I run a site for a non-profit organization whose.org name is taken by a cybersquatter (based on other sites the whois owner runs). The domain has been unused for more than two years, without a responding web server at the other end. Other variations of the name are awkward, so I've been trying for years to at least contact anyone connected with the domain and negotiate a price. Nothing. It's especially frustrating since they keep renewing it.
It's up for renewal in 2 months -- maybe I'll get it this time:/
...claims of OpenSSH not being an 'enterprise-class product' by SSH Communications...
That's because almost everything that's 'enterprise-class' is crap.
Sheesh. If I had a nickel for every time upper management was impressed into buying a 3-million dollar equivelent of syslog, I'd be back in the dot-com boom.
Here is another potential problem. MS might come out with an add-on to their OS where it prevents unauthorized (or authorized) installation of these malwares....it will do this because they are not digitally signed, and authenticated to the user...the only problem: My friend does not want to use a program (i.e. photoshop) so he deletes it from his computer and gives me the disk. The disk is registered to his windows...now I can't install it....or what if I want to rip my DvD movie to my computer (backup)...it won't let me play it.
From everything I've read, it seems MS is working on the goal of windows eventually running only applications signed by them, the same way XBox is supposed to only run games they sign. There are so many things wrong with that besides the examples you mentioned:
- Who signs the apps? Microsoft? - How do they determine which are legit and which arent? - Who is held responsible if a legit company - How much will they charge? - Will the costs of signing push shareware & freeware programmers out of the market? - Will the signed applications expire? - What happens if I sell my computer? Are the licenses still tied to it? - Will they also keep compeditors out of the market too - What happens when everyone's guard is down, and someone figures out a way to code-sign a worm.
Just to scratch the surface. Worst case scenario, future PCs will cease to run Linux or any other alternative OS.
My real fear is that MS and/or Intel lobbyists convince the government to pass a law mandating that computers only run signed code. As a matter of fact, I'm surprised they've waited this long.
North Korea, Iran, Terrorists, other states that haven't announced yet or are currently friends/neutral but could turn with an election or coup. Just because big bad USSR is gone doesn't make us safe from nuclear attacks.
Just because the president has the authorization to fire nukes at-will, doesn't make us any safer from nuclear attacks either. The threat behind a preemptive strike will only protect us from an enemy that's rational or has a lot to lose. Unfortunately most of our true enemies are irrational or have nothing to lose.
Well, I recently took a good long look at all three desktop operating systems for a personal shootout, and I must say that out of Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux with KDE or Gnome, and OSX Tiger, OSX was the only one that stood out from the crowd as being anywhere near innovative or 'new'. I didnt see anything in Linux that I havent enjoyed using elsewhere for years, although its security strengths are a positive, Windows had the games plus point, but its much of a muchness desktop wise, but OSX takes integration and ease of use to a new level, especially for developers.
Seconded. I spend almost every waking hour in front of unix, Windows, and OSX. OSX has spoiled me rotten.
Apple has always put a lot of resources into making the OS and applications consistent and flow nicely. In the early years of MacOS, Apple published books to that contained guidelines for applications, like how GUIs should look, or even things we take for granted like changing the cursor when a user triggers any but instantaneous operations. Today they have the Apple Human Interface Guidelines which does the same. Admittedly everyone, even Apple deviates from the guidelines now and then, but it's still better than nothing.
These types of unifying guidelines are what's lacking in Windows, and severely lacking in every unix desktop. (Web applications are the worst in this respect). Even commercial desktop environments like CDE with tons of R&D behind them are complex and non-intuitive. KDE may be the best right now, but it still lacks the consistency of OSX, and if you throw even the simplest non-KDE application into the mix, the user experience suffers. ("Hey, I configure fonts one way for every other application, but why does Firefox have its own font menu?")
Unfortunately I can't see unix desktop environment developers (commercial or otherwise) ever designing and agreeing on a consistent set of user interface guidelines. This is especially true in the open-source camp (myself included), where it's easier to make every aspect of an application configurable and avoid the whole issue. Who knows though -- there's a chance the unix desktop environment will somehow lead the evolution and somehow innovate with unifying standards.
