Looking at MS profits it appears they will be just fine with being slightly behind the curve as always, but actually selling volume. They are a publishing company, not a computer company. They will react to trends in UI design and eventually make something that will work well in a tablet format. Being first is cool but they are interested in money, not innovation.
Apple is also quite interested in money. I don't see anything the iPhone app store does that hasn't been in other cell phones for at least a decade. It's just they only have to support one platform instead of the 20 out there. Apple has always used this proprietary closed system to wring more out of the software. But that takes a lot of momentum and they've been lucky with the iPod and iPhone but we've seen this Apple before (late 80's). They are going to have to keep up this innovation pace to stay in business and I just don't see that happening in a closed system. When HTC can whip out a multi-touch device in a few months that does what the iPhone does, for half the cost, it's just a tough place to compete. Apple relies on the trendy cool factor and that's not enough to be a big player. Microsoft sells what the masses want, because that's where the volume is.
Squirrelmail is pretty good if you want to go the php route.. Zimbra has a very nice web client. And there's always Outlook Web Access or whatever they are calling it nowadays. Exchange has it's own problems but Gmail is just not enterprise class. I could see it as a student-only email service however.
What about Zimbra? Blows Gmail out of the water and you can host it yourself, meaning compliance with all sorts of legal and ethical rules.
I just trust Google less and less as time goes on. I'm not sure why, I just get a bad feeling about them. I think they mean well but they are sort of out of control and their philosophies and that of the world are not keeping up with the advances in technology. Google Apps seems to just package up a bunch of crap that other people already do, taking advantage of the fact that they have a captive audience for search.
I've used Google Apps and they are fine for very simple things but I hate how it's disolving the IT department's role in managing information and giving it to people who don't know anything about it becasuse they are saving a few bucks. Who are you going to call when your file goes missing? Google? Oh wait, they don't have a help desk.
I don't know why people don't just use Zimbra. It's practically free, easy to install and has great clients and is scalable provably to millions of users. Gmail is dicey. I could see referring students there for mail accounts but faculty and staff should be hosted locally for so many reasons I can't even begin to list them.
I've been playing with AWS (Amazon EC2 actually) and I've been working out a way to get live server images moved to EC2 nodes very quickly in the even something happens. Once there (you have to solve certain DNS issues and replication issues), you're paying by the hour but you're probably pretty safe and you can geolocate around their datacenters as well. It's definitely going to be a small part of our DR plan. At the very least we'll have our DNS provider forward to a last resort web server on EC2 with a downtime apology. The changes are kicked out automatically by a script at an offsite monitoring service. The more I use EC2 the more cool I think it is. Not the best solution for your main hosting but damn good for traffic spikes and emergencies.
Not to say I'm not also having a second data center in the DR plan, but instead of a rack I can get by with 10U and save $600/month!
These aren't new, the idea has been around for at least 60 years. Materials science has recently evolved to a point where the 20-50-100K rpm flywheels are possible without exploding. I have seen bigger slower ones that connect to utility lines to buffer power spikes and sags and such.
This is off-topic and possibly flamebait, but I'm a little tired of comments that have some stupid "equation" that equals "win" or "fail". It literally sounds like you are mentally disabled. This manner of speaking is cliched and was never that funny to begin with. Please give it a rest with the "win", "fail", "teh internets", "FTW", etc. It's old, and you can do better.
It's a universal truth for all humans that it takes approximately 21-30 days to learn a new skill, habit, language and use it naturally without effort. If you want to force yourself to learn a new skill and then use it, you can, but it takes a lot of mental effort. That sort of effort is not possible to sustain for four years of school across many subjects.
You don't have to make an effort if you commit to around 3 weeks of repetition. Your brain will just do it automatically. All of the greatest scientific thinkers of our time, such as Einstein, Feynman, Wiener, etc. as well as great leaders, businessmen, musicians, and other great people have learned to use this trick to create new habits. If you look at most great scientists you'll find they have optimized their thinking to focus on their one subject, and optimized their lives in order to maximize the amount of constructive thinking available. In this they have created a habitual ability to work in their subject. Sure, some of these people were born with certain abilities, and were raised in certain ways, but in almost every case you will see that they had an uncommon desire to change their brains to become somehow better, more connected with their chosen subject.
On the flip side, some people spend their entire lives studying their religious texts and it enables them to overcome addiction, mental illness, etc.
