A key thing with this service is that it's FREE for mp3s you buy from Amazon. From their help pages -
"All new Amazon MP3 purchases saved to Cloud Drive do not count against your storage quota."
So, if I buy mp3 files from Amazon, I have a free backup AND and I can play them across any Internet connection or from an Android phone. This puts Amazon's online music store on a more competitive footing against Apple. To date, Apple's advantage has been its integration of Store + Music Management + Portable Playback. For the growing number of Android owners, Amazon's store offers a comparable level of integration. I may even draw some iPod/iTunes users to Amazon.
Actually, decent sewer systems are a lot more recent that that. Romans only had sewer systems in large cities. European royalty still died of cholera in the 19th century and the US had a cholera epidemic as late as 1910. So effective modern water treatment and sewerage has only been around since the early 20th century.
First hand, I own a 19th house in a medium sized city on the US east coast. Built on the edge of town in 1855, it had an outhouse until the early 1920s.
There are many fields where major lapses in professional ethics will kick you out of the profession for life.
A fiend of mine who's a cop once busted a guy driving a dump truck while under the influence. Not only did he have the DUI on his regular driving record, the conviction cost him his commercial driver's license PERMANENTLY. He can never drive any truck for a living ever again. It may sound harsh, but the driver was swerving while driving a vehicle that could level a house.
Likewise, there are criminal and even just negligent behavior that can cause lawyers, accountants and doctors to lose their license - flushing away years of experience and education.
Everyone's focused on the elderly as the target market for this. However, there are many people who have limited use of their fingers, may even be missing a finger or two, or have other mobility issues.
For example, what if someone owns a business in a rough neighborhood and severe arthiritis? Should they be forced to close and put people out of work? Would they need to a bodyguard if they're working late? Or could they use this weapon to provide them with some degree of personal self-defense?
I'm not a gun owner myself, but I understand there are reasons for someone to own a firearm.
It's not just the remote hosting that's appealing - it's the scalability.
If I write an app and put it on a dedicated host, I'm okay until I exceed the capacity of that host. Then I have to find another box or boxes and I may even have to change my software since I had assumed it would only be on one server. Finding additional capacity, refactoring and load balancing not only add cost, but effort (and therefore time).
On a service like EC2 (or even Google Apps), I'm renting space on the massive infrastructure of Amazon or Google. Their frameworks restrict you from developing anything that can only run on a single server. And if I need more capacity, I just right a bigger check that month.
That scalability goes for bandwidth as well. If you poke around the internet, you'll find lots of folks using Amazon's storage service for that reason.
Microsoft is running into trouble in three places.
1. A lot of the high dollar computer buyers are going to Apple. People willing so spend money on their PC see the Apple and Mac OS X as better value.
2. Budget minded shoppers are going to less expensive desktops and laptop where the cost of the Windows license is becoming a greater share of the price of the product. This is moving more customers to inexpensive Linux desktops and ultra-compact notebooks.
3. PCs (both desktops and even some laptops) are becoming very low profit items for retailers. Because of these low margins, retailers may be more motivated to sell upgrades and accessories in their mix rather than new systems.
This seems to be an effort by MS to win back customers and also encourage retailers to sell more new systems. I think retailers and customers would prefer an operating system that better meets consumers' needs and makes up less of the total price of the system.
Strictly speaking, addiction requires some form of chemical agent, which video games lack.
Based on what scientists have learned about neurochemistry, addictive substances like nicotine, alcohol and opiates all dramatically alter the dopamine pathways in the brain. In short, they rewire the main motivational system of the brain. These changes can actually be measured and observed in the brains of addicts.
HBO had an excellent series on addiction a while back. The site for the series is full of useful information on addiction.
I have yet to see any study showing the same dramatic effects from video game playing. So, while it may be video games may be addictive in a figurative sense, there's no evidence that I've seen indicating that they alter the brain the same way addictive substances do.
A more accurate term would be a video game compulsion - not an addiction.
Even data on their competitors in violation of confidentiality agreements and NDAs? How much are they willing to pay? Of course, that may be out of contract.
Pretty clearly, running ad-hoc decision support queries against a transactional database is going to add an undetermined amount of load on that system. So your customer has a few options -
1. Upgrade your systems to support more load. Obviously, they want to still do their data processing in addition to any queries. If they're willing to cover the costs of the upgrade to insure the current level of service, then there shouldn't be a problem.
