I have a generic P3 with 9 HDDs in it totaling just shy of 4 TB of data. (most of the drives are 500 GB) They are all ATA drives, so I have a couple of ATAPI cards (with two IDE ports on each) giving me 8 drives. The 9th drive is a junker drive on the MB IDE port from way back when that only holds the O/S and the backup scripts. (CentOS 4.x) For whatever reason, it won't boot from the PCI IDE cards, and I don't care to fight it.
Works a real treat for nightly offsite rsync backups coordinated with the backup scripts I wrote some years ago, which manage backups, automatically running every night, use hard links to save disk space, and automatically use as much of the disk array space as possible for as many backups as there is space to support.
One advantage of disk-to-disk backups is that you can recover a file or two from backups with almost no hassle. We've actually incorporated this capability natively into our application allowing any of our users to recover any file to any of the available previous versions with a mouse-click. They love it!
So what is the point of this long story? That flash drives tend to have really cheap construction (in my experience) that doesn't hold up to much use, let alone much abuse. In the case of the Patriot I'm not surprised because it was a really cheap unit. But the Iomega was not.
Wow. I don't have your experience at ALL. I have a 1 GB nameless thumb drive I bought at Office Depot a couple years ago for about $90, when 64 MB drives were still the norm. It's been a road-warrior for almost 3 years without a hitch. Since I've used it anywhere from 1x/week to daily the entire time, I wasn't too upset with the little metal ring that attaches it to the necklace gave way just the other day. A metal clip broke, but the flash drive still works fine despite years of swinging and flicking idly while I walk...
That's not always true. In real estate contract offers are often delivered solely by fax, and the response is also delivered by fax when an offer is accepted. Sometimes the offers and counter offers go back and forth so many times that part of the document becomes too illegible to hold up in court.
But in real estate, there's this little thing called "escrow" that has to be done before the sale is complete.
Anyone can go to Kinkos and send a fax pretending it's from me. Someone might not be able to get me hired as in your example, but they might do enough damage to get me fired.
Maybe, but you'd have to suck ass as an employee, or work somewhere where they suck ass.
I think faxing filled an important niche in its time, but the world has moved on so it's time to let go of it. Newer copy machines even let you email your scanned documents which is far more convenient than faxing ever was. I'd rather see companies put their energy into standardizing an email encryption system rather than trying to keep faxing alive.
What I find funny is that we have electronic faxes at my company. It's quite funny to "verify" a fax by emailing the PDFs back to them and ask them if anything was missed?
Well written post! It's amazing how few people really understanding the difference between performance and scalability. Getting good performance isn't all that hard. Getting good scalability is much harder.
Good scalability is not about how fast something processes, it's about how much the speed degrades as the load increases. It sounds simple - but it's NOT.
Which is faster? A Lamborghini or a 5-ton flatbed truck?
Depends on what you're after! If you are trying to get yourself from point A to point B, the Lamborghini is the obvious choice. But if you need to move 4.5 tons of stuff from point A to point B, the Lamborghini would suck ass when compared to the flatbed truck.
It's just a question of what you are trying to accomplish. There is no absolute framework for "power" to solve problems, even if you define it fairly narrowly. For example, let's talk about 'pattern matching': A free database (like PostgreSQL) on cheap hardware can search through millions of records to deliver a query result in a tenth of a second. In that respect, Postgres is WAY faster than, say, the human brain. But the human brain will KICK ASS over just about any other technology out there in deciding whether or not a particular image contains a cat.
Use the right tool for the job, and you'll be amazed at the results. That 8 GPUs handily outperform 512 CPU cores at a specific task is not surprising - the GPUs are designed from the beginning to solve the kind of problem that's needed!
Personally, I'm surprised as to why there hasn't been more development behind the FPGA: are they just expensive?
I fly for pleasure, mostly. I have no intention of wearing epaulets anytime soon. So for me, it IS a simple dollars and cents and time equation. And the difference between 6 hours of flight time and 25 is pretty significant.
Someday, I'll probably fly GA to Sun & Fun in Florida from my home near Sacramento. I'd even like to fly around the world in a Cozy Mark IV. But even the Mark IV goes just shy of 2x as fast as the tin-can Cessna most GA pilots knock around in. (~ 200 Knots vs ~110)
Typical GA planes are not feasible for longer trips. They are awesome for "mid-range" trips, where you replace a day-long drive with a few hours' flight, trips too short to make commercial flights feasible. But they suck at longer trips.
For example: Sacramento, CA to Houston, TX, round trip.
Southwest = $330, 6 total hours flight, 4 hours total time at airports. If it's a business trip, you'll fly in the day before, and leave the night of or the day after your business event.
Cessna 172 = $1,200 in fuel (avgas) costs alone. Around 25 hours of flight time, plus about 2 hours at FBOs. How would this make sense? It's a 2 day trip either way!
If you notice, I was talking about when flying "commercial airliners", which should have been a clue to my attire. But I'm a private pilot, I don't fly for a job, and never wear a "pilot outfit", even when I'm flying "left seat".
I have no problem identifying myself with my FAA pilot's license, and even tried to show that to security once. If anything, it annoyed the guard and I got a more thorough checkout! (WTF?)
What's odd is that I could go across the street from the commercial terminal to the General Aviation terminal AT THE SAME !@## AIRPORT and identify myself with my state driving license and pilot license, and then DRIVE MY VAN OUT ON THE TARMAC to load up my plane!
All after identifying myself, that is, which I'd much rather do than watch some condescending guard pull on yet another pair of blue surgical gloves. (Seriously, why do they wear these things? It's not like they give me a rectal exam...)
Seriously, when you fly private, it's a whole different ball of wax...
Change the name of the button. Color it red. Call it "I assume liability". People are used to messages they don't understand, and have been conditioned that "OK" means nothing. And when you think about it, "OK", all by itself, doesn't actually mean anything. So don't call it "OK"!
