Such as corporations that profit off of harmful products?
Ish. I know I'm asking for a good karma smacking here but if people want to sell harmful crap and idiots want to buy it despite excellent evidence showing the harm it can do, good luck to both of them. Hopefully less fools will get a chance to procreate and the future will be just that little bit more intelligent on average.
Now, blatantly lying about the safety of their products and hamstringing the scientific community to stop them revealing the truth: that I would like to see the tobacco people strung up for.
you suffer the consequences. You know life has those.
Consequences? In a world where it is McDonald's fault people are fat, tobacco's fault people can't breath, the insurance industry's fault that medical care for their fat tar-filled bodies is expensive, and people are up in arms in the UK because the NHS won't stump up for free reversal surgery because their elective operation done on the cheap turns out to have been a bad idea? There are too many people out there who fail to acknowledge they are responsible for any consequences.
My rather limited experience with this is that, if you have more than a few snapshots on a base device, your write performance degrades very raplidy.
This is the case. Snapshots volumes contain the original data, so if a block is written to it must first be copied to all active snapshots of the device. This is not generally a problem as snapshots are intended for short-term use, but if you have several active snapshots write performance can degrade very badly. Changing a block a second time will not result in a snapshot access though, not will any read operation, so the performance problem for a number of I/O patterns the performance effect is minimal.
Actually www is fronted by reverse proxies running on linux (you can check with nmap). IIS apparently can't handle the load by itself.
Probably true, but disengenuously presented. The front-end is run by a 3rd party (Akami?) CDN so MS don't control what sofftware they chose to use for the task. It MS decided it was worth running their own CDN instead of outsourcing the task, their's would probably run un Windows+IIS rather than anything else.
You could equally say you see a lot of Apache errors because of broken PHP code, or people sending you mistyped links (hint: that 404 error may not be the web server's fault).
nginx is very often used as a front-end to code writting in other systems like node.js, rails, and so forth: nginx serves static files directly and the other systems serve dynamic content. If the back-end is too busy (or actually broken in some way) nginx won't be able to drag dynamic content from it and will have to report an error instead.
Most sites are configured to hand out a generic 500 "server error" instead of anything more specific like "some fool missed a semi-colon near line 328", as giving out meaningful internal error messages on public facing interfaces is considered a potential security problem (it can make injection flaws easier to find), but don't have custom message HTML so said messages have "nginx" plainly visible on them, so I can understand some confusion on this point (though the same thing affects other web servers too, obviously).
But it isn't a hassle free option if you are currentl on XP - you essentiually need to do a complete reinstall. My hardware (on the only personal machine that runs Windows) is capable of running pretty much anything comonly available but I don't want the migration hassle right now.
My next desktop OS upgrade will be when I next make significant hardware changes (maybe later this year, at some point soon I'd like to upgrade to an SSD for the main system drive and as the machine is all a couple of years old now I might build a new machine instead of upgrading and pass the remains on) so would have to reinstall anyway. The only think keeping Windows installed anyway is games, so maybe I'll decide to live without them (I've not had time to play much recently anyway) and replace Windows completely at that point.
At work we have a couple of machines still running XP (a pair of old laptops) but everything else other than servers is Vista or 7. The XP machine are due to be replaced so they'll get "upgraded" for that reason, but we wouldn't go through the hassle of upgrading them otherwise.
Most of our clients (banks) are still XP pretty much accross the board. They all have plans to replace their default builds with 7, but I doubt any of them will make much progress before then end of 2013. Projects like that have a habbit of stalling due to compatability issues and/or lack of testing resource, and it not being a management priority until support for the old is due to go away.
Having actually ready your link, the word "oppose" is actually there.
But they are not against it because they think it is wrong, they are quite literally against it because others are and it is getting embarrassing. They stated argument against it?: "there is no consensus". That is like being against mugging not because the stealing and violence are bad per say, but because they are not seen as generally accepted.
Too little too late for many (far too late for me: I last dealt with that company some years ago, and have been recommending people go elsewhere for just as long).
They did not bow to anything. They just removed some supporting posts in the hope that would con some people (it seems to have worked in some quarters).
They certainly haven't come out against it.