I am 100% sure if you looked at your own life you would see that this process of learning and forming habits is true for you as well. Of course, that's up to you.
Right, you shouldn't need to take notes if you have an effective instructor. Tests shouldn't be on "trick questions" to make sure you were listening in class. But you see a lot of students who don't take college life professionally and therefore the instructors had to respond and now here we are.
I think lecture is best spent listening intently to every word your instructor says. Note taking means you are not understanding, only listening for the next word to copy down. This means it's much more likely to miss something. Why do you need notes anyway? Unless you're talking about some insane 500 level class at MIT you aren't probably learning anything that A.) hasn't been tought for several years B.) is in the text book C.) is on the internet somewhere.
Anyway, learning is really all about repetition and it takes repeating something for approximately 21 days (not every day but repetition dispersed along that time period) to cement something in your brain. So here's the most effective strategy I know of:
1. Read the text book, even if it's boring and even if you don't understand it, read it. You can read without understanding. This is just building a foundation for later when you have the a-ha moment.
2. Go to lecure and don't take notes. Instead keep your eyes on the professor's face the entire lecture. You will be amazed how much more you remember.
3. Do the homework, even if it's repetitive and easy. It will save you study time later. Most courses use a spiral method where they reprise certain things throughout the course. If you didn't get it enough the first time you'll just fall deeper and deeper into a pit of dispair.
4. Figure out the pattern your instructor uses to make test questions. Do they come from the book? Do they come from other materials? Usually you'll see some patterns and know what to study.
Unfortunately, they have multiple datacenters and they are running cached mysql with some magic glue so it often does take several minutes for changes to propagate from coast to coast, become cached, etc. That's why the default feed is not live, but you can click it to get it--they would be brought to their knees doing all live updates.
They do use a technique called sharding which keeps the row counts down. Basically they break up all the users into different tables, databases or even servers. Then they try to keep users who talk to each other frequently in the same "shard". This minimizes the joins and of course enables more horizontal scalability. Personally, I think they could probably do more with a mainframe style of system but they don't have the money for that. Not that I hate LAMP but really the site is shoddy. Unpredictable at best, and really it doesn't do much. Just holds some information from almost every person in the U.S.
So what? TransUnion and Experian have held our entire credit histories and can not only retrieve them but score them with a complex algorithm in a few milliseconds. Which goes to show (and I've been trying to tell my boss this with some success) is that it's not just the data or the complexity but the interactivity that really intensifies the need for speed. Ajax and stuff is cool but it's only cool when it works fast. Otherwise it sucks.
So now we're dealing with hundreds of tiny requests rather than one big one. Apache was designed to handle those big requests. So you run into lots of issues there. Yeah, there's lighty and nginx which are going to be the new kings of that stuff. I'm thinking about probably moving my web services to a separate web server from my big MVC framework pages.
iNet has no control over BitTorrent system and [is] not responsible for BitTorrent system.
To define it as a system is interesting, when it's really a "society". Bittorrent is simply the protocol of the society of people who wish to acquire media on the internet in a free (not as in beer) manner. If the media companies could provide a way to allow people to pay a reasonable licensing fee by choice for the content they provide then people would use it. Unfortunately the vast majority of people don't feel the content is worth what they charge. But the same individuals are also motivated by social pressure to watch the content, pressure that is created by the media advertising. So they make us want the content, but then don't provide it at a reasonable cost. This causes humans to naturally seek the path of least resistance, even if it means bending a few "laws" that are out of date and not really even relevant any more. Media would love to be drug pushers and they really are to a certain extent. Where it breaks down is that they create demand and are unable to provide supply therefore the free market takes over and makes it available. There is only one solution, to stop making the content, or to form a police state that regulates the content for the companies. Neither are a viable solution for anyone. Their profits will plummet in either situation. So what will happen is that there will be more consolidation in the industry, less competition, and only the company that can make content people want for as cheaply as possible will succeed. It looks like iTunes was a pretty good first guess. People will pay $1 for things if it's convenient. I don't see the industry going out of it's way to increase the convenience of acquiring their content so likely they will fold and the people who actually make the content will have to find a new way make it cheaply and get it to the customer.