2. If the data doesn't have to be real time (within a few seconds), you should be able to replicate the data on a separate box for ad-hoc queries while active processing is done on the main database. Again, they need to foot the bill for this replicated server, but it may not need to be as beefy as the production box (depends a great deal on your scale/size).
3. Find a 3rd party to host the data for the customer and have the customer pay the 3rd party directly. Obviously, there may be some development and support cost of maintaining the data feed, but that way the customer understands the actual cost of that capability.
Now, I don't know the competitive and political environment that you're in. Are there competitors that may have a similar product to yours that allow live queries? Sometimes requests like this are simply to provde justification for a switch.
Actually, he stole many of the e-mail addresses he used. That got him four felony charges, each with 1-5 years in jail.
The 9 year sentence was what he got from the jury. The prosecutor asked for 15. Technically, he got off easy. IANAL, but I think if he had decent representation, he would have avoided a jury trial and either plead guilty one count or would have gotten a reduced sentence on each charge.
I'm generally not a supporter of long prison sentences; however, this one doesn't bother me really.
Exactly. Freedom of speech allows me to print a pamphlet on some cause of my choosing. I can hand my pamphlet out to people or go door to door. However, the first amendment does not allow me to break other laws in distributing them. I cannot break into your house to give you pamphlets. Nor can I just leave a pile on a ground to become litter.
For 23 years they have not just controlled, the word is 'dominated' the desktop environment.
Actually, they've really only been dominant for about 10-15 years.
I started out doing desktop software training in '92 and back then the dominant application setup was DOS with Lotus 123 and WordPerfect. If you had a LAN, most likely it was Novell Netware. Around '93/94, the Microsoft Office suite began to eat away at Lotus and WordPerfect's dominance. Only with Windows 95 did you get companies embracing a wholely Microsoft desktop computing environment - Windows with MS Office connected to a Win NT server. Based on the types of classes that I taught (which were typically to customer's buying new desktop software), it was only around 96-97 that Microsoft won over the last Lotus and WP holdouts.
Some of this was due to Microsoft's control of the OS and GUI environment. However, some of it was due to just bad decisions by their competition (such as WordPerfect releasing a WP 6.0 for DOS long before creating one for Windows 3.1).
I agree that we'll start to see a more heterogeneous environment in the future. Will Microsoft be going away anytime soon? I don't think so. Will they play the same role that they do today? Probably not.
The study questioned 292 male and female online gamers aged between 12 and 83 about anger and stress. They then played the game for two hours and were retested....
"This will help us develop an emotion and gaming questionnaire to distinguish the type of gamer who is likely to transfer their online aggression into everyday life."
I'm pretty skeptical of whether a questionnaire can accurately measure stress and relaxation better than physical measures (heart rate, blood pressure, etc). It'd also be good to know if playing in the game was actually relaxing. In the end, it seems like the study was more about developing a measurement tool than the actual results.
The conference also heard that people who play computer games obsessively display similar characteristics to those suffering from Asperger syndrome....
This is typically characterised by neuroticism, and lack of extraversion and agreeableness.
Which makes me wonder what the first study tested in the game. Did they have players simply go out and grind daily quests (which are a simple, repetitive tasks done individually) or was it something truly multi-player such as running an instance or engaging in PvP? I'd assume that stress and relaxation responses are different when playing solo versus playing cooperatively versus playing competitively.
A few instance groups that I've been in come to mind when I think about the second study.
Having taught school for a little bit, I'll tell you that sometimes the parents that don't come to parent-teacher conference night arent' that responsible. However, sometimes they're the parents who are working 60+ hours at two jobs to try to make ends meet.
I'm not a parent. However, between my single friends and my friends with kids, I've only heard single ones make similar arguments to yours. Even observed from a distance, parenting is a tough job - anything that simplifies one aspect of parenting merely gives parents more time for the 1001 other tasks involved in raising a child.
Re:When I have to negate something
on
Why Myths Persist
·
· Score: 1
I agree. I also have heard that Saddam was in fact a retard.
Of the compromised account, ten belong to the Kazakh embassy in Russia. Around 40 belong to Uzbeki embassies and consulates around the world.