Key members of their staff are still openly supporting it in blog posts (which the company would likely squash fairly quickly were they to be against the company position).
Define "inexpensive". Linode are very good in my experience, but some would not call them inexpensive.
Look at http://www.lowendbox.com/ for some very cheap low-but-fine-for-many-things options, though don't just get one. I have a three of cheap VPSs doing various little things. That are of order of 512Mb RAM (one 1024Mb, always look at the guaranteed memory rather than any burst option when looking at OVZ options), 40Gb disk, 500-1000G bandwidth (though I don't use most of that of that most of the time) and they weight in at less than $20/month in total. But while they are reliable and fast enough for what I ask, I don't entirely trust any of them (at that price there can't be much margin, and many cheap VPS providers go under with little notice) everything is on at least two of them and backup up here so I can switch over with nothing but DNS changes if one host should die.
You'll get much better customer service response from the likes of Linode, and much less contended outgoing bandwidth and contended I/O, but depending on your needs the cheaper options may offer better value.
Oracle realised that they had no hope of the control they wanted (as all the devs left for LibreOffice) so they just gave in.
Instead of just letting it stagnate and die, they handed it over to the Apache foundation so it could stagnate and die there without any need for Oracle to go to the hassle of ignoring support tickets.
I know replying to yourself is considered bad form, but I missed bits:
Of course some of the content was on film, not tape. Film can not be reused like magnetic tape can, so that excuse is gone for those examples, but also takes more care to store properly.
Yep. It was a money saving exercise: storing tape for long periods, in a condition that will play again when you ask the too, requires care, effort and space - none of which are free. That and new tape cost money too: they could be wiped and reused a few times before being destroyed so there was a secondary saving here. Someone high enough up suggested getting rid of these particular tapes and the BBC bureaucracy being what it was (and perhaps still is?) no one further down questioned the wisdom as they passed the instructions on down the chain.
The same bureaucracy did save a large pile of tapes at one point. A consignment destined to be wiped or destroyed didn't have the relevant paperwork. After very little effort to track it down, someone just filed the issue under "to deal with later" and shoved the tapes into a storeroom where they remained forgotten and unnoticed for the best part of 20 years. In that time people had realised how silly the idea of destroying the content was, so when they were found they were carefully restored (some didn't survive, tape can be a sensitive medium), copied onto other media and better treated this time around. Some good stuff was in that pile: not just Dr Who but bits of Not Only But Also and other significant shows.
I've noticed a lot of VPS providers charge almost nothing for processor time and RAM, but disk is still pretty expensive.
A cheap VPS provider will have "fair use" policies, officially or otherwise (in fact any VPS provider, though good ones are more likely to have well documented policies so you know what standard you are to be judged against). If your VM uses too much CPU time you will find it disabled without warning until you beg to have it turned back on again. The same goes for if you create a lot of I/O activity (i.e. any heavy database work).
You don't have to break your quotas either: I've have a cheap VPS provider cut me off for "to much bandwidth use in a day" when the amount of bandwidth used in the the day in questino was noticably less than "the amount I was supposed to be allowed in a month" divided by 31.
Also, the cheaper the offer the more chance there is that the host machiens will be massively oversold, so you have so many other VMs on the host your's is on that there is so much competition for I/O bandwidth that any disk operation will take much longer than you'd expect to complete. A cheap provider might have tens of VMs all using the one single spinning-metal based SATA drive.
I still have a couple of cheap VPSs that I use for various bits and bobs so if you find reasonable ones all can be fine - they certainly have thier place but be aware of the possible problems. I never have anything hosted on just one of them, so if one goes down or slows to a crawl all I have to do is switch some DNS entries and another takes over. Also, if looking ay OpenVZ never judge a VPS by its "burstable" memory allocation. If you need the memory you need the memory. A fair proportion of the not-the-cheapest-of-the-cheap hosts have stopped offering burstable memory. (swap on Xen is different as you can always allocate the full amount if you need to, but with OpenVZ with burst enabled you don't know until you try which makes some things fall over regularly - apparently Java based apps of any significant size are generaly not happy in such situations for instance, and I've seen rtorrent fall over when there is a suddern glut of incoming data and it hsan't been told to artificially reign in its memory use)
http://www.webhosttingtalk.com/ is a good place to look for hosting information generally, and http://www.lowendbox.com/ is a useful resource if you are looking at the lowest end of the market without wanting to consider shared hosting. If you don't mind signing up for 6 or more months rather than a rolling monthly contract you might find so very reasonable dedicated server offers like those at http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ (as with a cheap VPS, consider what options you lose by giong cheap such as support and SLAs), again http://www.webhosttingtalk.com/ is a good place to look for offers and discussion. Amazon's free tier (http://aws.amazon.com/free/) may also be worth looking at - you may find that much more stable and less over-sold than a cheap VPS.