If you eat before you see the movie, and just smuggle in a bad of skittles, you just saved yourself $18. The food has always been outrageous. Luckily, you aren't forced to buy it. It's the ticket prices that are getting ridiculous. It's $10.25 i believe to see a movie at a good stadium seating theater in my city.
Good way to keep the price of going to the movies down. But almost paradoxically, if everyone ate before going to the movies, the theater would be forced to raise ticket sales to make up the difference. A safe guess for how much a theater sells in food to each patron would be $5 on average. If everyone stopped buying food, ticket prices would then be $15 or so.
In short: If you are self-interested, your best bet would be to encourage more people to continue eating theater food, therefore keeping your own cost of going to the movies down.
I have to agree with some other posters -- without knowing some of the dynamics of the db usage, it's difficult to make suggestions. 280,000 users can be a piece of cake if all you're doing is user auths for each (that's about 3/second if everyone logs in once/day). Worse-case,
A few things too look at:
- If there is excessive or improper locking being done (i.e.: do you really need to lock a table to update a record that could only possibly be updated one at a time?) - If queries can be made less complex - Indexing. You should become intimate with how indexing works and the various ways of setting it up - Caching infrequently changed content on the front-end (i.e. generate static web pages that don't change too often rather than dynamically creating them constantly). - de-normalize your tables if it improves performance. Don't worry nobody's looking:)
Also, look into some lighter-weight DB & DB-related technologies: HSqlDB, SQLite, C-JDBC, BerkeleyDB, SQLRelay, to name a few. Granted some aren't distributed, but again, not knowing the architecture, some data may be lazily replicated out from the master.
Also, I can't find it now, but I read a while back that MySQL was adopting an open-sourced in-memory DB from a company (Ericcson?) that may be available separately. You also may want to look into something like LDAP (OpenLDAP) if the app is very read-heavy.
Part of the value you get when you buy a $12.99 CD is the ability to loan and share it to friends, make mixed recordings, burn to an mp3cd to play in the car, rip to my iPod, etc. It's been built into the price & value since at least the 70s.
The sharing is a big piece. Almost everyone likes to share, to introduce things to people, to be the first one to say "hey check this out."
More importantly, the ability to sell it used is also part of the hidden value. When I buy a CD, I know that even though I'm paying $13 for it, I can sell it used when I'm done with it.
With changing media and new DRM, these hidden values are being taken from the product, making that $12.99 less attractive. Suddenly you're paying $12.99 for some music that all you can do is listen to until you're sick of it, then you're stuck with it for life.
If I had to put a value on an average song that appeals to me the first 10 or 20 times I hear, then never be able to do anything with the media.. I'd say about 25 cents. Funny that's about what the artist gets paid after all the middle-men.
Oh actually addressing the post I'm replying to -- a large portion of the $12.99 you're paying on the CD is publicity.
Roughly what percentage of your system is built on open source, commercial, and homemade components, and what drove the decisions behind those choices?
Good. I say we stop resisting this and let them have what they want. Let these companies create all kinds of complicated consumer-angering technology. Let people be forced into experiencing the entertainment they "buy" only how the providers want. Let the consumer be forced into restrictive pay-per-view models for movies they purchase. Make it impossible for me to let my mom borrow a DVD I "bought." Just let it all happen.
That will give the rest of the entertainment community the chance to create smaller, niche forms of entertainment, while hollywood continues its downward spiral of making worse mass appeal crap. Same for music, TV, etc.
Just imagine how much worse the effect would be if the game did involve sex!!!
Now I understand why the rampant violence and cursing in San Andreas wasn't a problem but unlockable low-rez simulated dry-humping was such a huge deal!
Before I just thought it was uninformed rank lunacy on the part of anti-game zealots and uninformed hypocritcal pandering on the part of politicians but now I see they were just trying to protect us from dying like drug-addicted rats in a cage...
This was modded as Funny, but there's a lot of truth to this.
There's a lot of people that lack self-control, while others that know when to quit. Sex, drugs, TV, games, shopping, gambling... everything enjoyable. Of course a person may not be prone to compulsion in every single one of these areas, and there will be varying degrees.