Most of what PHP does is written in C and C++. As a scripting language, PHP relies on extensions. In general these are C libraries. Yes, you have some glue that is JIT and slow but for heavy lifting like database queries or graphics or whatever you're already in C. Like I do some graphics stuff using PHP to render the page, but all the gd_xxx() functions are calling directly to the gd extension which implements calls to the GD library which is either statically compiled or in shared memory. Yes, the for loop code is compiled into opcodes and run but I also use APC which caches the opcodes so it just gets run. I'm not going to run around and claim that PHP is the best or fastest but it's good at what it does, which is be a glue around C libraries. And the new version is pretty good with object orientation. Also check out Zend Framework which is really the only professional framework for PHP. MVC, lots of other stuff. It's quite good now (it wasn't a year ago). There's even a debugger extension for the apache module so you can run a firefox extension like firebug or their debugger toolbar and debug right on the production server (uses SSH to talk to the runtime)
Facebook is garbage and I give them 2 years from today before someone else has come along and taken half their business because the code is so poor. It's stories like these that really ram home the point that the company is run by 20 year olds. If it wasn't for myspace making them look good, they wouldn't be anywhere. Yahoo has had groupware and social networking for a lot longer and it frankly works better. Facebook just had the whole "private club for college students" thing going. I don't see the point. They have critical mass right now, it's the fad, but I don't see this lasting.
It's open source, so you could contribute your ideas on their site. Just a thought. Personally, I think if you took everyone on Slashdot and got them to contribute you might be able to find some good solutions to the basic systemic problems of going to the moon and get enough momentum that you could do another round of donations and actually get something from the big boys. But I do agree that asking for an open source CAD project is kindof.... backwards.
Exactly, they need to find a fuel or fuel package (tuned carbon lattice) that will release/convert most of the energy in the microwave range, then just use a big inductor around or near the reactor to pipe it right out as electrons.
It seems much of our need for government of any kind is to protect us from the other people anyway. Most everything else is provided by the market.. Once energy is free it's just a matter of who can use it fastest, and that's always going to be small organizations.
Yes, but GOOGLE doesn't know what sites you visit if you don't use their search or their toolbar or visit a site with their ads on it. But they want to know everything. So in the name of "better internet", not unlike the things people do in the name of Jesus, a little egg with evil inside is laid.
By the way, if you haven't seen panopticlick you should check it out. If you add the first three octets of ip address there would be more than enough info to identify your computer. What's scary is that Google (and msft and others [feds?]) have been doing this for years to track browser and no one has heard about it publically. Eric Schmidt says "if you're doing something online you don't want anyone knowing about, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." And that's all good in a utopian balanced world where there is no evil that might one day become stronger than you and you'll need to hide from it to battle it effectively. As such, and as such as the founders of this country sought never to happen AGAIN in this world, I think it would be best to leave the frickin broken ass, slow, decentralized DNS system alone and anonymous. Of course, the root servers know all;) Thanks Verisign (who also is the root of most SSL certs and decides whether or not to vouch for them). It's amazing but when you really look at it, there's really only 5-10 companies that control the bulk of the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at MS profits it appears they will be just fine with being slightly behind the curve as always, but actually selling volume. They are a publishing company, not a computer company. They will react to trends in UI design and eventually make something that will work well in a tablet format. Being first is cool but they are interested in money, not innovation.
Apple is also quite interested in money. I don't see anything the iPhone app store does that hasn't been in other cell phones for at least a decade. It's just they only have to support one platform instead of the 20 out there. Apple has always used this proprietary closed system to wring more out of the software. But that takes a lot of momentum and they've been lucky with the iPod and iPhone but we've seen this Apple before (late 80's). They are going to have to keep up this innovation pace to stay in business and I just don't see that happening in a closed system. When HTC can whip out a multi-touch device in a few months that does what the iPhone does, for half the cost, it's just a tough place to compete. Apple relies on the trendy cool factor and that's not enough to be a big player. Microsoft sells what the masses want, because that's where the volume is.
For now. Any time I see someone using a definite I get nervous. As if the shareholders couldn't change rapidly at some point in the future.
You mean something like Zimbra, care of Yahoo, Inc.?
Squirrelmail is pretty good if you want to go the php route.. Zimbra has a very nice web client. And there's always Outlook Web Access or whatever they are calling it nowadays. Exchange has it's own problems but Gmail is just not enterprise class. I could see it as a student-only email service however.