Assuming you are seriously asking and don't have your toung in your cheek: the key downside is that people will associate the trojan with your product, if they don't like the changes it makes to their systems they might blame you not cnet.
That is fanbios in general. I have an android device but accept it (both the device, the OS, and the standard apps) is far from perfect. To some people me picking at the flaws somehow makes me anti-android. It is like a religious thing: their choice is right in all ways, other choices are false gods, and by making their choice but finding fault I'm some sort of heretic. Every tech choice seems to breed this sort of thing. Phones and portable media devices (Apple, Google, heck even Blackberry and Nokia still have fanbois despite their respective falls from grace in recent years (if anything their troubled market positions makes their fanbois more strident)), games consoles (Nintendo, Sony, MS), gaming option in general (console, PC, not at all), desktop/laptop/server OS (Windows, Linux, BSD, OSX), sub-OS variant (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, RedHat, CentOS, Slackware,...) , 8-bit machines back in the day and when donning the rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia (Spectrum, Commodore, the Beeb). Car geeks/ners do it. Sports geeks/nerds do it. It seems to be human nature to closed minded and defensive once we've made what we think is a good decision, presumably there is some survival imperative involved (which seems logical to me: in many circumstances making any not-completely-stupid decision and getting on with acting on it has survival benefits over standing around thinking deeper).
Or 2.0 billion is what it really has but they ship with some cores/cache disabled, so in X months time they can sell the same chip without the cores turned off as an "extreme" model or follow what Intel have talked about and have people pay more after sale for a code sequence that will make the CPU unlock the disabled cores. If that were the case then maybe someone in technical has had a word with someone in legal to the effect of "are we sure we can legally sell it in all territories with that number even though a fair chunk of them are disabled by default in all cases?" and this has prompted legal to do some checking then tell PR to fix things just in case.
The 8088 was a 16-bit processor too (albeit talking to the outside world via an 8-bit data bus, much like the 386SX being 32-bit internally but with a 16-bit data bus and 24 bit address bus) where 6502 and similar CPUs used in the beebs (and some other like Commodore's home machines at the time) was 8-bit, so it could do a lot more with each of those clock cycles.
But that IBM PC would have set you back a heck of a lot more money. It wasn't a personal computer in the sense of being one anyone expected you to have at home, IBM were using "personal computer" here in the sense of having your own computer at your desk at work.
I thought MobileSafari was iOS only. Maybe I'll give it a try some time. Though I've made a point of avoiding it after removing the thing (and everything else Apple) when I was irritated by it auto-installing along with an update to QuickTime some while back, I can be bitter like that.
bad code / bad interface design can lead to multiple charges.
That seems to be the case, and it serves to highlight some of the other points made against the company. Many of the customer service complaints I've heard stem from such situations not being accepted, and the customer either being ignored or being told it is their fault so no refund (virtual items are not returnable, even with receipt, it would seem).
Obviously some of the complaints should be taken with a side-order of salt as some people, particularly the those of the type that will shout in the most exaggerated manner online, refuse to accept fault and will make one hell of a noise until someone else fixes their mistake - but given everything else I hear about Zynga I'm inclined to believe that more of the complaints against them are true than aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
Such as corporations that profit off of harmful products?
Ish. I know I'm asking for a good karma smacking here but if people want to sell harmful crap and idiots want to buy it despite excellent evidence showing the harm it can do, good luck to both of them. Hopefully less fools will get a chance to procreate and the future will be just that little bit more intelligent on average.
