At scale, sure. I am not Google. The biggest clusters I manage consist of maybe a dozen machines. If I have the choice between spending a month trying to optimize throughput, or adding an extra node, I'll do the latter because:
- 150+ hours of dev costs about the same as a decked out DB/web server - I'd rather spend that month on billable work, or getting ahead of the game - YAY more toys!
Despite that, I can see how there's a tipping point, dependent on the relation between traffic and revenue. I'm not exactly running an ad-supported business here, if my switch LEDs are burning out, it's because I'm making money.
What I'm saying is that refusing to help those in need and abroad, in favour of concentrating wealth and power locally, is akin to racism. It's not an attack, it's a statement. I really don't see how that has anything to do with Bu$hitler. They planted racist ideologies to further their grossly tyrannical agendas. That's the opposite of what I'm saying.
You think too much like a geek. In reality, the cheapest and most easily implemented trackers use GPS, because such a device is self-contained, will work in any vehicle and requires nothing more than a power source. Interfacing with the onboard computer, while somewhat easy, requires far more installation effort than a GPS receiver, and still does not address the issue of tracking where the vehicle actually is in the world.
Perhaps the correct solution would be a low-radius GPS jammer, that only affects your own vehicle. After all, you only need to disable the one receiver. GPS is a one-way communication.
This is precisely the problem: should insurance companies be allowed to track your every movement ?
I am extremely anti-insurance, so my answer is no. I would support jamming GPS devices used to track my whereabouts against my will. That's just an opinion though.
GPS navigation is generally a good thing. GPS tracking is a slippery thing, seen by some as an invasion of privacy. The vehicle owner should be entitled to know where their property is, but it is none of their business where I go and what I do during the day. Insurance companies would love to hike premiums based on where you park, where you eat, how many mistresses you entertain, or those brief stops in the seedy part of town.
I cannot speak for the UK, but in some parts of the world, you can get fined for speeding in a rental vehicle - by the rental company, not the police! I would gladly jam a device used to defraud me in such fashion. Traffic management is a police matter, not a private one.
On one hand, GPS tracking can help against theft, or at least facilitate recovery. On the other hand, it opens up a wealth of possibilities for abuse. The dilemma is in deciding if the pros outweigh the cons (no pun intended).
If I'm reading you correctly, you'd rather see him widen the wealth gap between the U.S. hyper-rich and the 3rd world ? The funny thing about wealth gaps is they tend to trigger acts of extreme violence to rebalance the equation. It is FAR more beneficial to humankind, to help the 3rd world deal with some of their most basic problems. Who's to say, maybe in 30 years from now, an African that was given access to education, sanitation and employment might discover a (realistic) cure for AIDS.
I'd go as far as saying that there is not much hope left for the U.S., because its control structures are far beyond repair, its human capital bottlenecked by the very pursuit of wealth. Throwing more money into a broken hyperpower only makes the rich richer. Throwing money into a 3rd world nation has the potential to bring sweeping changes.
Ultimately, it's about inching toward a unified world view. To think or act otherwise is notihng more than racism and elitism.
So it's basically key/value where the value is a serialized freeform array ? So then, if there is no structural integrity at the DB level, it has to be implemented in the application logic ? Doesn't that merely displace the performance bottleneck from the DB to the application ?
Perhaps I'm not getting the point, but I'd much rather have DB-enforced structural integrity, than have to write all those checks and balances myself for every single app. Computing time is cheap. Development time, not so much.
It seems you've missed the part where they mention infected Fortune 500 and government machines. If all the infectees were average joes like you and I, they would eagerly pull the plug. But big business and their sock-puppet the "government" are special, they must be protected from the shame of having their noses rubbed in their own steaming shit. They can never be called on their mistakes, because you don't want to piss off all those twitchy lobbyists and their dirty money.
If the U.S. wants extradition rights abroad, effectively granting them temporary dominion over foreign citizens, perhaps the very concept of country boundaries should be deemed obsolete. I want a unitary world government, not this so-called New World Order founded on lies, violence and greed.