So half of the 100 accounts belong to underdeveloped former Soviet republics. It seems unsurprising that many of their staff would be unfamiliar with computer systems and computer security.
You can get massive savings in processing by using various caching techniques. Caching lets you save the results of one process for use later.
1. Client side cache. Most developers shudder when they think of a web page being cached on the browser. However, some pages (like help pages, new articles) do not change with real time and can be stored on the client's browser for a few minutes. Learn how to use the HTTP Caching directives to reduce the number of unique pages requested by each user.
2. HTML Output caching. While some parts of a page may change, some elements (such as navigation elements, footers, etc) may not need to be recalculated with each page load. Many app servers let you save sections of the page so that once one user has generated them, you can reuse them again.
3. Database Caching. Frameworks like Hibernate allow you to cache the results of SQL calls so that if the same SQL is reissued (even between different users) the cache reads the result, not the database. Usually you can pick which calls are cached versus which ones have to be live.
...has been to add free new content (remember the War Effort Event) then a paid expansion. Given that many guilds are still making their way through the long string of instances, I don't think there will be any significant new content until late this year.
In addition to Northrend, there are still several locked areas -
*The various entrances to the Emerald dream. *Grim Batol *Uldum *Gilneas *Timbermaw Hold (the big gates in Azshara) *Something that looks like two PvP entrances in Azhara.
Of the 70 they announced closing, over 60 of them were Canadian stores which are more along the lines of a Radio Shack than a typical Circuit City super store in the US. The 7 US stores were averaging a little under $1 million a month each. In short, they are closing much smaller stores in favor of larger stores - both in square footage and projected sales.
By the end of February, the company expects to close seven domestic Superstores. The stores generated $71 million in revenue during the twelve months ended December 31, 2006. These stores either are cash flow negative or are very low-volume, low-cash flow stores with older formats that are being closed for brand image reasons. Separately, in February, the company will close one Superstore in advance of opening a replacement store in the first quarter of fiscal 2008....
International Segment
The international segment plans to close approximately 62 under-performing company-owned stores.
if she already had tenure (ie, worked in a district for 3-5 whole years) there's no way she could even be fired for this, let alone have her certification stripped. Which is why the younger teachers are often the most uptight - they're underpaid and under constant scrutiny. The older ones have tenure and if they're smart, they've got some dirt on the principal as well.
Actually, the key quote from the article is this -
Snyder received "superior" or "competent" ratings on her final student-teacher evaluation in all areas except "professionalism," in which she was labeled "unsatisfactory," according to the suit filed last week. Student teaching is generally not graded, but you do have at least pass it. I think that a rating of unsatisfactory even in one area would be enough to "fail". Also, you usually have interim evaluations, so this shouldn't have been a surprise to Snyder. If Snyder's cooperating teacher observed and documented other instances of unprofessional behavior, then the Myspace pic is merely icing on the cake. In short, Ms. Snyder failed the one class she needed to pass to get her teaching degree.
It is also possible that Snyder and her cooperating teacher were a bad match - some folks just don't get along. But like any boss/employee relationship, the responsibility ultimately lies on the employee to make it work. Based on my own experience's as a student teacher as well as my fellow student teachers', some coordinating teachers are easier to work with than others.
Even if she had passed her student teaching, the picture was a bad idea. Any principal considering her would immediately imagine the conversation he'd have with some irate (albeit wrongheaded) parent and determine that she wasn't worth the hassle.
Actually, I think it's more like social networks. Playing the game isn't just a matter of time spent, but it's a matter of time spent with friends - both in RL in in-game. Leaving the game doesn't just mean leaving behind the characters you've made but also the social connections as well.
I was the first of my immediate friends to play WoW. Around the time of the first Christmas, I sent a screenshot of my character standing in Ironforge next to the Christmas tree. A couple of friends picked up copies, then another, then a friend's girlfriend. Within a couple of months, five of us were playing together a couple of times a week. That group formed into a guild with another group of folks who were RL friends and other people that we met in the game. So now, there are a dozen of us who play and socialize in game. Then you have various non-guilded friends we've met in game. After a couple of years, we all have in-game friends and aquaintances tied to our characters. Going to a new game would almost be like moving to a new city - we'd be leaving our old social network behind and have to meet new people.