Now, blatantly lying about the safety of their products and hamstringing the scientific community to stop them revealing the truth: that I would like to see the tobacco people strung up for.
you suffer the consequences. You know life has those.
Consequences? In a world where it is McDonald's fault people are fat, tobacco's fault people can't breath, the insurance industry's fault that medical care for their fat tar-filled bodies is expensive, and people are up in arms in the UK because the NHS won't stump up for free reversal surgery because their elective operation done on the cheap turns out to have been a bad idea? There are too many people out there who fail to acknowledge they are responsible for any consequences.
My rather limited experience with this is that, if you have more than a few snapshots on a base device, your write performance degrades very raplidy.
This is the case. Snapshots volumes contain the original data, so if a block is written to it must first be copied to all active snapshots of the device. This is not generally a problem as snapshots are intended for short-term use, but if you have several active snapshots write performance can degrade very badly. Changing a block a second time will not result in a snapshot access though, not will any read operation, so the performance problem for a number of I/O patterns the performance effect is minimal.
It wasn't just GoDaddy IIRC, but they were by far the biggest registrar to be offered a little bribe to that end.
Actually www is fronted by reverse proxies running on linux (you can check with nmap). IIS apparently can't handle the load by itself.
Probably true, but disengenuously presented. The front-end is run by a 3rd party (Akami?) CDN so MS don't control what sofftware they chose to use for the task. It MS decided it was worth running their own CDN instead of outsourcing the task, their's would probably run un Windows+IIS rather than anything else.
You could equally say you see a lot of Apache errors because of broken PHP code, or people sending you mistyped links (hint: that 404 error may not be the web server's fault).
nginx is very often used as a front-end to code writting in other systems like node.js, rails, and so forth: nginx serves static files directly and the other systems serve dynamic content. If the back-end is too busy (or actually broken in some way) nginx won't be able to drag dynamic content from it and will have to report an error instead.
Most sites are configured to hand out a generic 500 "server error" instead of anything more specific like "some fool missed a semi-colon near line 328", as giving out meaningful internal error messages on public facing interfaces is considered a potential security problem (it can make injection flaws easier to find), but don't have custom message HTML so said messages have "nginx" plainly visible on them, so I can understand some confusion on this point (though the same thing affects other web servers too, obviously).
But it isn't a hassle free option if you are currentl on XP - you essentiually need to do a complete reinstall. My hardware (on the only personal machine that runs Windows) is capable of running pretty much anything comonly available but I don't want the migration hassle right now.
My next desktop OS upgrade will be when I next make significant hardware changes (maybe later this year, at some point soon I'd like to upgrade to an SSD for the main system drive and as the machine is all a couple of years old now I might build a new machine instead of upgrading and pass the remains on) so would have to reinstall anyway. The only think keeping Windows installed anyway is games, so maybe I'll decide to live without them (I've not had time to play much recently anyway) and replace Windows completely at that point.
At work we have a couple of machines still running XP (a pair of old laptops) but everything else other than servers is Vista or 7. The XP machine are due to be replaced so they'll get "upgraded" for that reason, but we wouldn't go through the hassle of upgrading them otherwise.
Most of our clients (banks) are still XP pretty much accross the board. They all have plans to replace their default builds with 7, but I doubt any of them will make much progress before then end of 2013. Projects like that have a habbit of stalling due to compatability issues and/or lack of testing resource, and it not being a management priority until support for the old is due to go away.
Well, colour me corrected. Ish.
Having actually ready your link, the word "oppose" is actually there.
But they are not against it because they think it is wrong, they are quite literally against it because others are and it is getting embarrassing. They stated argument against it?: "there is no consensus". That is like being against mugging not because the stealing and violence are bad per say, but because they are not seen as generally accepted.
Too little too late for many (far too late for me: I last dealt with that company some years ago, and have been recommending people go elsewhere for just as long).
They did not bow to anything. They just removed some supporting posts in the hope that would con some people (it seems to have worked in some quarters).
They certainly haven't come out against it.
Key members of their staff are still openly supporting it in blog posts (which the company would likely squash fairly quickly were they to be against the company position).