Further down the Star Trek fantasy, if we didn't have global financial abuses, heck - finances at all - there would be no incentive for black hats to hijack computers and defraud total strangers and this whole fiasco would never have happened in the first place.
Adding more layers of bullshit to a flawed system does not fix it. Dismantling the system will.
I see no reason to protect the stupid from themselves. If someone wants to write sloppy software that opens them up to abuse, that's their right. We already have too many bad programmers in this industry. Let them make embarrassing mistakes so those of us who are actually competent can point, laugh, and negotiate raises.
I'm not a hero. Anyone else would have done the same thing, especially if they had a few lawyer friends like I do. And really, there wasn't a day where I didn't fantasize about throwing a tire iron at their faces until the screaming stopped.
A true hero would change the underlying system that creates these aberrations of society in the first place. I don't actually believe people set out to be bad cops, they are simply the product of an unhealthy environment. The pay sucks, stress is stigmatized, no good deed goes unpunished... yeah, it's no surprise they act out and slowly go batshit insane. But before that can be fixed, modern society itself is in dire need of a reboot. That's a bigger job than I can even envision.
No. That was 12 years ago. You'd think that, over time, I would have gotten over it; that my other experiences would have reframed that incident as an unfortunate mishap, but no. I've even done consulting for the police over many years, and it did nothing to redress my perception of the system. What's particularly chilling is when regional directors tell you how they know it's fucked up, but not worth going against the majority.
Just last week, they let me down yet again, this time in a different city. I was at a concert that got WAY out of control, people were getting trampled and beaten, and the security staff could barely keep up with the injured, pulling them out of the massacre. Broken limbs, blood everywhere. The lobby was turned into a first aid area, and those same security goons were trying to downplay the chaos, refusing to call ambulances until one of the victims put their lawyer on the phone. At least a dozen of us called the police to try and do something about it. The cops never showed up, never even filed an incident. Luckily, I was able to track down some of the victims and we've requested copies of our 9-1-1 recordings. I think you know where this is going...
To be harassed by one fucked up cop (or couple), yeah that's a freak event and probably (hopefully) does not happen often at all. To have an entire department ignore emergency calls outright, that's fucking vile! I don't want money, I don't even want them fired; I just want them to be thrown into that raging mosh pit and savagely trampled like the people whose pleas they ignored. We pay their goddamned salaries!
Anything that relies on "voluntary" cooperation is flawed. Either you accept that 99% of the internet will ignore it and quityerbitchin', or... you create a privacy standard that is client-enforced and leaves no room for loose interpretation.
Just because people think they can shame Google into playing nice, doesn't mean those Doubleclick rat bastards will, nor any 3rd world fraudster, which means this whole P3P thing is a joke.
Yeeeep. I used to think law enforcement was a good thing, then one day, a cop decided to become my worst enemy and now I hate them all equally. I am not a "bad guy", but they have made it clear they are not the "good guys".
When I was 18, I totaled my parents' car. I wasn't drinking, nor high, nor doing anything wrong besides driving at night on an unfamiliar and poorly maintained, where I was blinded by oncoming high-beams and veered into the ditch... where a giant stone was waiting to send my vehicle flying. Freak accident.
30 minutes later, someone stops to help and calls 9-1-1. Minutes later, the ambulance takes my passenger, who had a pretty bad gash in his arm. I wasn't hurt at all. A full hour later, the police officer shows up. She (*grumble*) asked me if I'd been drinking, I'd say about 4-5 times, hoping I'd change my story. So she had me do a roadside breathalyzer test. Zero. Took me down to the station, did the same test on a bigger machine. Zero. When she realized I was clean as a whistle, she slapped me with $5000 worth of bogus fines and suspended my licence. Two months later, the judge overturned all my fines and reinstated my licence.