Many (most?) people don't read dialog box text. But they do read the buttons themselves (if there is more than one) to see which one to click. Make sure that none of the buttons is active by default. (so clicking "Enter" doesn't do anything)
For the longest time, I was on the "do not fly" list. I never knew why, but my name is very common. Turns out somebody used an alias the same as my name in the Bahamas to commit international wire fraud - I found this out when it took 6 hours to open a $100 bank account. It wasn't identity theft - just coincidence.
So here I am, not only taking my shoes off, but also being escorted to the back room for the "enhanced" security check every time I fly on an airliner. The only problem is that I'm an FAA-licensed pilot, and have all the clearance to enter just about any area of the airport! (once I get past the extended searchdown, that is)
Wow. You think 256 GB is alot? I have that on my laptop. I have almost 2TB of total storage on my home network, despite me tending to delay upgrades until the last possible second. (Some 20 GB drives, there...)
No, it's not all MP3s and MPEGs. In fact, that's a very small minority. Mostly, it's word files, email, VMWare sessions, and a few ISO images. It's just stunning how rapidly these things add up when you use them everyday at work!
The problem that SSD drives face is something like the "two guys running from the bear" joke, which goes something like this.
Two guys are hiking thru the woods, and they come across a bear. Both guys start running as fast as they can. One guy says to the other: "Do you think you can outrun that bear?" To which, the other guy says: "I don't have to. I only have to outrun YOU."
Flash drives have made excellent progress, improving FASTER than hard disk technology has advanced (which has been significantly faster than Moore's law) but it still faces (as it always has) the challenges that a slightly older, more mature technology manages to perform somewhat better in that all-important arena, the cost/per/unit arena.
And because of that, flash/SSD will only do better in those areas that flash is better positioned against HDDS: low churn, low power, compact storage. (EG: MP3 players, ipods, phones, etc)
Yeah, they'll be 1/10th the price in a few years. So will hard drives. And so, against the bear of economics, HDDs outperform SSDs and remains ahead.
Digital files can be copied without depriving the original owner of theirs, be it software or music. Your money was taken from you leaving you with less (I hope your insurance covered it).
Eh... duh? The issue isn't that "copying" a work deprives the original author of his or her copy. See the definition of "copy". You'll find that it's a very old word.
The issue is that in so doing, you destroy the merchantability of the work in question. Since economics require a balance of supply and demand, and since copying can be done infinitely (killing any such balance) then economic restrictions are in place so that economic activity can continue.
This is a *good thing*. If you want to do anything, push to have the copyright terms brought back the reasonable timeframe they initially were...
Now just imagine once 3d printers become cheap enough for the common household... Manufacturers of small cheap trinkets had better be worried because their time is next.
I'm going to agree. It's out of your hands. Likely as not, they really don't expect you to come in.
I would write a letter, acknowledging that, by removing your access, the company has essentially killed your productivity, and acknowledge that they would rather you counsel your replacement for the next few weeks.
Lastly, acknowledge that in the meantime, you'll be "staying current" on "breaking technology news".
On another note, the last company I worked for (it's now been YEARS) left me with administrative access, and I STILL have that access. From time to time, I'm called in on a consultative basis when there's an emergency or something, and I've never had my SSH security keys revoked. So it can certainly go both ways...
1) No natural resources. Or in other words, there's nothing there that anyone wants. You might be able to grow your own food and harvest the necessities from the sea, but you can basically forget about having any exports. This would be a deficit economy just about any way you shake it.
Eh, you're kidding, right? Probably the single biggest resource is... the sea! There's plenty of farming that can be done. Growing algae for biofuels, or as food for exotic and/or tasty fish that can then be exported! Electrical power, since when you're really 'out in the middle' there's basically no other life below and you are free from obstructions (mountains, trees, etc) that stop wind flow, so solar/wind power is also a clear options.
2) Environment is fatal to humans. Should the platform sink, everybody dies. Few of the places on earth with this level of lethality house humans for any real length of time without some really compelling reason to be there (see above...)
Simply a case of proper engineering. Ever try to sink styrofoam?
3) 'Nation problems'. Without any allies, any nation can declare war on you and sink you. You're a nation now, so you're expected to play at that level. Likewise, your neighbor on his own platform can declare war on you - he's running a nation, too. PirateBay platform, meet the RIAA platform... Do you plan to appeal to the United Nations? Can you even do that if you're not a member? What about trade agreements? There's really a LOT to consider here.
International law has long been established. More than likely, an oceanic culture would be treated as a protectorate, like Japan.
4) 'Hot button' nations. Can Osama float a platform and no longer be considered a terrorist, rather a dictator? What about those pedo-polygamists? Can't they just float a platform and go right on forcing marriage and sex on pre-teens? And if this is possible, wouldn't others want desperately to sink them? Or, if not sink you could they not simply blockade you, or otherwise apply pressure to cut you off from the outside world?
Again, international law covers this pretty nicely. (See #3 above)
There's a GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY right now just off NOLA, USA. The Mighty Mississippi is busy dumping tons and tons of nicely fertilized water into the Gulf, that could be used to grow lots and lots of algae-based bio fuels if only we could develop farming techniques. If we did this, the problems with hypoxia would abate dramatically, reducing the "dead zones" that hit the papers from time to time - effectively, we could turn an environmental disaster into profits.
Just have to figure out a way to make it profitable...
The "Open Source" government may be closer than you think.
The phenomenon of anonymous, whatever you may personally think of their current "war" on Scientology, is something rather unique in human history. We have a relatively well coordinated, well mannered, peaceful "organization" having no membership, no particular leaders, no apparent fund-raising mechanism, and no organizational structure. Rather than being coordinated by a chain of command with structured communication channels, it seems to be organized chaotically by "memes" - ideas that become something like a cliche.
Despite all these properties which, in times past, would have been severe limitations, anonymous has now coordinated an international protest at dozens of cities around the world involving many thousands of people. This is simply incredible!
I believe thisto be an artifact of the Internet age, and a sign of things to come. While anonymous "members" appears to mostly consist of the younger college age, remember that the college kids of today are the first generation to grow up with ubiquitous global telecommunications. Just like hippie movement of the 1960's was the first generation to grow up with ubiquitous global communications in the form of television, so does the current new generation of anonymous represent the first generation to grow up with the Internet.