All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
So say we all.
Define "inexpensive". Linode are very good in my experience, but some would not call them inexpensive.
Look at http://www.lowendbox.com/ for some very cheap low-but-fine-for-many-things options, though don't just get one. I have a three of cheap VPSs doing various little things. That are of order of 512Mb RAM (one 1024Mb, always look at the guaranteed memory rather than any burst option when looking at OVZ options), 40Gb disk, 500-1000G bandwidth (though I don't use most of that of that most of the time) and they weight in at less than $20/month in total. But while they are reliable and fast enough for what I ask, I don't entirely trust any of them (at that price there can't be much margin, and many cheap VPS providers go under with little notice) everything is on at least two of them and backup up here so I can switch over with nothing but DNS changes if one host should die.
You'll get much better customer service response from the likes of Linode, and much less contended outgoing bandwidth and contended I/O, but depending on your needs the cheaper options may offer better value.
Oracle realised that they had no hope of the control they wanted (as all the devs left for LibreOffice) so they just gave in.
Instead of just letting it stagnate and die, they handed it over to the Apache foundation so it could stagnate and die there without any need for Oracle to go to the hassle of ignoring support tickets.
You missed tomato == tomato.
I know replying to yourself is considered bad form, but I missed bits:
Of course some of the content was on film, not tape. Film can not be reused like magnetic tape can, so that excuse is gone for those examples, but also takes more care to store properly.
Yep. It was a money saving exercise: storing tape for long periods, in a condition that will play again when you ask the too, requires care, effort and space - none of which are free. That and new tape cost money too: they could be wiped and reused a few times before being destroyed so there was a secondary saving here. Someone high enough up suggested getting rid of these particular tapes and the BBC bureaucracy being what it was (and perhaps still is?) no one further down questioned the wisdom as they passed the instructions on down the chain.
The same bureaucracy did save a large pile of tapes at one point. A consignment destined to be wiped or destroyed didn't have the relevant paperwork. After very little effort to track it down, someone just filed the issue under "to deal with later" and shoved the tapes into a storeroom where they remained forgotten and unnoticed for the best part of 20 years. In that time people had realised how silly the idea of destroying the content was, so when they were found they were carefully restored (some didn't survive, tape can be a sensitive medium), copied onto other media and better treated this time around. Some good stuff was in that pile: not just Dr Who but bits of Not Only But Also and other significant shows.
May be he is a slow typist and/or a slow thinker?!
Don't switch sides over this as it isn't just women: a similar proportion of gay men appear to be guilty of these things too.
Actually, cancel the Amazon mention: yout 500Gb isn't going to fit on the free tier by a long shot...
I've noticed a lot of VPS providers charge almost nothing for processor time and RAM, but disk is still pretty expensive.
A cheap VPS provider will have "fair use" policies, officially or otherwise (in fact any VPS provider, though good ones are more likely to have well documented policies so you know what standard you are to be judged against). If your VM uses too much CPU time you will find it disabled without warning until you beg to have it turned back on again. The same goes for if you create a lot of I/O activity (i.e. any heavy database work).
You don't have to break your quotas either: I've have a cheap VPS provider cut me off for "to much bandwidth use in a day" when the amount of bandwidth used in the the day in questino was noticably less than "the amount I was supposed to be allowed in a month" divided by 31.
Also, the cheaper the offer the more chance there is that the host machiens will be massively oversold, so you have so many other VMs on the host your's is on that there is so much competition for I/O bandwidth that any disk operation will take much longer than you'd expect to complete. A cheap provider might have tens of VMs all using the one single spinning-metal based SATA drive.