Fast-forward two years, I was working a shit job at a video store. One night, I got robbed by armed thugs. Sure enough, that same asshole cop showed up to take my report. Instead of actually taking my report, she said I had to be lying, that a big guy like me could not possibly be scared of two (knife-wielding) crackheads and I must have been in on it. I caught her comments on the CCTV and took her to court, won, and had her suspended without pay for a year. Only problem was, her husband was also a cop, so for the next two years, they stalked me. They'd park at the end of my street in the morning, and wait for me to leave for work, and hubby would follow me in his squad car, sometimes tailgating very aggresively, trying to psych me into doing something stupid, or pulling me over every morning for a week. I endured two years of this harassment, until he actually bumped me and caused an accident. He tried very hard to blame it on me, that I had been driving "suspiciously" and somehow caused him to rear-end me, but that didn't hold up in court. Both of them were again suspended (goddamned unions), and a restraining order was issued.
Needless to say, after all that bullshit, I have a less than stellar view of law enforcement officials. I'll go as far as saying that, if a cop were to be injured and in need of help, I would sit and watch them suffer. It boggles my mind that we entrust such heinous, immature people with a badge and a gun. In the few times when I needed help, they just kicked me down. That to me makes them less than human and instead of giving them new ways to harass, we should be stripping them of their powers because they clearly lack the intelligence and respect to use them properly.
Back in the good ol' days, when men were men, and Java was just a retarded twinkle in Gosling's eye, we had 256-byte competitions in assembly language. Anything using an interpreter is an immediate disqualification, unless your interpreter + script somehow fit inside the 256 byte limit. Basically, any dependency that isn't part of the hardware, BIOS, or low-level OS functionality like disk I/O, must be included in the byte total. Libraries, interpreters, resource blobs, it all adds up.
By 2006, our dual-core Athlon 64's and n-way Opterons were starting to feel old, and AMD failed to follow them up with something better. They were focused on die shrinks that didn't offer a significant performance jump. AMD's death knell was the Intel Core 2 series. Even the entry-level E6400 could go toe-to-toe with the fastest Athlon, and offered greater memory bandwidth which was most welcome when paired with a high-end GPU. You could take that same mid-range 8800 GT from your Athlon X2, drop it in an Intel system and gain 15-20% more fps in most games. Since then, AMD has always been playing catch-up. They couldn't match the clocks speeds, nor the performance-per-clock, so they were relegated to the budget segment.
AMD has been very good to me for low-end, home/office PCs, but they are not even on the radar for anything beyond the "I want a cheap surf machine" demographic. As soon as my CPU budget exceeds $150, I'm better served by an Intel. Then when you look at the server market, they do not compete at all anymore. Performance per watt and per dollar both lag badly behind the Xeon. Bulldozer looks like it's their most expensive blunder yet. It is a chip without a home. The average user does not need more cores right now, they want a cheaper, smaller, quieter PC and shinier games. Processing wackos like myself have no desire for a compromised CPU architecture that does not scale, which is why we turn to dual Xeons.
Here's what it boils down to:
AMD does not offer a competitive chip for my partner AMD does not offer a competitive chip for my mother AMD does not offer a competitive chip for my business AMD does not offer a competitive chip for ME
If they can't start cranking out faster chips than Intel, then they need to slash prices until the gap is so wide that it compensates for the inferior product. Right now, you can buy a very decent i5 for $200, or a shitty Bulldozer for $200. I'll take the non-shitty one. Drop that Bulldozer to $120 and a lot of people will look past its shittiness, myself included. Intel sucks at the low-end, and while that's a boring segment to be in, it's also extremely large and easy for AMD to capitalize on, until their engineers pull their heads out of the sand.
Except that in 2012, there is no valid excuse for not having your own personal email address. You don't need a second line installed in your home. You don't have to pay an extra $40 a month for the luxury. You just trot your sycophantic ass over to gmail and sign up.
That "johnandmelinda@" address ? DITCH IT! Create new, separate accounts, forward anything you want to keep, and move on. When a problem has a 5 minute solution, I don't want to hear someone bitch for hours. Life goes on, and the sooner people get their heads out of their asses, the sooner they can get happy again with someone else.