As a self-proclaimed Internet addict, I've watched anonymous with interest - the "memes" that provide so much power within anonymous apparently comprise nothing more than an idea posed by someone that others enjoyed and repeated. Anybody can throw up an idea, and the classic value of "reputation" seems to be lost, here. Ideas are presented by anyone, and when repeated by others who like the idea, they become memes. And memes are, as much, a way of doing or presenting information as it is the information itself. For example, there's a common theme in Digg articles of repeating adjectives. EG: "The lame article is lame". Of course, there's Rick-rolling, variations of "LOL", and a few others.
Could this meme-based anonymous evolve into a world government? In a sense, it already has, because this structure of memes is already coordinating the behavior of thousands! Why couldn't this evolve into a new way of governing? My guess is that anonymous evolves into a sort of meta-government. Rather than directly become a government agency, it becomes a sort of unstructured political party that exerts considerable power at the voting booth, and is able to reinforce its power through real-life protests and events, much like those going on against Scientology today.
Honestly, Apples are overpriced for what hardware and software they contain. Sure they may use a stable UNIX based OS, but you can get just that with any respectable Linux OS (Debian, Ubuntu, etc., depending on the person's preference.)
I use Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. (Yes, I still use Windows 98, though mostly for compatibility testing anymore) I also use Mac OSX 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, Fedora Core 8, and RHEL 4. My primary system is a FC8 Dell laptop setup for KDE 3.5. I'm comfortable in front of any of these, though I admit that I'm least familiar with OSX.
Implying that a Mac is the same as *nix is just silly. You haven't USED a Mac. It's an artistic interface. KDE 3.5 feels, to me, roughly comparable to Windows XP. Sure, there are plenty of differences, but the interface is just a tad clunky, with an interface that's very useful, often gorgeous, but just a bit "rough around the edges".
OSX, on the other hand, has a very "polished" feel. It's like the difference between the dress of an Army brat and a Marine in full dress. Both are military, both are useful, but the Marine has that bit of spit and polish to do it in style.
And even though I bet my SaaS software company's farm quite successfully every day on the stability, utility, and economy of Linux, the computer I'm typing this on right now is a Mac mini - somewhat ironically with a Microsoft keyboard and mouse. I originally purchased this computer simply to do compatibility testing for our cross-platform product, but I fell in love with it! It doesn't take all that long.
That you would dismiss OSX for Linux so quickly is merely an indication that you haven't USED OSX for any length of time. Worth the price? Well, I've already said: I bet my farm on Linux, and I've done quite well doing so. I wouldn't want to standardize on Macs in my company for the simple reason of cost - I have dozens of midrange servers that have a ZERO software cost, and reasonable administration tools - the cost of standardizing on OSX would be very, very high, and would likely come at a significant performance loss.
Airplanes aren't like cars; cars are mass-produced, throwaway items that seldom see more than 10-15 years of use. Yes, there *are* 30 year old cars, but they represent a rather small fraction of the actual cars in day-to-day use.
Airplanes, on the other hand, are in a different category. Airplanes are all-but hand made. They are very expensive, so it's usually cheaper to fix an existing plane than to buy a new one. I got my pilot's license in a 1971 Cessna 172 that was older than I am. This isn't a particularly old plane, C-172s go all the way back to 1955 or so, and there isn't a whole lot that changed in the plane characteristics from 1959 to 2006 - mostly just newer instrumentation and a few minor tweaks.
Since we can be fairly certain that many (most?) of airplanes made today will be flying 40 years from now, how well does this "self healing" work then? Composites are much more sensitive to extreme temperatures - how well does it "heal" at below freezing? (typical of high altitudes, as well as high lattitudes)
Aviation is very risk averse - KISS is the rule of survival! Most planes are leaned MANUALLY just to avoid the possibility that some little spring in the carburetor would die while flying over mountains to the detriment of the plane occupants.
Yes, even though I'm a technocrat, I remain a bit skeptical.
It would be a very reasonable effort to develop a standardized "driver API" for drivers and whatnot. Linus could easily issue an API that is standard, year by year. EG: 2007 API, 2008 API, 2009 API, etc. It doesn't have to be by calendar year, but it does have to be CONSISTENT.
And makers of hardware could easily write drivers to this API, binary or source, and release these in yum/apt repos, so that any distro could do a quick check for the hardware, and instantly know what repo to go to with a simple lookup.
Once this is done, WHO FREAKIN' CARES what date something is released? The only thing that matters is the driver API. If that's honored, the game is over. I imagine yum/apt repos for drivers published by driver manufacturers that are discovered "automagically" by distros. It not only wouldn't be that hard, it would be trivial if the right effort was put into the right place.
Granted, it costs you a bit in hardware and setup time, etc. But if you're really nervous about it, then it should do the trick. Given the limited load on the replica and its read only nature it should be able to live on limited hardware, like maybe an older server that you have hanging around. Plus you don't have to worry about reliability either. If the thing blows up no data is lost.
Cost? What cost? Oh, you mean the profit that you'll make from charging the end user for time and "overhead" in setting up the replication?
That's only a cost to the requesting end user! It's all profit for you!
How about "cheap - for an airplane"? Yeah, none are truly "cheap". But once you've gotten past the $5,000 - $10,000 it costs to become a private pilot, owning your own airplane starts at about $500/month + gas, if you are reasonably careful. A somewhat nicer plane like a Mooney starts at about $800/month + gas. The "Gas" cost is simply GPH * cost of gas, now running close to $5/gallon for Avgas.
Many planes (think: twin-engine, jet, etc) cost way way WAY more than this. So I'd still say that an older used Mooney is a cheap "high performance" plane, even though the cheaper Mooneys are technically not a "high perf" plane since the engine on most older Mooneys are 200 HP.
