Some clients are more stable than others. I am on ST 7.5.1, and it's rock solid even with voice chats. I can't say the same about previous versions, and I haven't tried Sametime 8.0x yet.
I work with people that use Pidgin to connect to the same server, and it has crashed on them as well. I would rather have software I can get support for.
An enterprise client can work with IBM to pare down the options to whatever is needed, making it a lighter image.
Note well, the study is regarding cough medicines for CHILDREN, and not adults.
- It says nothing about Guaifenisin efficacy for adults. - The headline neglects the details which allow us to read the inverse: 20% of children do require antibiotics to treat ear infections, and others have repeat cases.
When it helps 1 in 5, it's hard for me to say they are worthless. Just overproscribed.
We need to carefully differentiate the "blue collar non-tech firm" from Google and IBM Research.
1 - Is your department developing products that generate significant revenue for the company? (I suspect not, as you call yourself MIS. MIS is cost, and not usually P&L management.)
2 - Is your department researching and generating patentable technical assets that keep your firm ahead of your competitors? Do you frequently work with legal to track and manage your IP?
3 - Is your department focused on day-to-day operations of company servers and systems, upgrading software as needed and maintaining custom-code that drives manufacturing equipment?
If you can't answer yes to #1 or #2, I would be careful.
- An asshole consultant (not me) might see your staff as IT operations not core to the business, and recommend outsourcing to the IBMs, EDSs, and Wipros of the world, to cut cost.
- A union rep for the company's "blue collar" staff might see your non-unionized department as the true source of waste, and try to leverage that during the next contract round.
RIM offers a Blackberry JDE for their phones. It looks slick and well integrated, and comes with an emulator and tons of samples. One caveat - I haven't actually built anything with it yet
Since you didn't say what kind of server you're building, I'm going to assume: - that you're building a custom-purpose, client-server or message processing application, - it needs to be highly parallel to be efficient - the language is C, C#, or C++, and not Java (process-based servers in Java?)
I have done this before, using both processes and threads, for the same application. Consider the impact of application faults on your design, and then consider how hard it will be to create thread-safe code.
o A highly multithreaded server, where threads are performing complex and/or memory demanding tasks, will be susceptable to complete failure of all running jobs on all threads, if just a single thread SEGFAULTs. And despite your best testing efforts, complex code (1M+ lines) will at some point, somewhere, fail.
o Threaded code must be thread safe. Static variables, shared data structures, and factories all previously accessed through a singleton must now be protected with guard functions and semaphores. Race conditions need to be considered. Design for this up front. It will be much harder to add it later.
The Project
I worked on a team which added an asychronous processing engine to a web application. The engine was responsible for performing memory and time-intensive financial analysis and reporting for 16,000 accountants, so that they could close a large company's financial books. Unlike a webserver triggered by on-line end users, this engine is triggered by events in the company's financial database: once the database raises the "ready" flag, this engine begins running as many reports as it can, as fast as it can, on behalf of the 16K users. The analysis and report code was 2 million lines of C++, running on AIX.
Process implementation
The initial implementation used processes. A dispatcher job monitored the database for the ready flag, and then forked children of itself to analyze slices of the data, and generate the reports. One child job was used for each analysis and report pair, and the manager controlled how many jobs ran in parallel, maintaining a scoreboard of which jobs succeeded, and which failed.
Due to the complexity of the system, failures (core) occasionally occurred. The monitor would record this, retry the failed analysis up to 3 times, and keep a uniquely named core file of the event. Other analysis reports would continue to be generated, otherwise unharmed by the thrashing thread. Approximately once every 90 days, the development team would collect the few cores generated, use the gbd/xldb debugger to determine the cause of failure, and correct the fault.
The downsides of this? The solution was slowed because couldn't re-use resources like database connections (they were destroyed with each process), and more memory was used than need be. DB2 caching helped somewhat, but potential performance improvements remained.
Threaded implementation
In a large company, there are IT standards, and one of the standards at my company is that applications shall never, ever, ever fork(), even if running on a large dedicated machine. After losing the fight against this, my team re-architected the report engine. Largely the same as the previous, the new engine waits for the "ready" signal, and then spawns pthreads (POSIX threads) as workers to analyze the data and generate the report. In theory, it was robust.