I, er... I think I shorthand a lot of this stuff, because it seems trivial to me as a programmer. Anything that works like a hashtable is going to experience diminishing returns, because you have to scan through that every-growing table. O(n^2) and stuff.
On the other hand, anything that spares you from hitting a disk, that's a guaranteed win. What I commonly do with my DB servers, since my data sets are small but complex, is to give them enough memory to cache the entire database into RAM. The disk effectively becomes a backup copy, in case I need to reboot the box. With RAM being so cheap these days, it's usually more cost effective than deploying more cluster nodes. Memcached is great if all you want is a key-value bucket, but for speeding up existing applications that (ab)use SQL, RAM is the undisputed king of performance.
I didn't call Ron Paul a corporatist, that was Santorum. I think Ron Paul has an excellent grasp of the financial problems that are plaguing the country today, and he gets a lot of second-hand love because his platform is pretty much the opposite of the big bads, but I'm not sure he actually understands the scope of those non-financial issues. He's a very smart man, but I worry that his attention is spread too thin.
I think he is getting a lot more attention this time around, because he doesn't have all those big money friends. We've been seeing a lot of anti-corporate sentiment in recent years, not the least of which is the OWS movement, and numerous exposés on the financial industry's abuses. Call it crazy, but I think people being a little more informed, or at least concerned about the widespread corruption is what's giving Ron a leg up in 2012.
Do I think he's presidential material ? Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. I think he would face very strong resistance and would stagnate in office unless he cleans house and appoints fresh-minded people to back him up, but either way, it seems he would do far less evil than his peers.
I can think of only two digital "assets" that are shared with my partner. One is her domain name and web site, which could be trivially moved to her own registrar account and cheap/free hosting. The other is our media server. If we ever split up, I'll just set her up with a hard drive or modest NAS box and copy any movies and TV shows she wants to keep. Depending on where you live, this may or may not be in breach of copyright law.
Other than that, and for non-digital assets as well, we are two individual people who just happen to live together. She has her stuff, I have mine. We each have our own computers, 50" plasma TVs and XBMC set-top boxes. She has her guitars, I have mine. Besides, I have a hard time picturing her shredding on a Warlock:) The focus isn't even on ownership, but utility. I bought her a 50" TV for the bedroom, I paid for it, but logically it belongs to her and if we split, she gets to keep it. I have my own identical TV downstairs in the rec room. In the same vein, the karaoke software and songs I bought, are hers. They reside on my server, they're routinely used with my epic audio system, but she's the soprano singer and I'm just a hobbyist sound engineer. If she decides to elope with a tall handsome black man, I'll put all that stuff on a DVD or hard drive she can take with her.
I get that not all divorces are handled in a calm, responsible manner, but that doesn't change the fact that digital assets are easier to handle than tangible ones. They can be copied or moved with ease, and if some things are locked away behind a shared login (e.g. iTunes), you do as you would any other non-divisible asset: assess its replacement value. One person gets the asset, the other gets cash so they can buy their own. Yes, that's right, you can buy your ex-wife half of a Madonna album. $8, problem solved.
This is what I don't understand. I've got a similar setup to yours, we each have our own profile dir on the server. We don't care so much about privacy, I am root anyway, if I wanted to read her files, I could, but if we were to split, it is a simple matter to copy her files to a separate hard drive, or burn to a DVD-R, and delete them from my server and its replicates.
If the concern is about copyrighted materials like movies/music/software, it becomes a matter of ethics I guess. If you want to strictly adhere to copyright law, then only one person is supposed to keep any item. Again, you plug in a portable hard drive and move the stuff that isn't yours. Not the end of the world. If you've been sharing an iTunes account all this time, well, you're kinda fucked and that's entirely your own fault.
Make copies. Just because it took you two years to realize you hate your spouse, doesn't mean you can't keep mementos of your shared experiences. How hard is it to burn a few DVD-Rs ?
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At scale, sure. I am not Google. The biggest clusters I manage consist of maybe a dozen machines. If I have the choice between spending a month trying to optimize throughput, or adding an extra node, I'll do the latter because:
- 150+ hours of dev costs about the same as a decked out DB/web server
- I'd rather spend that month on billable work, or getting ahead of the game
- YAY more toys!