It's "cheap" if there's any reasonable chance that an otherwise average skilled worker could own one. (Think doctor, programmer, contractor, plumber, etc) I know of one guy who (until recently) had a little Piper. Single guy, drives 10 year old Ford Escort, lives alone, has a very typical engineering job, and owned a '69 Piper Cherokee. Nice guy, too. I tried to buy into a co-ownership on the plane with him, but he was starting some new venture and had to cut his costs to the bone to make it work. He sold the plane for equity.
(Yes, you read that right - the C152 airframe was only minimally changed in 1977 as a tweak of the previous, highly successful 150)
It strikes me as quite appropriate that 21st Century technology would provide a significant improvement in capability/price/performance, when developed by current, high-quality engineers.
BTW, Burt Rutan is a legend in the field. You might know his company Scaled Composites which won the Ansari X-Prize. He's a legend in the field. Not only did he build an experimental aircraft design that outperformed other designs by a factor of 2 or more in speed, while halving fuel burn, he did so with a design that's relatively cheap and easy to build.
Some people like Rutan and Al Mooney just seem to "get it right" when it comes to aircraft design, and they do it over, and over, and over again. The Mooney Mark 20 is a line of high performance, high reliability, cheap, complex aircraft that provide solid performance, excellent safety and great economy. The Mooney Mark-20 line (there have been lots culminating in the current "Ovation") is one of the few GA single-engine airplanes with a proper "crash cage" resulting in excellent safety numbers - you are half as likely to die (per mile of flight) while flying a Mooney in IFR conditions than the industry average.
A good indicator of airplane efficiency is its glide ratio - how far it moves forward for every foot dropped without power. The first number is the distance you move forward, the second number is is how far you drop. It's a ratio, and the higher the first number relative to the second, the better. A Mooney has a glide ratio of about 13:1, while a Cessna does about 7:1. A long EZ or a VariEZE can do anywhere from 15:1 to 20:1, a Boeing 767 did about 12:1 in the famous Gimli Glider incident. Many ultralights do as badly as 3:1.
Can they do it? I'm quite sure they can. As soon as I can afford one, I'll probably buy. (It'll take me a few years, which is fine, since they won't be ready and tested by the "early adopters" for a few years, anyway)
I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want !!!!!!
Front-Ahead Design? Pretty damned funny, if you ask me. I've been lurking at TheDailyWTF for years, but I don't remember seeing this one before! (BTW: What's with that guy's fascination with renaming his website? Why doesn't he like the success of TheDailyWTF.com?)
But it sounds like a satire of what we actually do, namely, a variation of Agile Software development. Our application is very structured and layered, with strong database abstraction, SQL-injection protection using prepared statements, abstracted management of security, output templates, etc.
But even with that overhead, PHP allows us to get started and simply make it work, rather than waste time on type checking, memory manglement, garbage collection, variable definition, etc.
I live in the California Sacramento valley. When I head to the San Fransisco area, I get service the whole way with my Verizon EVDO card. However, it's about modem speed (40k-ish) until I get to Vacaville or Sacramento - at which point it jumps suddenly to near 1 Mb. Latency is still weak, though. (75-200 ms ping is typical)
I'm not complaining - for the SSH session stuff I need, even 50k is fine, but if I were You-Tubing, it would suck pretty majorly.
My first thought for OP was to go with cellular since it's actually gotten pretty good!
I've worked with PHP professionally, building a healthy, heavily profitable, and rapidly growing company providing information management services to schools.
From the simple standpoint of "concept to implementation" - PHP ROCKS. It's very, very fast, requiring little in the way of "planning" and "structuring" while letting the features come out... FAST. It is, bar none, the best RAD environment I've yet worked with. Not that it's the best in every area, but that it clearly has the best balance between features and "gotchas". It has its weaknesses, such as lousy error reporting, but even that can be largely mitigated with a little intelligence in advance. But it really does have a number of key strengths that I leverage to the hilt:
1) Stability. It just doesn't die. Ever. I've never, ever, ever had a problem with PHP "not working". I don't troubleshoot it. It's there, it works, and I don't sweat it.
2) Scalability. It's "share nothing" approach makes clusting and random-host selection boil all the way down to a simple session manager. Having 1 or 10 application servers running side-by-side is almost trivial!
3) Code density = excellent! It's a fairly dense language, meaning that lots can get done in a few lines. Just for giggles, I've written a self-forking, multi-process daemon with a process manager and hundreds of managed children forks performing a deep-level network scan in like 50 lines!
4) Security. Yes, you heard me correctly. Although you can certainly use PHP "wrong", you can also use it "right". Once you do, you discover that PHP has a number of features that make things like SQL injection and shell parameter expansion a thing of the past. Really. Learn your tools!
5) Flexibility. You can run it as a module inside Apache. You can run it as a standalone executable. With tools like Ion Cube and PHP-GTK, you can create a cross-platform GUI application without revealing source.
6) Availability. Any $5/month web hosting company supports PHP, and there are many free ones, as well. You can download a CD, install Linux, and have PHP/Apache up and running in under 10 minutes. There are batrillzions of apps available A LA SourceForge for free. PHP is the most commonly available web development language. And, by no means is it a web-only development language!
Sorry you can't handle a few quirks in the function names. (so write out a file of wrapper functions - DUH!) Sorry that it's attempts to simplify variable management weren't perfect. Geez. Just code in c and be done with it, why don't you?
In short, PHP is everything that VB and.NET wished to be, only cross-platform. It's an excellent tool for developing information-processing applications, very, very rapidly. Yes, it has its weaknesses, and nobody's forcing you to use it, and the devs are working on the weaknesses, too. Go use Ruby if it makes you feel good. But PHP works well on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, and many others. Seriously: you really can't go too wrong betting on PHP unless you need 3D graphics!
Slashdot Mirror
I have a generic P3 with 9 HDDs in it totaling just shy of 4 TB of data. (most of the drives are 500 GB) They are all ATA drives, so I have a couple of ATAPI cards (with two IDE ports on each) giving me 8 drives. The 9th drive is a junker drive on the MB IDE port from way back when that only holds the O/S and the backup scripts. (CentOS 4.x) For whatever reason, it won't boot from the PCI IDE cards, and I don't care to fight it.