So without controls, a certain portion of the society will at best be unproductive, and at worst damage the productive parts.
Many of us at the top end of the age bracket for gamers (mid-30s) have few blocks of uninterrupted time to invest in larger quests and campaigns. We're lucky to get a few solid hours on a saturday evening. Even at 2 hours/weekend it's still a bargain when compared to other entertainment, it still seems like a rip-off if the user can't use the game outside of those blocks. MMOG products can address this a number of ways:
- Create longer puzzling or strategic challenges that can require thought, planning, and possibly even group discussion outside the game. (In other words, a guild could chat on IM during the day and plan out how to infiltrate an enemy compound.)
- In addition to the current adventures, make shorter ones.
- Alternative non-play interfaces into the virtual world, such as access to the chat channels, virtual in-game web-cams, real time stats, mail, auctions, etc. The trick would be to do it without the usual 3d game client, using standard desktop technologies like DHTML, Java, RSS feeds, Flash, etc. Anything that allows the user to be a part of the world without a huge time and client investment, so they can be connected at work or in the short gaps between 'real-life' tasks at home.
- Make more real-world resources accessible and standard within the game client. Provide an IM client to major protocols (AIM, ICQ, Y!, etc). Obviously nobody wants windows popping up when they're battling a 60th level tit-mouse, but careful GUI engineering can provide unobtrusive notifications and even auto-responders. Same for other real-world resources, like email clients. Point being, for those of us that do get a few hours to play, keep us there.
The four judges who voted AGAINST the local government's land grab were Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and O'Commor. It's the liberals who want to give away private property - the conservatives want to give away PUBLIC property.
Or you could look at it this way: The conservatives want the rich to own all the businesses and property. The liberals want the government to own all the businesses and property. What neither side realize is that we're so close to the rich, government, and businesses all being the same, why bother fighting?:)
I think we will see a draft return sometime in the next few years if the military continues to fail to meet recruiting goals.
Unfortunately, right or wrong, we're now in an indefinite war. The terrorist enemies are invisible, without borders, without command structure, etc. Unlike the major conflicts in the past, we will never know if and when we have won (although we certainly will know if we've lost).
I'm a patriotic American who loves his country and the principals it was founded on, and I'm so afraid for our country's future. Nobody has the resources to fight an indefinite war.
Slashdot Mirror
I run a site for a non-profit organization whose .org name is taken by a cybersquatter (based on other sites the whois owner runs). The domain has been unused for more than two years, without a responding web server at the other end. Other variations of the name are awkward, so I've been trying for years to at least contact anyone connected with the domain and negotiate a price. Nothing. It's especially frustrating since they keep renewing it.
:/
It's up for renewal in 2 months -- maybe I'll get it this time
That's because almost everything that's 'enterprise-class' is crap.
Sheesh. If I had a nickel for every time upper management was impressed into buying a 3-million dollar equivelent of syslog, I'd be back in the dot-com boom.
From everything I've read, it seems MS is working on the goal of windows eventually running only applications signed by them, the same way XBox is supposed to only run games they sign. There are so many things wrong with that besides the examples you mentioned:
- Who signs the apps? Microsoft?
- How do they determine which are legit and which arent?
- Who is held responsible if a legit company
- How much will they charge?
- Will the costs of signing push shareware & freeware programmers out of the market?
- Will the signed applications expire?
- What happens if I sell my computer? Are the licenses still tied to it?
- Will they also keep compeditors out of the market too
- What happens when everyone's guard is down, and someone figures out a way to code-sign a worm.
Just to scratch the surface. Worst case scenario, future PCs will cease to run Linux or any other alternative OS.
My real fear is that MS and/or Intel lobbyists convince the government to pass a law mandating that computers only run signed code. As a matter of fact, I'm surprised they've waited this long.
How ironic that without their takedown notice, I never would've seen your site. There's some pretty obvious legal karma in there. :)
Just because the president has the authorization to fire nukes at-will, doesn't make us any safer from nuclear attacks either. The threat behind a preemptive strike will only protect us from an enemy that's rational or has a lot to lose. Unfortunately most of our true enemies are irrational or have nothing to lose.