Despite that, I can see how there's a tipping point, dependent on the relation between traffic and revenue. I'm not exactly running an ad-supported business here, if my switch LEDs are burning out, it's because I'm making money.
Sooo.... can I invoke Godwin's law here ?
What I'm saying is that refusing to help those in need and abroad, in favour of concentrating wealth and power locally, is akin to racism. It's not an attack, it's a statement. I really don't see how that has anything to do with Bu$hitler. They planted racist ideologies to further their grossly tyrannical agendas. That's the opposite of what I'm saying.
You think too much like a geek. In reality, the cheapest and most easily implemented trackers use GPS, because such a device is self-contained, will work in any vehicle and requires nothing more than a power source. Interfacing with the onboard computer, while somewhat easy, requires far more installation effort than a GPS receiver, and still does not address the issue of tracking where the vehicle actually is in the world.
Perhaps the correct solution would be a low-radius GPS jammer, that only affects your own vehicle. After all, you only need to disable the one receiver. GPS is a one-way communication.
This is precisely the problem: should insurance companies be allowed to track your every movement ?
I am extremely anti-insurance, so my answer is no. I would support jamming GPS devices used to track my whereabouts against my will. That's just an opinion though.
You must be new to America.
Depends on your definition of "criminal".
GPS navigation is generally a good thing. GPS tracking is a slippery thing, seen by some as an invasion of privacy. The vehicle owner should be entitled to know where their property is, but it is none of their business where I go and what I do during the day. Insurance companies would love to hike premiums based on where you park, where you eat, how many mistresses you entertain, or those brief stops in the seedy part of town.
I cannot speak for the UK, but in some parts of the world, you can get fined for speeding in a rental vehicle - by the rental company, not the police! I would gladly jam a device used to defraud me in such fashion. Traffic management is a police matter, not a private one.
On one hand, GPS tracking can help against theft, or at least facilitate recovery. On the other hand, it opens up a wealth of possibilities for abuse. The dilemma is in deciding if the pros outweigh the cons (no pun intended).
If I'm reading you correctly, you'd rather see him widen the wealth gap between the U.S. hyper-rich and the 3rd world ? The funny thing about wealth gaps is they tend to trigger acts of extreme violence to rebalance the equation. It is FAR more beneficial to humankind, to help the 3rd world deal with some of their most basic problems. Who's to say, maybe in 30 years from now, an African that was given access to education, sanitation and employment might discover a (realistic) cure for AIDS.
I'd go as far as saying that there is not much hope left for the U.S., because its control structures are far beyond repair, its human capital bottlenecked by the very pursuit of wealth. Throwing more money into a broken hyperpower only makes the rich richer. Throwing money into a 3rd world nation has the potential to bring sweeping changes.
Ultimately, it's about inching toward a unified world view. To think or act otherwise is notihng more than racism and elitism.
So it's basically key/value where the value is a serialized freeform array ? So then, if there is no structural integrity at the DB level, it has to be implemented in the application logic ? Doesn't that merely displace the performance bottleneck from the DB to the application ?
Perhaps I'm not getting the point, but I'd much rather have DB-enforced structural integrity, than have to write all those checks and balances myself for every single app. Computing time is cheap. Development time, not so much.
It seems you've missed the part where they mention infected Fortune 500 and government machines. If all the infectees were average joes like you and I, they would eagerly pull the plug. But big business and their sock-puppet the "government" are special, they must be protected from the shame of having their noses rubbed in their own steaming shit. They can never be called on their mistakes, because you don't want to piss off all those twitchy lobbyists and their dirty money.
*dons crazy hat*
If the U.S. wants extradition rights abroad, effectively granting them temporary dominion over foreign citizens, perhaps the very concept of country boundaries should be deemed obsolete. I want a unitary world government, not this so-called New World Order founded on lies, violence and greed.