The alpha version of this solution immediately failed (cored) during testing. We neglected to identify the less obvious non-thread-safe code in the application, and failed to identify several race conditions. Unlike previous failures, this faults were total: a SEGFAULT in code on one of 20 threads would halt the entire application. And the corefile generated was now huge - it contained a snapshot of memory for all 20 running jobs, instead of just the one of interest.
Extensive root-cause analysis, design, and restart management solved this, and the current version is as robust, and a good bit faster, than the previous. At a significant price.
That headline alone will cause problems (and potentially failure) for this initiative. Just like development or construction projects where use/acceptance is not compulsory, success needs to take into considerations the needs of all stakeholders, and not just one.
Sounds like they're playing favorites.
Re:marketing expenses a little excessive?
on
Vonage IPO
·
· Score: 1
You're right, they might have had some positive earnings. At the expense of growth.
Why can't Sourceforge keep the private-key a secret, and offer signing as a service to "certified" OSTG members? I've yet to read anything in the MSDN docs that make this impossible.
I still think Sourceforge could set it up as a service. If you're referring to the D&B rating, it's not that hard to get: Sourceforge is owned by the Open Source Technology Group, which is owned by VA Software.
Nothing on the Verisign site http://www.verisign.com/products-services/security -services/code-signing/digital-ids-code-signing/in dex.html indicates that ever single piece of software requires a new certificate. So nothing prevents a group of opensource developers from getting together, incorporating, obtaining a cert, and then signing the software of those they trust. For example, Sourceforge could get a cert, and then offer driver-signing services to trusted projects.
That arguement breaks for source-driven drivers as well. Can you use a driver for a 2.0 or 2.1 kernel with the 2.6 kernel? Maybe. Maybe not. Just because it's source-based doesn't mean that there's a guarantee it will build.
Using an abstracted binary driver interface means that newer kernels could guarantee backwards compatability, by supporting prior versions of the binary driver interface. The older interfaces might not allow the driver to use the latest-and-greatest features, but at least it would work as it used to.
An added benefit of putting drivers in a "box": recovery. Binary driver interfaces could be configured to validate parameters, logging and restarting drivers that attempt to do bad things before the driver can damage the rest of the system. My Windows XP ATI Catalyst drivers do that now...
Is there a bluetooth equivalent?
on
TCP/IP Speakers
·
· Score: 1
Has anyone seen a Bluetooth equivalent? I'm looking for a bluetooth audio gateway that includes a built-in amp and outputs, without the transmitter mate (my home PCs already have Bluetooth transceivers.)
So we pull out, and the genie comes out of the bottle. As predicted, Pol-Pot, backed by the communist North Vietnamese, takes the capital of Cambodia. In a campaign against the educated and middle class, the government beats, tortures, and EXTERMINATES between 1.5 and 3 MILLION people over the next 5 years. The peasant is the ideal. You (yeah, the educated engineer) were the enemy.
You're halfway there: half the stuff that actually comes in contact with a patients is one-time use, then discarded for incineration as medical waste. Instead of taking the time to clean the covers, have them incinerated with the rest of the medical waste.
Replacing them with every shift, though not perfect, is better than the current setup.
Think that's too costly? A cover with an 8-hour life could just be made from thin latex / neoprene / Nitrile / polyurathane film. Convince a vendor your ward will use 1000/year, and they might start making them.
There's no need for a new technology or overly complex solution for a problem already solved in many states. Using NY and NJ as an example, these two states still have tolls on major highways, but drivers using EasyPass can pass through them at 40-60 mph. And EasyPass (http://www.ezpass.com/) only cares about the number of axles you have, not the fuel efficiency/inefficiency of your car...
Categorizing broadband access a need so fundamental that governments must provide it to their citizens, implies that many more critical things also should be provided by government to all citizens. A short list might be:
defense shelter water food clothing healthc are electricity heating / cooling transportation education
There's certainly enough whining out here about defense, so I'll skip that one. Do we have the shelter issue covered? In rural PA? How about Pittsburg? Are you sure?
The real poor need a lot more before they care about WiFi. If we're interested in really helping poor people, we need to focus our resources on them, instead of on feel-good policies that only help us feel good about ourselves.