A young executive is leaving the office late one night when he finds the CEO standing over the shredder with a piece of paper in his hand.
"This is a very sensitive official document," says the CEO. "My secretary's gone for the night. Can you make this thing work?"
"Sure," says the junior exec as he turns on the shredder and hits the start button.
"Great," says the CEO. "I just need one copy."
Seconded. I spend almost every waking hour in front of unix, Windows, and OSX. OSX has spoiled me rotten.
Apple has always put a lot of resources into making the OS and applications consistent and flow nicely. In the early years of MacOS, Apple published books to that contained guidelines for applications, like how GUIs should look, or even things we take for granted like changing the cursor when a user triggers any but instantaneous operations. Today they have the Apple Human Interface Guidelines which does the same. Admittedly everyone, even Apple deviates from the guidelines now and then, but it's still better than nothing.
These types of unifying guidelines are what's lacking in Windows, and severely lacking in every unix desktop. (Web applications are the worst in this respect). Even commercial desktop environments like CDE with tons of R&D behind them are complex and non-intuitive. KDE may be the best right now, but it still lacks the consistency of OSX, and if you throw even the simplest non-KDE application into the mix, the user experience suffers. ("Hey, I configure fonts one way for every other application, but why does Firefox have its own font menu?")
Unfortunately I can't see unix desktop environment developers (commercial or otherwise) ever designing and agreeing on a consistent set of user interface guidelines. This is especially true in the open-source camp (myself included), where it's easier to make every aspect of an application configurable and avoid the whole issue. Who knows though -- there's a chance the unix desktop environment will somehow lead the evolution and somehow innovate with unifying standards.
Good way to keep the price of going to the movies down. But almost paradoxically, if everyone ate before going to the movies, the theater would be forced to raise ticket sales to make up the difference. A safe guess for how much a theater sells in food to each patron would be $5 on average. If everyone stopped buying food, ticket prices would then be $15 or so.
In short: If you are self-interested, your best bet would be to encourage more people to continue eating theater food, therefore keeping your own cost of going to the movies down.
I have to agree with some other posters -- without knowing some of the dynamics of the db usage, it's difficult to make suggestions. 280,000 users can be a piece of cake if all you're doing is user auths for each (that's about 3/second if everyone logs in once/day). Worse-case,
:)
A few things too look at:
- If there is excessive or improper locking being done (i.e.: do you really need to lock a table to update a record that could only possibly be updated one at a time?)
- If queries can be made less complex
- Indexing. You should become intimate with how indexing works and the various ways of setting it up
- Caching infrequently changed content on the front-end (i.e. generate static web pages that don't change too often rather than dynamically creating them constantly).
- de-normalize your tables if it improves performance. Don't worry nobody's looking
Also, look into some lighter-weight DB & DB-related technologies: HSqlDB, SQLite, C-JDBC, BerkeleyDB, SQLRelay, to name a few. Granted some aren't distributed, but again, not knowing the architecture, some data may be lazily replicated out from the master.
Also, I can't find it now, but I read a while back that MySQL was adopting an open-sourced in-memory DB from a company (Ericcson?) that may be available separately. You also may want to look into something like LDAP (OpenLDAP) if the app is very read-heavy.
Part of the value you get when you buy a $12.99 CD is the ability to loan and share it to friends, make mixed recordings, burn to an mp3cd to play in the car, rip to my iPod, etc. It's been built into the price & value since at least the 70s.
The sharing is a big piece. Almost everyone likes to share, to introduce things to people, to be the first one to say "hey check this out."
More importantly, the ability to sell it used is also part of the hidden value. When I buy a CD, I know that even though I'm paying $13 for it, I can sell it used when I'm done with it.
With changing media and new DRM, these hidden values are being taken from the product, making that $12.99 less attractive. Suddenly you're paying $12.99 for some music that all you can do is listen to until you're sick of it, then you're stuck with it for life.