Why do people use Myspace even though it's crappy? Because everyone they know is on it.
OS/2 and NT were the technological predecessors to '95. However, Windows 95 made the several key features of 32 OSes availabe to the masses.
1. A built-in 32-bit IP stack. Before 95 when you had to actually buy a winsock stack (or you could use the amazingly obtuse one in Windows for Workgroups). With 95, every desktop PC had TCP/IP and with it, the ability to connect to the Internet.
2. Improved stability. Okay, improved stability relative to Windows 3.1, but that was still a big milestone. I remember teaching a class of desktop support folks about Windows 95 and one of the stunts I'd do would be to pull out the network cable and try to browse the network in Win95. Of course, you wouldn't get any resources, but the whole system wouldn't freeze up either like it did in DOS/Win 3.1.
3. Driver support beyond the DOS upper memory limits. I can remember beating on config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get a PC to recognize a network card, a sound card, a mouse and a CD drive under DOS. Driver support was far from flawless under Windows 95, but the initial version of Plug-N-Play was a vast improvement.
Built-in network connectivity, system stability and support for multiple peripherals are a given for most OSes today, but back in the mid-90s it wasn't the case.
Ah, so the vulnerability would existing to manipulate data on the server using the customer's credentials, not just to show/manipulate data on the client. I was thinking solely on the client side.
Thanks - I'd give ya a +1 helpful. Maybe someone else will oblige me.
Slashdot Mirror
A key thing with this service is that it's FREE for mp3s you buy from Amazon. From their help pages -
"All new Amazon MP3 purchases saved to Cloud Drive do not count against your storage quota."
So, if I buy mp3 files from Amazon, I have a free backup AND and I can play them across any Internet connection or from an Android phone. This puts Amazon's online music store on a more competitive footing against Apple. To date, Apple's advantage has been its integration of Store + Music Management + Portable Playback. For the growing number of Android owners, Amazon's store offers a comparable level of integration. I may even draw some iPod/iTunes users to Amazon.
Actually, decent sewer systems are a lot more recent that that. Romans only had sewer systems in large cities. European royalty still died of cholera in the 19th century and the US had a cholera epidemic as late as 1910. So effective modern water treatment and sewerage has only been around since the early 20th century.
First hand, I own a 19th house in a medium sized city on the US east coast. Built on the edge of town in 1855, it had an outhouse until the early 1920s.
There are many fields where major lapses in professional ethics will kick you out of the profession for life.
A fiend of mine who's a cop once busted a guy driving a dump truck while under the influence. Not only did he have the DUI on his regular driving record, the conviction cost him his commercial driver's license PERMANENTLY. He can never drive any truck for a living ever again. It may sound harsh, but the driver was swerving while driving a vehicle that could level a house.
Likewise, there are criminal and even just negligent behavior that can cause lawyers, accountants and doctors to lose their license - flushing away years of experience and education.
Everyone's focused on the elderly as the target market for this. However, there are many people who have limited use of their fingers, may even be missing a finger or two, or have other mobility issues.
For example, what if someone owns a business in a rough neighborhood and severe arthiritis? Should they be forced to close and put people out of work? Would they need to a bodyguard if they're working late? Or could they use this weapon to provide them with some degree of personal self-defense?
I'm not a gun owner myself, but I understand there are reasons for someone to own a firearm.
It's not just the remote hosting that's appealing - it's the scalability.
If I write an app and put it on a dedicated host, I'm okay until I exceed the capacity of that host. Then I have to find another box or boxes and I may even have to change my software since I had assumed it would only be on one server. Finding additional capacity, refactoring and load balancing not only add cost, but effort (and therefore time).
On a service like EC2 (or even Google Apps), I'm renting space on the massive infrastructure of Amazon or Google. Their frameworks restrict you from developing anything that can only run on a single server. And if I need more capacity, I just right a bigger check that month.
That scalability goes for bandwidth as well. If you poke around the internet, you'll find lots of folks using Amazon's storage service for that reason.
Oooh, is the next spell Burning Hands?
Microsoft is running into trouble in three places.
1. A lot of the high dollar computer buyers are going to Apple. People willing so spend money on their PC see the Apple and Mac OS X as better value.
2. Budget minded shoppers are going to less expensive desktops and laptop where the cost of the Windows license is becoming a greater share of the price of the product. This is moving more customers to inexpensive Linux desktops and ultra-compact notebooks.