Lots of smart folks on slashdot. Some maybe even run their own start-ups. So what does this mean?
If you wake up one night, with an epiphany that solves the cheaper/faster/more reliable distributed broadband problem, you can do a lot of things with it. But if rural towns or entire states start to adopt these policies, one of the things you *CAN'T* do can't is become a provider. Not without competing directly with local governments...
You hit the heart of the matter: How is the rape, torture, and murder of political dissidents -- or of members of their families -- considered an acceptable form of government? (China, Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan, Libya, the former Iraqi dictatorship and Zimbabwe)
Many democratic countries have laws where if you witness a murder and do nothing, you are complicit in the crime. How long do we watch governments maintain power by murdering their own people, and do nothing but pass petty resolutions or sanctions that only state it is atrocious?
Don't get me wrong: we'll always have the small group of individuals taking advantage of their strength. What matters then is how a government deals with it. Abu Gharaib and the recent mercy killing of a young boy were both very wrong, staining the honor of our allied forces and meriting prison and hanging for the US troops involved. There's a huge distinction between that and having to watch the government-sanctioned rape of your wife and daughter before you're executed with a machete (Zimbabwe).
You don't have to give samples of your DNA to enter the country. Period. If you're involved in a serious crime (rape, murder) you might, but in that situation citizens "have to" as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Some clients are more stable than others. I am on ST 7.5.1, and it's rock solid even with voice chats. I can't say the same about previous versions, and I haven't tried Sametime 8.0x yet.
I work with people that use Pidgin to connect to the same server, and it has crashed on them as well. I would rather have software I can get support for.
An enterprise client can work with IBM to pare down the options to whatever is needed, making it a lighter image.
Note well, the study is regarding cough medicines for CHILDREN, and not adults.
- It says nothing about Guaifenisin efficacy for adults.
- The headline neglects the details which allow us to read the inverse: 20% of children do require antibiotics to treat ear infections, and others have repeat cases.
When it helps 1 in 5, it's hard for me to say they are worthless. Just overproscribed.
We need to carefully differentiate the "blue collar non-tech firm" from Google and IBM Research.
1 - Is your department developing products that generate significant revenue for the company? (I suspect not, as you call yourself MIS. MIS is cost, and not usually P&L management.)
2 - Is your department researching and generating patentable technical assets that keep your firm ahead of your competitors? Do you frequently work with legal to track and manage your IP?
3 - Is your department focused on day-to-day operations of company servers and systems, upgrading software as needed and maintaining custom-code that drives manufacturing equipment?
If you can't answer yes to #1 or #2, I would be careful.
- An asshole consultant (not me) might see your staff as IT operations not core to the business, and recommend outsourcing to the IBMs, EDSs, and Wipros of the world, to cut cost.
- A union rep for the company's "blue collar" staff might see your non-unionized department as the true source of waste, and try to leverage that during the next contract round.
Certainly the root of all names and numbers would qualify. All others are just delegates.
RIM offers a Blackberry JDE for their phones. It looks slick and well integrated, and comes with an emulator and tons of samples. One caveat - I haven't actually built anything with it yet
Since you didn't say what kind of server you're building, I'm going to assume:
- that you're building a custom-purpose, client-server or message processing application,
- it needs to be highly parallel to be efficient
- the language is C, C#, or C++, and not Java (process-based servers in Java?)
I have done this before, using both processes and threads, for the same application. Consider the impact of application faults on your design, and then consider how hard it will be to create thread-safe code.
o A highly multithreaded server, where threads are performing complex and/or memory demanding tasks, will be susceptable to complete failure of all running jobs on all threads, if just a single thread SEGFAULTs. And despite your best testing efforts, complex code (1M+ lines) will at some point, somewhere, fail.
o Threaded code must be thread safe. Static variables, shared data structures, and factories all previously accessed through a singleton must now be protected with guard functions and semaphores. Race conditions need to be considered. Design for this up front. It will be much harder to add it later.