Works a real treat for nightly offsite rsync backups coordinated with the backup scripts I wrote some years ago, which manage backups, automatically running every night, use hard links to save disk space, and automatically use as much of the disk array space as possible for as many backups as there is space to support.
One advantage of disk-to-disk backups is that you can recover a file or two from backups with almost no hassle. We've actually incorporated this capability natively into our application allowing any of our users to recover any file to any of the available previous versions with a mouse-click. They love it!
So what is the point of this long story? That flash drives tend to have really cheap construction (in my experience) that doesn't hold up to much use, let alone much abuse. In the case of the Patriot I'm not surprised because it was a really cheap unit. But the Iomega was not.
Wow. I don't have your experience at ALL. I have a 1 GB nameless thumb drive I bought at Office Depot a couple years ago for about $90, when 64 MB drives were still the norm. It's been a road-warrior for almost 3 years without a hitch. Since I've used it anywhere from 1x/week to daily the entire time, I wasn't too upset with the little metal ring that attaches it to the necklace gave way just the other day. A metal clip broke, but the flash drive still works fine despite years of swinging and flicking idly while I walk...
Do you insert your flash drives with a hammer?
That's not always true. In real estate contract offers are often delivered solely by fax, and the response is also delivered by fax when an offer is accepted. Sometimes the offers and counter offers go back and forth so many times that part of the document becomes too illegible to hold up in court.
But in real estate, there's this little thing called "escrow" that has to be done before the sale is complete.
Anyone can go to Kinkos and send a fax pretending it's from me. Someone might not be able to get me hired as in your example, but they might do enough damage to get me fired.
Maybe, but you'd have to suck ass as an employee, or work somewhere where they suck ass.
I think faxing filled an important niche in its time, but the world has moved on so it's time to let go of it. Newer copy machines even let you email your scanned documents which is far more convenient than faxing ever was. I'd rather see companies put their energy into standardizing an email encryption system rather than trying to keep faxing alive.
What I find funny is that we have electronic faxes at my company. It's quite funny to "verify" a fax by emailing the PDFs back to them and ask them if anything was missed?
Well written post! It's amazing how few people really understanding the difference between performance and scalability. Getting good performance isn't all that hard. Getting good scalability is much harder.
Good scalability is not about how fast something processes, it's about how much the speed degrades as the load increases. It sounds simple - but it's NOT.
Which is faster? A Lamborghini or a 5-ton flatbed truck?
Depends on what you're after! If you are trying to get yourself from point A to point B, the Lamborghini is the obvious choice. But if you need to move 4.5 tons of stuff from point A to point B, the Lamborghini would suck ass when compared to the flatbed truck.
It's just a question of what you are trying to accomplish. There is no absolute framework for "power" to solve problems, even if you define it fairly narrowly. For example, let's talk about 'pattern matching': A free database (like PostgreSQL) on cheap hardware can search through millions of records to deliver a query result in a tenth of a second. In that respect, Postgres is WAY faster than, say, the human brain. But the human brain will KICK ASS over just about any other technology out there in deciding whether or not a particular image contains a cat.
Use the right tool for the job, and you'll be amazed at the results. That 8 GPUs handily outperform 512 CPU cores at a specific task is not surprising - the GPUs are designed from the beginning to solve the kind of problem that's needed!
Personally, I'm surprised as to why there hasn't been more development behind the FPGA: are they just expensive?
Ok, this thread has become a conversation!
I fly for pleasure, mostly. I have no intention of wearing epaulets anytime soon. So for me, it IS a simple dollars and cents and time equation. And the difference between 6 hours of flight time and 25 is pretty significant.
Someday, I'll probably fly GA to Sun & Fun in Florida from my home near Sacramento. I'd even like to fly around the world in a Cozy Mark IV. But even the Mark IV goes just shy of 2x as fast as the tin-can Cessna most GA pilots knock around in. (~ 200 Knots vs ~110)
Typical GA planes are not feasible for longer trips. They are awesome for "mid-range" trips, where you replace a day-long drive with a few hours' flight, trips too short to make commercial flights feasible. But they suck at longer trips.
For example: Sacramento, CA to Houston, TX, round trip.
Southwest = $330, 6 total hours flight, 4 hours total time at airports. If it's a business trip, you'll fly in the day before, and leave the night of or the day after your business event.
Cessna 172 = $1,200 in fuel (avgas) costs alone. Around 25 hours of flight time, plus about 2 hours at FBOs. How would this make sense? It's a 2 day trip either way!
If you notice, I was talking about when flying "commercial airliners", which should have been a clue to my attire. But I'm a private pilot, I don't fly for a job, and never wear a "pilot outfit", even when I'm flying "left seat".
I have no problem identifying myself with my FAA pilot's license, and even tried to show that to security once. If anything, it annoyed the guard and I got a more thorough checkout! (WTF?)
What's odd is that I could go across the street from the commercial terminal to the General Aviation terminal AT THE SAME !@## AIRPORT and identify myself with my state driving license and pilot license, and then DRIVE MY VAN OUT ON THE TARMAC to load up my plane!
All after identifying myself, that is, which I'd much rather do than watch some condescending guard pull on yet another pair of blue surgical gloves. (Seriously, why do they wear these things? It's not like they give me a rectal exam...)
Seriously, when you fly private, it's a whole different ball of wax...
Change the name of the button. Color it red. Call it "I assume liability". People are used to messages they don't understand, and have been conditioned that "OK" means nothing. And when you think about it, "OK", all by itself, doesn't actually mean anything. So don't call it "OK"!
Many (most?) people don't read dialog box text. But they do read the buttons themselves (if there is more than one) to see which one to click. Make sure that none of the buttons is active by default. (so clicking "Enter" doesn't do anything)
For the longest time, I was on the "do not fly" list. I never knew why, but my name is very common. Turns out somebody used an alias the same as my name in the Bahamas to commit international wire fraud - I found this out when it took 6 hours to open a $100 bank account. It wasn't identity theft - just coincidence.