Further down the Star Trek fantasy, if we didn't have global financial abuses, heck - finances at all - there would be no incentive for black hats to hijack computers and defraud total strangers and this whole fiasco would never have happened in the first place.
Adding more layers of bullshit to a flawed system does not fix it. Dismantling the system will.
I see no reason to protect the stupid from themselves. If someone wants to write sloppy software that opens them up to abuse, that's their right. We already have too many bad programmers in this industry. Let them make embarrassing mistakes so those of us who are actually competent can point, laugh, and negotiate raises.
I'm not a hero. Anyone else would have done the same thing, especially if they had a few lawyer friends like I do. And really, there wasn't a day where I didn't fantasize about throwing a tire iron at their faces until the screaming stopped.
A true hero would change the underlying system that creates these aberrations of society in the first place. I don't actually believe people set out to be bad cops, they are simply the product of an unhealthy environment. The pay sucks, stress is stigmatized, no good deed goes unpunished... yeah, it's no surprise they act out and slowly go batshit insane. But before that can be fixed, modern society itself is in dire need of a reboot. That's a bigger job than I can even envision.
No. That was 12 years ago. You'd think that, over time, I would have gotten over it; that my other experiences would have reframed that incident as an unfortunate mishap, but no. I've even done consulting for the police over many years, and it did nothing to redress my perception of the system. What's particularly chilling is when regional directors tell you how they know it's fucked up, but not worth going against the majority.
Just last week, they let me down yet again, this time in a different city. I was at a concert that got WAY out of control, people were getting trampled and beaten, and the security staff could barely keep up with the injured, pulling them out of the massacre. Broken limbs, blood everywhere. The lobby was turned into a first aid area, and those same security goons were trying to downplay the chaos, refusing to call ambulances until one of the victims put their lawyer on the phone. At least a dozen of us called the police to try and do something about it. The cops never showed up, never even filed an incident. Luckily, I was able to track down some of the victims and we've requested copies of our 9-1-1 recordings. I think you know where this is going...
To be harassed by one fucked up cop (or couple), yeah that's a freak event and probably (hopefully) does not happen often at all. To have an entire department ignore emergency calls outright, that's fucking vile! I don't want money, I don't even want them fired; I just want them to be thrown into that raging mosh pit and savagely trampled like the people whose pleas they ignored. We pay their goddamned salaries!
Anything that relies on "voluntary" cooperation is flawed. Either you accept that 99% of the internet will ignore it and quityerbitchin', or... you create a privacy standard that is client-enforced and leaves no room for loose interpretation.
Just because people think they can shame Google into playing nice, doesn't mean those Doubleclick rat bastards will, nor any 3rd world fraudster, which means this whole P3P thing is a joke.
Yeeeep. I used to think law enforcement was a good thing, then one day, a cop decided to become my worst enemy and now I hate them all equally. I am not a "bad guy", but they have made it clear they are not the "good guys".
When I was 18, I totaled my parents' car. I wasn't drinking, nor high, nor doing anything wrong besides driving at night on an unfamiliar and poorly maintained, where I was blinded by oncoming high-beams and veered into the ditch... where a giant stone was waiting to send my vehicle flying. Freak accident.
30 minutes later, someone stops to help and calls 9-1-1. Minutes later, the ambulance takes my passenger, who had a pretty bad gash in his arm. I wasn't hurt at all. A full hour later, the police officer shows up. She (*grumble*) asked me if I'd been drinking, I'd say about 4-5 times, hoping I'd change my story. So she had me do a roadside breathalyzer test. Zero. Took me down to the station, did the same test on a bigger machine. Zero. When she realized I was clean as a whistle, she slapped me with $5000 worth of bogus fines and suspended my licence. Two months later, the judge overturned all my fines and reinstated my licence.