The Project
I worked on a team which added an asychronous processing engine to a web application. The engine was responsible for performing memory and time-intensive financial analysis and reporting for 16,000 accountants, so that they could close a large company's financial books. Unlike a webserver triggered by on-line end users, this engine is triggered by events in the company's financial database: once the database raises the "ready" flag, this engine begins running as many reports as it can, as fast as it can, on behalf of the 16K users. The analysis and report code was 2 million lines of C++, running on AIX.
Process implementation
The initial implementation used processes. A dispatcher job monitored the database for the ready flag, and then forked children of itself to analyze slices of the data, and generate the reports. One child job was used for each analysis and report pair, and the manager controlled how many jobs ran in parallel, maintaining a scoreboard of which jobs succeeded, and which failed.
Due to the complexity of the system, failures (core) occasionally occurred. The monitor would record this, retry the failed analysis up to 3 times, and keep a uniquely named core file of the event. Other analysis reports would continue to be generated, otherwise unharmed by the thrashing thread. Approximately once every 90 days, the development team would collect the few cores generated, use the gbd/xldb debugger to determine the cause of failure, and correct the fault.
The downsides of this? The solution was slowed because couldn't re-use resources like database connections (they were destroyed with each process), and more memory was used than need be. DB2 caching helped somewhat, but potential performance improvements remained.
Threaded implementation
In a large company, there are IT standards, and one of the standards at my company is that applications shall never, ever, ever fork(), even if running on a large dedicated machine. After losing the fight against this, my team re-architected the report engine. Largely
the same as the previous, the new engine waits for the "ready" signal, and then spawns pthreads (POSIX threads) as workers to analyze the data and generate the report. In theory, it was robust.
The alpha version of this solution immediately failed (cored) during testing. We neglected to identify the less obvious non-thread-safe code in the application, and failed to identify several race conditions. Unlike previous failures, this faults were total: a SEGFAULT in code on one of 20 threads would halt the entire application. And the corefile generated was now huge - it contained a snapshot of memory for all 20 running jobs, instead of just the one of interest.
Extensive root-cause analysis, design, and restart management solved this, and the current version is as robust, and a good bit faster, than the previous. At a significant price.
Except Bill Gates DIDN'T step in.
Her own parents did.
Certainly if Akamai succeeds, it will set a precident that NBC will tap again, and that other broadcasters may join.
m bol=AKAM&event=peek.
For those that have cashed out of Google, perhaps now's the time to invest in Akamai, if you haven't already http://clearstation.etrade.com/cgi-bin/details?Sy
That headline alone will cause problems (and potentially failure) for this initiative. Just like development or construction projects where use/acceptance is not compulsory, success needs to take into considerations the needs of all stakeholders, and not just one.
Sounds like they're playing favorites.
You're right, they might have had some positive earnings. At the expense of growth.
This is perfect proof that, given two interested parties and debatable facts, a public document editor cannot be used an authority.
Score one for Britannica http://www.britannica.com/
Why can't Sourceforge keep the private-key a secret, and offer signing as a service to "certified" OSTG members? I've yet to read anything in the MSDN docs that make this impossible.
I still think Sourceforge could set it up as a service. If you're referring to the D&B rating, it's not that hard to get: Sourceforge is owned by the Open Source Technology Group, which is owned by VA Software.
a sp?prodid=&catalog=&GUID=7F577E4E-B03B-4123-B0BE-B 805583CC740&cm_mmc=Proprietary*DNB.com*Home%20Page *Search%20Box
Both already have D&B ratings: http://smallbusiness.dnb.com/company-information.
Nothing on the Verisign site http://www.verisign.com/products-services/security -services/code-signing/digital-ids-code-signing/in dex.html indicates that ever single piece of software requires a new certificate. So nothing prevents a group of opensource developers from getting together, incorporating, obtaining a cert, and then signing the software of those they trust. For example, Sourceforge could get a cert, and then offer driver-signing services to trusted projects.
6 ,00.html).
Want to go it alone? It's $75 - $500 to incorporate, depending upon the type (http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,28798
Keep in mind that driver-signing doesn't 100% guarantee stability. My ATI card's signed drivers still periodically flake out...
That arguement breaks for source-driven drivers as well. Can you use a driver for a 2.0 or 2.1 kernel with the 2.6 kernel? Maybe. Maybe not. Just because it's source-based doesn't mean that there's a guarantee it will build.