3. PCs (both desktops and even some laptops) are becoming very low profit items for retailers. Because of these low margins, retailers may be more motivated to sell upgrades and accessories in their mix rather than new systems.
This seems to be an effort by MS to win back customers and also encourage retailers to sell more new systems. I think retailers and customers would prefer an operating system that better meets consumers' needs and makes up less of the total price of the system.
Strictly speaking, addiction requires some form of chemical agent, which video games lack.
Based on what scientists have learned about neurochemistry, addictive substances like nicotine, alcohol and opiates all dramatically alter the dopamine pathways in the brain. In short, they rewire the main motivational system of the brain. These changes can actually be measured and observed in the brains of addicts.
HBO had an excellent series on addiction a while back. The site for the series is full of useful information on addiction.
http://www.hbo.com/addiction/understanding_addiction/12_pleasure_pathway.html
I have yet to see any study showing the same dramatic effects from video game playing. So, while it may be video games may be addictive in a figurative sense, there's no evidence that I've seen indicating that they alter the brain the same way addictive substances do.
A more accurate term would be a video game compulsion - not an addiction.
...that they're willing to pay for.
Pretty clearly, running ad-hoc decision support queries against a transactional database is going to add an undetermined amount of load on that system. So your customer has a few options -
1. Upgrade your systems to support more load. Obviously, they want to still do their data processing in addition to any queries. If they're willing to cover the costs of the upgrade to insure the current level of service, then there shouldn't be a problem.
2. If the data doesn't have to be real time (within a few seconds), you should be able to replicate the data on a separate box for ad-hoc queries while active processing is done on the main database. Again, they need to foot the bill for this replicated server, but it may not need to be as beefy as the production box (depends a great deal on your scale/size).
3. Find a 3rd party to host the data for the customer and have the customer pay the 3rd party directly. Obviously, there may be some development and support cost of maintaining the data feed, but that way the customer understands the actual cost of that capability.
Now, I don't know the competitive and political environment that you're in. Are there competitors that may have a similar product to yours that allow live queries? Sometimes requests like this are simply to provde justification for a switch.
Actually, he stole many of the e-mail addresses he used. That got him four felony charges, each with 1-5 years in jail. The 9 year sentence was what he got from the jury. The prosecutor asked for 15. Technically, he got off easy. IANAL, but I think if he had decent representation, he would have avoided a jury trial and either plead guilty one count or would have gotten a reduced sentence on each charge. I'm generally not a supporter of long prison sentences; however, this one doesn't bother me really.
Exactly. Freedom of speech allows me to print a pamphlet on some cause of my choosing. I can hand my pamphlet out to people or go door to door. However, the first amendment does not allow me to break other laws in distributing them. I cannot break into your house to give you pamphlets. Nor can I just leave a pile on a ground to become litter.
Actually, they've really only been dominant for about 10-15 years.
I started out doing desktop software training in '92 and back then the dominant application setup was DOS with Lotus 123 and WordPerfect. If you had a LAN, most likely it was Novell Netware. Around '93/94, the Microsoft Office suite began to eat away at Lotus and WordPerfect's dominance. Only with Windows 95 did you get companies embracing a wholely Microsoft desktop computing environment - Windows with MS Office connected to a Win NT server. Based on the types of classes that I taught (which were typically to customer's buying new desktop software), it was only around 96-97 that Microsoft won over the last Lotus and WP holdouts.
Some of this was due to Microsoft's control of the OS and GUI environment. However, some of it was due to just bad decisions by their competition (such as WordPerfect releasing a WP 6.0 for DOS long before creating one for Windows 3.1).
I agree that we'll start to see a more heterogeneous environment in the future. Will Microsoft be going away anytime soon? I don't think so. Will they play the same role that they do today? Probably not.
Having taught school for a little bit, I'll tell you that sometimes the parents that don't come to parent-teacher conference night arent' that responsible. However, sometimes they're the parents who are working 60+ hours at two jobs to try to make ends meet.
I'm not a parent. However, between my single friends and my friends with kids, I've only heard single ones make similar arguments to yours. Even observed from a distance, parenting is a tough job - anything that simplifies one aspect of parenting merely gives parents more time for the 1001 other tasks involved in raising a child.