So here I am, not only taking my shoes off, but also being escorted to the back room for the "enhanced" security check every time I fly on an airliner. The only problem is that I'm an FAA-licensed pilot, and have all the clearance to enter just about any area of the airport! (once I get past the extended searchdown, that is)
What a joke...
Wow. You think 256 GB is alot? I have that on my laptop. I have almost 2TB of total storage on my home network, despite me tending to delay upgrades until the last possible second. (Some 20 GB drives, there...)
No, it's not all MP3s and MPEGs. In fact, that's a very small minority. Mostly, it's word files, email, VMWare sessions, and a few ISO images. It's just stunning how rapidly these things add up when you use them everyday at work!
The problem that SSD drives face is something like the "two guys running from the bear" joke, which goes something like this.
Two guys are hiking thru the woods, and they come across a bear. Both guys start running as fast as they can. One guy says to the other: "Do you think you can outrun that bear?" To which, the other guy says: "I don't have to. I only have to outrun YOU."
Flash drives have made excellent progress, improving FASTER than hard disk technology has advanced (which has been significantly faster than Moore's law) but it still faces (as it always has) the challenges that a slightly older, more mature technology manages to perform somewhat better in that all-important arena, the cost/per/unit arena.
And because of that, flash/SSD will only do better in those areas that flash is better positioned against HDDS: low churn, low power, compact storage. (EG: MP3 players, ipods, phones, etc)
Yeah, they'll be 1/10th the price in a few years. So will hard drives. And so, against the bear of economics, HDDs outperform SSDs and remains ahead.
Digital files can be copied without depriving the original owner of theirs, be it software or music. Your money was taken from you leaving you with less (I hope your insurance covered it).
Eh... duh? The issue isn't that "copying" a work deprives the original author of his or her copy. See the definition of "copy". You'll find that it's a very old word.
The issue is that in so doing, you destroy the merchantability of the work in question. Since economics require a balance of supply and demand, and since copying can be done infinitely (killing any such balance) then economic restrictions are in place so that economic activity can continue.
This is a *good thing*. If you want to do anything, push to have the copyright terms brought back the reasonable timeframe they initially were...
Now just imagine once 3d printers become cheap enough for the common household... Manufacturers of small cheap trinkets had better be worried because their time is next.
Hopefully, copyrights will apply then.
I'm going to agree. It's out of your hands. Likely as not, they really don't expect you to come in.
I would write a letter, acknowledging that, by removing your access, the company has essentially killed your productivity, and acknowledge that they would rather you counsel your replacement for the next few weeks.
Lastly, acknowledge that in the meantime, you'll be "staying current" on "breaking technology news".
On another note, the last company I worked for (it's now been YEARS) left me with administrative access, and I STILL have that access. From time to time, I'm called in on a consultative basis when there's an emergency or something, and I've never had my SSH security keys revoked. So it can certainly go both ways...
1) No natural resources. Or in other words, there's nothing there that anyone wants. You might be able to grow your own food and harvest the necessities from the sea, but you can basically forget about having any exports. This would be a deficit economy just about any way you shake it.
Eh, you're kidding, right? Probably the single biggest resource is... the sea! There's plenty of farming that can be done. Growing algae for biofuels, or as food for exotic and/or tasty fish that can then be exported! Electrical power, since when you're really 'out in the middle' there's basically no other life below and you are free from obstructions (mountains, trees, etc) that stop wind flow, so solar/wind power is also a clear options.
2) Environment is fatal to humans. Should the platform sink, everybody dies. Few of the places on earth with this level of lethality house humans for any real length of time without some really compelling reason to be there (see above...)
Simply a case of proper engineering. Ever try to sink styrofoam?
3) 'Nation problems'. Without any allies, any nation can declare war on you and sink you. You're a nation now, so you're expected to play at that level. Likewise, your neighbor on his own platform can declare war on you - he's running a nation, too. PirateBay platform, meet the RIAA platform... Do you plan to appeal to the United Nations? Can you even do that if you're not a member? What about trade agreements? There's really a LOT to consider here.
International law has long been established. More than likely, an oceanic culture would be treated as a protectorate, like Japan.
4) 'Hot button' nations. Can Osama float a platform and no longer be considered a terrorist, rather a dictator? What about those pedo-polygamists? Can't they just float a platform and go right on forcing marriage and sex on pre-teens? And if this is possible, wouldn't others want desperately to sink them? Or, if not sink you could they not simply blockade you, or otherwise apply pressure to cut you off from the outside world?
Again, international law covers this pretty nicely. (See #3 above)
There's a GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY right now just off NOLA, USA. The Mighty Mississippi is busy dumping tons and tons of nicely fertilized water into the Gulf, that could be used to grow lots and lots of algae-based bio fuels if only we could develop farming techniques. If we did this, the problems with hypoxia would abate dramatically, reducing the "dead zones" that hit the papers from time to time - effectively, we could turn an environmental disaster into profits.
Just have to figure out a way to make it profitable...
The "Open Source" government may be closer than you think.
The phenomenon of anonymous, whatever you may personally think of their current "war" on Scientology, is something rather unique in human history. We have a relatively well coordinated, well mannered, peaceful "organization" having no membership, no particular leaders, no apparent fund-raising mechanism, and no organizational structure. Rather than being coordinated by a chain of command with structured communication channels, it seems to be organized chaotically by "memes" - ideas that become something like a cliche.
Despite all these properties which, in times past, would have been severe limitations, anonymous has now coordinated an international protest at dozens of cities around the world involving many thousands of people. This is simply incredible!
I believe thisto be an artifact of the Internet age, and a sign of things to come. While anonymous "members" appears to mostly consist of the younger college age, remember that the college kids of today are the first generation to grow up with ubiquitous global telecommunications. Just like hippie movement of the 1960's was the first generation to grow up with ubiquitous global communications in the form of television, so does the current new generation of anonymous represent the first generation to grow up with the Internet.