Fast-forward two years, I was working a shit job at a video store. One night, I got robbed by armed thugs. Sure enough, that same asshole cop showed up to take my report. Instead of actually taking my report, she said I had to be lying, that a big guy like me could not possibly be scared of two (knife-wielding) crackheads and I must have been in on it. I caught her comments on the CCTV and took her to court, won, and had her suspended without pay for a year. Only problem was, her husband was also a cop, so for the next two years, they stalked me. They'd park at the end of my street in the morning, and wait for me to leave for work, and hubby would follow me in his squad car, sometimes tailgating very aggresively, trying to psych me into doing something stupid, or pulling me over every morning for a week. I endured two years of this harassment, until he actually bumped me and caused an accident. He tried very hard to blame it on me, that I had been driving "suspiciously" and somehow caused him to rear-end me, but that didn't hold up in court. Both of them were again suspended (goddamned unions), and a restraining order was issued.
Needless to say, after all that bullshit, I have a less than stellar view of law enforcement officials. I'll go as far as saying that, if a cop were to be injured and in need of help, I would sit and watch them suffer. It boggles my mind that we entrust such heinous, immature people with a badge and a gun. In the few times when I needed help, they just kicked me down. That to me makes them less than human and instead of giving them new ways to harass, we should be stripping them of their powers because they clearly lack the intelligence and respect to use them properly.
Back in the good ol' days, when men were men, and Java was just a retarded twinkle in Gosling's eye, we had 256-byte competitions in assembly language. Anything using an interpreter is an immediate disqualification, unless your interpreter + script somehow fit inside the 256 byte limit. Basically, any dependency that isn't part of the hardware, BIOS, or low-level OS functionality like disk I/O, must be included in the byte total. Libraries, interpreters, resource blobs, it all adds up.
And now, a real Tetris in 256 bytes: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jchap/tvprotet.htm
Get that goddamned Javascript hack out of my face.
Why are students paying for the "privilege" of being monitored ? Do they not have law students over there ? I'd sue the goddamned administration!
By 2006, our dual-core Athlon 64's and n-way Opterons were starting to feel old, and AMD failed to follow them up with something better. They were focused on die shrinks that didn't offer a significant performance jump. AMD's death knell was the Intel Core 2 series. Even the entry-level E6400 could go toe-to-toe with the fastest Athlon, and offered greater memory bandwidth which was most welcome when paired with a high-end GPU. You could take that same mid-range 8800 GT from your Athlon X2, drop it in an Intel system and gain 15-20% more fps in most games. Since then, AMD has always been playing catch-up. They couldn't match the clocks speeds, nor the performance-per-clock, so they were relegated to the budget segment.
AMD has been very good to me for low-end, home/office PCs, but they are not even on the radar for anything beyond the "I want a cheap surf machine" demographic. As soon as my CPU budget exceeds $150, I'm better served by an Intel. Then when you look at the server market, they do not compete at all anymore. Performance per watt and per dollar both lag badly behind the Xeon. Bulldozer looks like it's their most expensive blunder yet. It is a chip without a home. The average user does not need more cores right now, they want a cheaper, smaller, quieter PC and shinier games. Processing wackos like myself have no desire for a compromised CPU architecture that does not scale, which is why we turn to dual Xeons.
Here's what it boils down to:
AMD does not offer a competitive chip for my partner
AMD does not offer a competitive chip for my mother
AMD does not offer a competitive chip for my business
AMD does not offer a competitive chip for ME
If they can't start cranking out faster chips than Intel, then they need to slash prices until the gap is so wide that it compensates for the inferior product. Right now, you can buy a very decent i5 for $200, or a shitty Bulldozer for $200. I'll take the non-shitty one. Drop that Bulldozer to $120 and a lot of people will look past its shittiness, myself included. Intel sucks at the low-end, and while that's a boring segment to be in, it's also extremely large and easy for AMD to capitalize on, until their engineers pull their heads out of the sand.
Except that in 2012, there is no valid excuse for not having your own personal email address. You don't need a second line installed in your home. You don't have to pay an extra $40 a month for the luxury. You just trot your sycophantic ass over to gmail and sign up.
That "johnandmelinda@" address ? DITCH IT! Create new, separate accounts, forward anything you want to keep, and move on. When a problem has a 5 minute solution, I don't want to hear someone bitch for hours. Life goes on, and the sooner people get their heads out of their asses, the sooner they can get happy again with someone else.