Using an abstracted binary driver interface means that newer kernels could guarantee backwards compatability, by supporting prior versions of the binary driver interface. The older interfaces might not allow the driver to use the latest-and-greatest features, but at least it would work as it used to.
An added benefit of putting drivers in a "box": recovery. Binary driver interfaces could be configured to validate parameters, logging and restarting drivers that attempt to do bad things before the driver can damage the rest of the system. My Windows XP ATI Catalyst drivers do that now...
Has anyone seen a Bluetooth equivalent? I'm looking for a bluetooth audio gateway that includes a built-in amp and outputs, without the transmitter mate (my home PCs already have Bluetooth transceivers.)
BLUETAKE makes an audio gateway (http://www.bluetake.com/products/BT460EX.htm) that overachieves - I don't need to transmitter part of it, and the receiver is way too big.
...because I see some captivating similarities in your interests.
I guess great minds think alike...
Everyone forgets to read the next chapter.
n d_genocide
8 8.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia#Civil_war_a
So we pull out, and the genie comes out of the bottle. As predicted, Pol-Pot, backed by the communist North Vietnamese, takes the capital of Cambodia. In a campaign against the educated and middle class, the government beats, tortures, and EXTERMINATES between 1.5 and 3 MILLION people over the next 5 years. The peasant is the ideal. You (yeah, the educated engineer) were the enemy.
Cambodia lost the war in Vietnam. And Pol Pot? He's still around. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/789
Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point
The chart tells all. Drop the pressure over frozen water, and you can turn it into a gas.
You're halfway there: half the stuff that actually comes in contact with a patients is one-time use, then discarded for incineration as medical waste. Instead of taking the time to clean the covers, have them incinerated with the rest of the medical waste.
Replacing them with every shift, though not perfect, is better than the current setup.
Think that's too costly? A cover with an 8-hour life could just be made from thin latex / neoprene / Nitrile / polyurathane film. Convince a vendor your ward will use 1000/year, and they might start making them.
There's no need for a new technology or overly complex solution for a problem already solved in many states. Using NY and NJ as an example, these two states still have tolls on major highways, but drivers using EasyPass can pass through them at 40-60 mph. And EasyPass (http://www.ezpass.com/) only cares about the number of axles you have, not the fuel efficiency/inefficiency of your car...
Categorizing broadband access a need so fundamental that governments must provide it to their citizens, implies that many more critical things also should be provided by government to all citizens. A short list might be:
c are
defense
shelter
water
food
clothing
health
electricity
heating / cooling
transportation
education
There's certainly enough whining out here about defense, so I'll skip that one. Do we have the shelter issue covered? In rural PA? How about Pittsburg? Are you sure?
The real poor need a lot more before they care about WiFi. If we're interested in really helping poor people, we need to focus our resources on them, instead of on feel-good policies that only help us feel good about ourselves.
Lots of smart folks on slashdot. Some maybe even run their own start-ups. So what does this mean?
If you wake up one night, with an epiphany that solves the cheaper/faster/more reliable distributed broadband problem, you can do a lot of things with it. But if rural towns or entire states start to adopt these policies, one of the things you *CAN'T* do can't is become a provider. Not without competing directly with local governments...
You hit the heart of the matter: How is the rape, torture, and murder of political dissidents -- or of members of their families -- considered an acceptable form of government? (China, Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan, Libya, the former Iraqi dictatorship and Zimbabwe)
Many democratic countries have laws where if you witness a murder and do nothing, you are complicit in the crime. How long do we watch governments maintain power by murdering their own people, and do nothing but pass petty resolutions or sanctions that only state it is atrocious?
Don't get me wrong: we'll always have the small group of individuals taking advantage of their strength. What matters then is how a government deals with it. Abu Gharaib and the recent mercy killing of a young boy were both very wrong, staining the honor of our allied forces and meriting prison and hanging for the US troops involved. There's a huge distinction between that and having to watch the government-sanctioned rape of your wife and daughter before you're executed with a machete (Zimbabwe).
You don't have to give samples of your DNA to enter the country. Period. If you're involved in a serious crime (rape, murder) you might, but in that situation citizens "have to" as well.