As a self-proclaimed Internet addict, I've watched anonymous with interest - the "memes" that provide so much power within anonymous apparently comprise nothing more than an idea posed by someone that others enjoyed and repeated. Anybody can throw up an idea, and the classic value of "reputation" seems to be lost, here. Ideas are presented by anyone, and when repeated by others who like the idea, they become memes. And memes are, as much, a way of doing or presenting information as it is the information itself. For example, there's a common theme in Digg articles of repeating adjectives. EG: "The lame article is lame". Of course, there's Rick-rolling, variations of "LOL", and a few others.
Could this meme-based anonymous evolve into a world government? In a sense, it already has, because this structure of memes is already coordinating the behavior of thousands! Why couldn't this evolve into a new way of governing? My guess is that anonymous evolves into a sort of meta-government. Rather than directly become a government agency, it becomes a sort of unstructured political party that exerts considerable power at the voting booth, and is able to reinforce its power through real-life protests and events, much like those going on against Scientology today.
Fascinating times! Watch and see!
Honestly, Apples are overpriced for what hardware and software they contain. Sure they may use a stable UNIX based OS, but you can get just that with any respectable Linux OS (Debian, Ubuntu, etc., depending on the person's preference.)
I use Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. (Yes, I still use Windows 98, though mostly for compatibility testing anymore) I also use Mac OSX 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, Fedora Core 8, and RHEL 4. My primary system is a FC8 Dell laptop setup for KDE 3.5. I'm comfortable in front of any of these, though I admit that I'm least familiar with OSX.
Implying that a Mac is the same as *nix is just silly. You haven't USED a Mac. It's an artistic interface. KDE 3.5 feels, to me, roughly comparable to Windows XP. Sure, there are plenty of differences, but the interface is just a tad clunky, with an interface that's very useful, often gorgeous, but just a bit "rough around the edges".
OSX, on the other hand, has a very "polished" feel. It's like the difference between the dress of an Army brat and a Marine in full dress. Both are military, both are useful, but the Marine has that bit of spit and polish to do it in style.
And even though I bet my SaaS software company's farm quite successfully every day on the stability, utility, and economy of Linux, the computer I'm typing this on right now is a Mac mini - somewhat ironically with a Microsoft keyboard and mouse. I originally purchased this computer simply to do compatibility testing for our cross-platform product, but I fell in love with it! It doesn't take all that long.
That you would dismiss OSX for Linux so quickly is merely an indication that you haven't USED OSX for any length of time. Worth the price? Well, I've already said: I bet my farm on Linux, and I've done quite well doing so. I wouldn't want to standardize on Macs in my company for the simple reason of cost - I have dozens of midrange servers that have a ZERO software cost, and reasonable administration tools - the cost of standardizing on OSX would be very, very high, and would likely come at a significant performance loss.
You might not buy it. But don't dismiss it.
Many concerns with this kind of system.
Airplanes aren't like cars; cars are mass-produced, throwaway items that seldom see more than 10-15 years of use. Yes, there *are* 30 year old cars, but they represent a rather small fraction of the actual cars in day-to-day use.
Airplanes, on the other hand, are in a different category. Airplanes are all-but hand made. They are very expensive, so it's usually cheaper to fix an existing plane than to buy a new one. I got my pilot's license in a 1971 Cessna 172 that was older than I am. This isn't a particularly old plane, C-172s go all the way back to 1955 or so, and there isn't a whole lot that changed in the plane characteristics from 1959 to 2006 - mostly just newer instrumentation and a few minor tweaks.
Since we can be fairly certain that many (most?) of airplanes made today will be flying 40 years from now, how well does this "self healing" work then? Composites are much more sensitive to extreme temperatures - how well does it "heal" at below freezing? (typical of high altitudes, as well as high lattitudes)
Aviation is very risk averse - KISS is the rule of survival! Most planes are leaned MANUALLY just to avoid the possibility that some little spring in the carburetor would die while flying over mountains to the detriment of the plane occupants.
Yes, even though I'm a technocrat, I remain a bit skeptical.
It would be a very reasonable effort to develop a standardized "driver API" for drivers and whatnot. Linus could easily issue an API that is standard, year by year. EG: 2007 API, 2008 API, 2009 API, etc. It doesn't have to be by calendar year, but it does have to be CONSISTENT.
And makers of hardware could easily write drivers to this API, binary or source, and release these in yum/apt repos, so that any distro could do a quick check for the hardware, and instantly know what repo to go to with a simple lookup.
Once this is done, WHO FREAKIN' CARES what date something is released? The only thing that matters is the driver API. If that's honored, the game is over. I imagine yum/apt repos for drivers published by driver manufacturers that are discovered "automagically" by distros. It not only wouldn't be that hard, it would be trivial if the right effort was put into the right place.
(Sigh). I can dream, can't I?
Granted, it costs you a bit in hardware and setup time, etc. But if you're really nervous about it, then it should do the trick. Given the limited load on the replica and its read only nature it should be able to live on limited hardware, like maybe an older server that you have hanging around. Plus you don't have to worry about reliability either. If the thing blows up no data is lost.
Cost? What cost? Oh, you mean the profit that you'll make from charging the end user for time and "overhead" in setting up the replication?
That's only a cost to the requesting end user! It's all profit for you!
How about "cheap - for an airplane"? Yeah, none are truly "cheap". But once you've gotten past the $5,000 - $10,000 it costs to become a private pilot, owning your own airplane starts at about $500/month + gas, if you are reasonably careful. A somewhat nicer plane like a Mooney starts at about $800/month + gas. The "Gas" cost is simply GPH * cost of gas, now running close to $5/gallon for Avgas.
Many planes (think: twin-engine, jet, etc) cost way way WAY more than this. So I'd still say that an older used Mooney is a cheap "high performance" plane, even though the cheaper Mooneys are technically not a "high perf" plane since the engine on most older Mooneys are 200 HP.
It's "cheap" if there's any reasonable chance that an otherwise average skilled worker could own one. (Think doctor, programmer, contractor, plumber, etc) I know of one guy who (until recently) had a little Piper. Single guy, drives 10 year old Ford Escort, lives alone, has a very typical engineering job, and owned a '69 Piper Cherokee. Nice guy, too. I tried to buy into a co-ownership on the plane with him, but he was starting some new venture and had to cut his costs to the bone to make it work. He sold the plane for equity.