I still have a couple of cheap VPSs that I use for various bits and bobs so if you find reasonable ones all can be fine - they certainly have thier place but be aware of the possible problems. I never have anything hosted on just one of them, so if one goes down or slows to a crawl all I have to do is switch some DNS entries and another takes over. Also, if looking ay OpenVZ never judge a VPS by its "burstable" memory allocation. If you need the memory you need the memory. A fair proportion of the not-the-cheapest-of-the-cheap hosts have stopped offering burstable memory. (swap on Xen is different as you can always allocate the full amount if you need to, but with OpenVZ with burst enabled you don't know until you try which makes some things fall over regularly - apparently Java based apps of any significant size are generaly not happy in such situations for instance, and I've seen rtorrent fall over when there is a suddern glut of incoming data and it hsan't been told to artificially reign in its memory use)
http://www.webhosttingtalk.com/ is a good place to look for hosting information generally, and http://www.lowendbox.com/ is a useful resource if you are looking at the lowest end of the market without wanting to consider shared hosting. If you don't mind signing up for 6 or more months rather than a rolling monthly contract you might find so very reasonable dedicated server offers like those at http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ (as with a cheap VPS, consider what options you lose by giong cheap such as support and SLAs), again http://www.webhosttingtalk.com/ is a good place to look for offers and discussion. Amazon's free tier (http://aws.amazon.com/free/) may also be worth looking at - you may find that much more stable and less over-sold than a cheap VPS.
Assuming you are seriously asking and don't have your toung in your cheek: the key downside is that people will associate the trojan with your product, if they don't like the changes it makes to their systems they might blame you not cnet.
That is fanbios in general. I have an android device but accept it (both the device, the OS, and the standard apps) is far from perfect. To some people me picking at the flaws somehow makes me anti-android. It is like a religious thing: their choice is right in all ways, other choices are false gods, and by making their choice but finding fault I'm some sort of heretic. Every tech choice seems to breed this sort of thing. Phones and portable media devices (Apple, Google, heck even Blackberry and Nokia still have fanbois despite their respective falls from grace in recent years (if anything their troubled market positions makes their fanbois more strident)), games consoles (Nintendo, Sony, MS), gaming option in general (console, PC, not at all), desktop/laptop/server OS (Windows, Linux, BSD, OSX), sub-OS variant (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, RedHat, CentOS, Slackware, ...) , 8-bit machines back in the day and when donning the rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia (Spectrum, Commodore, the Beeb). Car geeks/ners do it. Sports geeks/nerds do it. It seems to be human nature to closed minded and defensive once we've made what we think is a good decision, presumably there is some survival imperative involved (which seems logical to me: in many circumstances making any not-completely-stupid decision and getting on with acting on it has survival benefits over standing around thinking deeper).
Or 2.0 billion is what it really has but they ship with some cores/cache disabled, so in X months time they can sell the same chip without the cores turned off as an "extreme" model or follow what Intel have talked about and have people pay more after sale for a code sequence that will make the CPU unlock the disabled cores. If that were the case then maybe someone in technical has had a word with someone in legal to the effect of "are we sure we can legally sell it in all territories with that number even though a fair chunk of them are disabled by default in all cases?" and this has prompted legal to do some checking then tell PR to fix things just in case.
It was fast for a home computer at the time.
The 8088 was a 16-bit processor too (albeit talking to the outside world via an 8-bit data bus, much like the 386SX being 32-bit internally but with a 16-bit data bus and 24 bit address bus) where 6502 and similar CPUs used in the beebs (and some other like Commodore's home machines at the time) was 8-bit, so it could do a lot more with each of those clock cycles.
But that IBM PC would have set you back a heck of a lot more money. It wasn't a personal computer in the sense of being one anyone expected you to have at home, IBM were using "personal computer" here in the sense of having your own computer at your desk at work.
I thought MobileSafari was iOS only. Maybe I'll give it a try some time. Though I've made a point of avoiding it after removing the thing (and everything else Apple) when I was irritated by it auto-installing along with an update to QuickTime some while back, I can be bitter like that.
bad code / bad interface design can lead to multiple charges.
That seems to be the case, and it serves to highlight some of the other points made against the company. Many of the customer service complaints I've heard stem from such situations not being accepted, and the customer either being ignored or being told it is their fault so no refund (virtual items are not returnable, even with receipt, it would seem).
Obviously some of the complaints should be taken with a side-order of salt as some people, particularly the those of the type that will shout in the most exaggerated manner online, refuse to accept fault and will make one hell of a noise until someone else fixes their mistake - but given everything else I hear about Zynga I'm inclined to believe that more of the complaints against them are true than aren't.