I, er... I think I shorthand a lot of this stuff, because it seems trivial to me as a programmer. Anything that works like a hashtable is going to experience diminishing returns, because you have to scan through that every-growing table. O(n^2) and stuff.
On the other hand, anything that spares you from hitting a disk, that's a guaranteed win. What I commonly do with my DB servers, since my data sets are small but complex, is to give them enough memory to cache the entire database into RAM. The disk effectively becomes a backup copy, in case I need to reboot the box. With RAM being so cheap these days, it's usually more cost effective than deploying more cluster nodes. Memcached is great if all you want is a key-value bucket, but for speeding up existing applications that (ab)use SQL, RAM is the undisputed king of performance.
I didn't call Ron Paul a corporatist, that was Santorum. I think Ron Paul has an excellent grasp of the financial problems that are plaguing the country today, and he gets a lot of second-hand love because his platform is pretty much the opposite of the big bads, but I'm not sure he actually understands the scope of those non-financial issues. He's a very smart man, but I worry that his attention is spread too thin.
I think he is getting a lot more attention this time around, because he doesn't have all those big money friends. We've been seeing a lot of anti-corporate sentiment in recent years, not the least of which is the OWS movement, and numerous exposés on the financial industry's abuses. Call it crazy, but I think people being a little more informed, or at least concerned about the widespread corruption is what's giving Ron a leg up in 2012.
Do I think he's presidential material ? Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. I think he would face very strong resistance and would stagnate in office unless he cleans house and appoints fresh-minded people to back him up, but either way, it seems he would do far less evil than his peers.
This.
I can think of only two digital "assets" that are shared with my partner. One is her domain name and web site, which could be trivially moved to her own registrar account and cheap/free hosting. The other is our media server. If we ever split up, I'll just set her up with a hard drive or modest NAS box and copy any movies and TV shows she wants to keep. Depending on where you live, this may or may not be in breach of copyright law.
Other than that, and for non-digital assets as well, we are two individual people who just happen to live together. She has her stuff, I have mine. We each have our own computers, 50" plasma TVs and XBMC set-top boxes. She has her guitars, I have mine. Besides, I have a hard time picturing her shredding on a Warlock :) The focus isn't even on ownership, but utility. I bought her a 50" TV for the bedroom, I paid for it, but logically it belongs to her and if we split, she gets to keep it. I have my own identical TV downstairs in the rec room. In the same vein, the karaoke software and songs I bought, are hers. They reside on my server, they're routinely used with my epic audio system, but she's the soprano singer and I'm just a hobbyist sound engineer. If she decides to elope with a tall handsome black man, I'll put all that stuff on a DVD or hard drive she can take with her.
I get that not all divorces are handled in a calm, responsible manner, but that doesn't change the fact that digital assets are easier to handle than tangible ones. They can be copied or moved with ease, and if some things are locked away behind a shared login (e.g. iTunes), you do as you would any other non-divisible asset: assess its replacement value. One person gets the asset, the other gets cash so they can buy their own. Yes, that's right, you can buy your ex-wife half of a Madonna album. $8, problem solved.
This is what I don't understand. I've got a similar setup to yours, we each have our own profile dir on the server. We don't care so much about privacy, I am root anyway, if I wanted to read her files, I could, but if we were to split, it is a simple matter to copy her files to a separate hard drive, or burn to a DVD-R, and delete them from my server and its replicates.
If the concern is about copyrighted materials like movies/music/software, it becomes a matter of ethics I guess. If you want to strictly adhere to copyright law, then only one person is supposed to keep any item. Again, you plug in a portable hard drive and move the stuff that isn't yours. Not the end of the world. If you've been sharing an iTunes account all this time, well, you're kinda fucked and that's entirely your own fault.
Make copies. Just because it took you two years to realize you hate your spouse, doesn't mean you can't keep mementos of your shared experiences. How hard is it to burn a few DVD-Rs ?