Man, you just don't get the slashdot zeitgeist. Old news is an essential part of the whole experience.
Man, you just don't get the slashdot zeitgeist. Complaining about old news is an essential part of the whole experience!
I'd reinforce your point #1 with the Rutan Long EZ which does 160 Knots (184 MPH) at about 5.1 GPH, for an astonishing 36 MPG at just shy of 200 miles per hour - even my trusty, highly reliable, and economical Saturn SL2 only gets about 30 MPG on the freeway! (at 80 MPH) And, unlike the 152, which is based on technology first developed in the mid 1950s, the Long EZ owes its legacy back to the early 1970s.
(Yes, you read that right - the C152 airframe was only minimally changed in 1977 as a tweak of the previous, highly successful 150)
It strikes me as quite appropriate that 21st Century technology would provide a significant improvement in capability/price/performance, when developed by current, high-quality engineers.
BTW, Burt Rutan is a legend in the field. You might know his company Scaled Composites which won the Ansari X-Prize. He's a legend in the field. Not only did he build an experimental aircraft design that outperformed other designs by a factor of 2 or more in speed, while halving fuel burn, he did so with a design that's relatively cheap and easy to build.
Some people like Rutan and Al Mooney just seem to "get it right" when it comes to aircraft design, and they do it over, and over, and over again. The Mooney Mark 20 is a line of high performance, high reliability, cheap, complex aircraft that provide solid performance, excellent safety and great economy. The Mooney Mark-20 line (there have been lots culminating in the current "Ovation") is one of the few GA single-engine airplanes with a proper "crash cage" resulting in excellent safety numbers - you are half as likely to die (per mile of flight) while flying a Mooney in IFR conditions than the industry average.
A good indicator of airplane efficiency is its glide ratio - how far it moves forward for every foot dropped without power. The first number is the distance you move forward, the second number is is how far you drop. It's a ratio, and the higher the first number relative to the second, the better. A Mooney has a glide ratio of about 13:1, while a Cessna does about 7:1. A long EZ or a VariEZE can do anywhere from 15:1 to 20:1, a Boeing 767 did about 12:1 in the famous Gimli Glider incident. Many ultralights do as badly as 3:1.
Can they do it? I'm quite sure they can. As soon as I can afford one, I'll probably buy. (It'll take me a few years, which is fine, since they won't be ready and tested by the "early adopters" for a few years, anyway)
I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want !!!!!!
Front-Ahead Design? Pretty damned funny, if you ask me. I've been lurking at TheDailyWTF for years, but I don't remember seeing this one before! (BTW: What's with that guy's fascination with renaming his website? Why doesn't he like the success of TheDailyWTF.com?)
But it sounds like a satire of what we actually do, namely, a variation of Agile Software development. Our application is very structured and layered, with strong database abstraction, SQL-injection protection using prepared statements, abstracted management of security, output templates, etc.
But even with that overhead, PHP allows us to get started and simply make it work, rather than waste time on type checking, memory manglement, garbage collection, variable definition, etc.
It's so quick!
As always, YMMV. Depends on where you are.
I live in the California Sacramento valley. When I head to the San Fransisco area, I get service the whole way with my Verizon EVDO card. However, it's about modem speed (40k-ish) until I get to Vacaville or Sacramento - at which point it jumps suddenly to near 1 Mb. Latency is still weak, though. (75-200 ms ping is typical)
I'm not complaining - for the SSH session stuff I need, even 50k is fine, but if I were You-Tubing, it would suck pretty majorly.
My first thought for OP was to go with cellular since it's actually gotten pretty good!
I've worked with PHP professionally, building a healthy, heavily profitable, and rapidly growing company providing information management services to schools.
.NET wished to be, only cross-platform. It's an excellent tool for developing information-processing applications, very, very rapidly. Yes, it has its weaknesses, and nobody's forcing you to use it, and the devs are working on the weaknesses, too. Go use Ruby if it makes you feel good. But PHP works well on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, and many others. Seriously: you really can't go too wrong betting on PHP unless you need 3D graphics!
From the simple standpoint of "concept to implementation" - PHP ROCKS. It's very, very fast, requiring little in the way of "planning" and "structuring" while letting the features come out... FAST. It is, bar none, the best RAD environment I've yet worked with. Not that it's the best in every area, but that it clearly has the best balance between features and "gotchas". It has its weaknesses, such as lousy error reporting, but even that can be largely mitigated with a little intelligence in advance. But it really does have a number of key strengths that I leverage to the hilt:
1) Stability. It just doesn't die. Ever. I've never, ever, ever had a problem with PHP "not working". I don't troubleshoot it. It's there, it works, and I don't sweat it.
2) Scalability. It's "share nothing" approach makes clusting and random-host selection boil all the way down to a simple session manager. Having 1 or 10 application servers running side-by-side is almost trivial!
3) Code density = excellent! It's a fairly dense language, meaning that lots can get done in a few lines. Just for giggles, I've written a self-forking, multi-process daemon with a process manager and hundreds of managed children forks performing a deep-level network scan in like 50 lines!
4) Security. Yes, you heard me correctly. Although you can certainly use PHP "wrong", you can also use it "right". Once you do, you discover that PHP has a number of features that make things like SQL injection and shell parameter expansion a thing of the past. Really. Learn your tools!
5) Flexibility. You can run it as a module inside Apache. You can run it as a standalone executable. With tools like Ion Cube and PHP-GTK, you can create a cross-platform GUI application without revealing source.
6) Availability. Any $5/month web hosting company supports PHP, and there are many free ones, as well. You can download a CD, install Linux, and have PHP/Apache up and running in under 10 minutes. There are batrillzions of apps available A LA SourceForge for free. PHP is the most commonly available web development language. And, by no means is it a web-only development language!
Sorry you can't handle a few quirks in the function names. (so write out a file of wrapper functions - DUH!) Sorry that it's attempts to simplify variable management weren't perfect. Geez. Just code in c and be done with it, why don't you?
In short, PHP is everything that VB and