If I had to put a value on an average song that appeals to me the first 10 or 20 times I hear, then never be able to do anything with the media.. I'd say about 25 cents. Funny that's about what the artist gets paid after all the middle-men.
Oh actually addressing the post I'm replying to -- a large portion of the $12.99 you're paying on the CD is publicity.
Roughly what percentage of your system is built on open source, commercial, and homemade components, and what drove the decisions behind those choices?
I was hoping someone would notice :)
Good. I say we stop resisting this and let them have what they want. Let these companies create all kinds of complicated consumer-angering technology. Let people be forced into experiencing the entertainment they "buy" only how the providers want. Let the consumer be forced into restrictive pay-per-view models for movies they purchase. Make it impossible for me to let my mom borrow a DVD I "bought." Just let it all happen.
That will give the rest of the entertainment community the chance to create smaller, niche forms of entertainment, while hollywood continues its downward spiral of making worse mass appeal crap. Same for music, TV, etc.
This was modded as Funny, but there's a lot of truth to this.
There's a lot of people that lack self-control, while others that know when to quit. Sex, drugs, TV, games, shopping, gambling... everything enjoyable. Of course a person may not be prone to compulsion in every single one of these areas, and there will be varying degrees.
So without controls, a certain portion of the society will at best be unproductive, and at worst damage the productive parts.
There are a few development Podcasts emerging. One includes my favorite on Java called zdot
Someone else already mentioned , but it's worth recommending again.
I'm really new to WoW. What's this about being banned for exploring?
Many of us at the top end of the age bracket for gamers (mid-30s) have few blocks of uninterrupted time to invest in larger quests and campaigns. We're lucky to get a few solid hours on a saturday evening. Even at 2 hours/weekend it's still a bargain when compared to other entertainment, it still seems like a rip-off if the user can't use the game outside of those blocks. MMOG products can address this a number of ways:
:)
- Create longer puzzling or strategic challenges that can require thought, planning, and possibly even group discussion outside the game. (In other words, a guild could chat on IM during the day and plan out how to infiltrate an enemy compound.)
- In addition to the current adventures, make shorter ones.
- Alternative non-play interfaces into the virtual world, such as access to the chat channels, virtual in-game web-cams, real time stats, mail, auctions, etc. The trick would be to do it without the usual 3d game client, using standard desktop technologies like DHTML, Java, RSS feeds, Flash, etc. Anything that allows the user to be a part of the world without a huge time and client investment, so they can be connected at work or in the short gaps between 'real-life' tasks at home.
- Make more real-world resources accessible and standard within the game client. Provide an IM client to major protocols (AIM, ICQ, Y!, etc). Obviously nobody wants windows popping up when they're battling a 60th level tit-mouse, but careful GUI engineering can provide unobtrusive notifications and even auto-responders. Same for other real-world resources, like email clients. Point being, for those of us that do get a few hours to play, keep us there.
- Hire me.
May 9, 1995.
:)
Good old TCX DataKonsult AB.
What? No sharks with frickin laser beams?
What's a Latte Liberal?
Teacher: So y = r cubed over 3. And if you determine the rate of change in this curve correctly, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. ...
Teacher: Don't you get it? Derivative dy = 3 r squared dr over 3, or r squared dr, or r dr r.
The four judges who voted AGAINST the local government's land grab were Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and O'Commor. It's the liberals who want to give away private property - the conservatives want to give away PUBLIC property.
:)
Or you could look at it this way: The conservatives want the rich to own all the businesses and property. The liberals want the government to own all the businesses and property. What neither side realize is that we're so close to the rich, government, and businesses all being the same, why bother fighting?
I think we will see a draft return sometime in the next few years if the military continues to fail to meet recruiting goals.
Unfortunately, right or wrong, we're now in an indefinite war. The terrorist enemies are invisible, without borders, without command structure, etc. Unlike the major conflicts in the past, we will never know if and when we have won (although we certainly will know if we've lost).
I'm a patriotic American who loves his country and the principals it was founded on, and I'm so afraid for our country's future. Nobody has the resources to fight an indefinite war.
Is what he said libelous?
*shakes his fist at his NDA*