I agree. I also have heard that Saddam was in fact a retard.
So half of the 100 accounts belong to underdeveloped former Soviet republics. It seems unsurprising that many of their staff would be unfamiliar with computer systems and computer security.
You can get massive savings in processing by using various caching techniques. Caching lets you save the results of one process for use later.
1. Client side cache. Most developers shudder when they think of a web page being cached on the browser. However, some pages (like help pages, new articles) do not change with real time and can be stored on the client's browser for a few minutes. Learn how to use the HTTP Caching directives to reduce the number of unique pages requested by each user.
2. HTML Output caching. While some parts of a page may change, some elements (such as navigation elements, footers, etc) may not need to be recalculated with each page load. Many app servers let you save sections of the page so that once one user has generated them, you can reuse them again.
3. Database Caching. Frameworks like Hibernate allow you to cache the results of SQL calls so that if the same SQL is reissued (even between different users) the cache reads the result, not the database. Usually you can pick which calls are cached versus which ones have to be live.
...has been to add free new content (remember the War Effort Event) then a paid expansion. Given that many guilds are still making their way through the long string of instances, I don't think there will be any significant new content until late this year.
In addition to Northrend, there are still several locked areas -
*The various entrances to the Emerald dream.
*Grim Batol
*Uldum
*Gilneas
*Timbermaw Hold (the big gates in Azshara)
*Something that looks like two PvP entrances in Azhara.
I just hope they bring back Captain Placeholder.
http://newsroom.circuitcity.com/releasedetail.cfm
It is also possible that Snyder and her cooperating teacher were a bad match - some folks just don't get along. But like any boss/employee relationship, the responsibility ultimately lies on the employee to make it work. Based on my own experience's as a student teacher as well as my fellow student teachers', some coordinating teachers are easier to work with than others.
Even if she had passed her student teaching, the picture was a bad idea. Any principal considering her would immediately imagine the conversation he'd have with some irate (albeit wrongheaded) parent and determine that she wasn't worth the hassle.
Actually, I think it's more like social networks. Playing the game isn't just a matter of time spent, but it's a matter of time spent with friends - both in RL in in-game. Leaving the game doesn't just mean leaving behind the characters you've made but also the social connections as well.
I was the first of my immediate friends to play WoW. Around the time of the first Christmas, I sent a screenshot of my character standing in Ironforge next to the Christmas tree. A couple of friends picked up copies, then another, then a friend's girlfriend. Within a couple of months, five of us were playing together a couple of times a week. That group formed into a guild with another group of folks who were RL friends and other people that we met in the game. So now, there are a dozen of us who play and socialize in game. Then you have various non-guilded friends we've met in game. After a couple of years, we all have in-game friends and aquaintances tied to our characters. Going to a new game would almost be like moving to a new city - we'd be leaving our old social network behind and have to meet new people.
Why do people use Myspace even though it's crappy? Because everyone they know is on it.
OS/2 and NT were the technological predecessors to '95. However, Windows 95 made the several key features of 32 OSes availabe to the masses.
1. A built-in 32-bit IP stack. Before 95 when you had to actually buy a winsock stack (or you could use the amazingly obtuse one in Windows for Workgroups). With 95, every desktop PC had TCP/IP and with it, the ability to connect to the Internet.
2. Improved stability. Okay, improved stability relative to Windows 3.1, but that was still a big milestone. I remember teaching a class of desktop support folks about Windows 95 and one of the stunts I'd do would be to pull out the network cable and try to browse the network in Win95. Of course, you wouldn't get any resources, but the whole system wouldn't freeze up either like it did in DOS/Win 3.1.
3. Driver support beyond the DOS upper memory limits. I can remember beating on config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get a PC to recognize a network card, a sound card, a mouse and a CD drive under DOS. Driver support was far from flawless under Windows 95, but the initial version of Plug-N-Play was a vast improvement.
Built-in network connectivity, system stability and support for multiple peripherals are a given for most OSes today, but back in the mid-90s it wasn't the case.
Ah, so the vulnerability would existing to manipulate data on the server using the customer's credentials, not just to show/manipulate data on the client. I was thinking solely on the client side.
Thanks - I'd give ya a +1 helpful. Maybe someone else will oblige me.