What about Zimbra? Blows Gmail out of the water and you can host it yourself, meaning compliance with all sorts of legal and ethical rules.
I just trust Google less and less as time goes on. I'm not sure why, I just get a bad feeling about them. I think they mean well but they are sort of out of control and their philosophies and that of the world are not keeping up with the advances in technology. Google Apps seems to just package up a bunch of crap that other people already do, taking advantage of the fact that they have a captive audience for search.
I've used Google Apps and they are fine for very simple things but I hate how it's disolving the IT department's role in managing information and giving it to people who don't know anything about it becasuse they are saving a few bucks. Who are you going to call when your file goes missing? Google? Oh wait, they don't have a help desk.
I don't know why people don't just use Zimbra. It's practically free, easy to install and has great clients and is scalable provably to millions of users. Gmail is dicey. I could see referring students there for mail accounts but faculty and staff should be hosted locally for so many reasons I can't even begin to list them.
I've been playing with AWS (Amazon EC2 actually) and I've been working out a way to get live server images moved to EC2 nodes very quickly in the even something happens. Once there (you have to solve certain DNS issues and replication issues), you're paying by the hour but you're probably pretty safe and you can geolocate around their datacenters as well. It's definitely going to be a small part of our DR plan. At the very least we'll have our DNS provider forward to a last resort web server on EC2 with a downtime apology. The changes are kicked out automatically by a script at an offsite monitoring service. The more I use EC2 the more cool I think it is. Not the best solution for your main hosting but damn good for traffic spikes and emergencies.
Not to say I'm not also having a second data center in the DR plan, but instead of a rack I can get by with 10U and save $600/month!
These aren't new, the idea has been around for at least 60 years. Materials science has recently evolved to a point where the 20-50-100K rpm flywheels are possible without exploding. I have seen bigger slower ones that connect to utility lines to buffer power spikes and sags and such.
And even if it is more expensive, at least you're giving the money to people and not overseas to microsoft.
Obligitory link here. Enjoy?
This is off-topic and possibly flamebait, but I'm a little tired of comments that have some stupid "equation" that equals "win" or "fail". It literally sounds like you are mentally disabled. This manner of speaking is cliched and was never that funny to begin with. Please give it a rest with the "win", "fail", "teh internets", "FTW", etc. It's old, and you can do better.
if($self->isNerd())
{
if($girl->isNerd())
{
if(rand(0,999999)==1 && !$girl->isLesbian())
{
$self->chance=.99;
}
}
else($girl->isHot())
{
if($self->isRich())
{
$self->chance=.5;
}
else
{
$self->chance=0;
}
}
else if($girl->isUgly())
{
$self->chance=.75;
}
}
if($self->chance
It's a universal truth for all humans that it takes approximately 21-30 days to learn a new skill, habit, language and use it naturally without effort. If you want to force yourself to learn a new skill and then use it, you can, but it takes a lot of mental effort. That sort of effort is not possible to sustain for four years of school across many subjects.
You don't have to make an effort if you commit to around 3 weeks of repetition. Your brain will just do it automatically. All of the greatest scientific thinkers of our time, such as Einstein, Feynman, Wiener, etc. as well as great leaders, businessmen, musicians, and other great people have learned to use this trick to create new habits. If you look at most great scientists you'll find they have optimized their thinking to focus on their one subject, and optimized their lives in order to maximize the amount of constructive thinking available. In this they have created a habitual ability to work in their subject. Sure, some of these people were born with certain abilities, and were raised in certain ways, but in almost every case you will see that they had an uncommon desire to change their brains to become somehow better, more connected with their chosen subject.
On the flip side, some people spend their entire lives studying their religious texts and it enables them to overcome addiction, mental illness, etc.
I am 100% sure if you looked at your own life you would see that this process of learning and forming habits is true for you as well. Of course, that's up to you.
Right, you shouldn't need to take notes if you have an effective instructor. Tests shouldn't be on "trick questions" to make sure you were listening in class. But you see a lot of students who don't take college life professionally and therefore the instructors had to respond and now here we are.
I think lecture is best spent listening intently to every word your instructor says. Note taking means you are not understanding, only listening for the next word to copy down. This means it's much more likely to miss something. Why do you need notes anyway? Unless you're talking about some insane 500 level class at MIT you aren't probably learning anything that A.) hasn't been tought for several years B.) is in the text book C.) is on the internet somewhere.
Anyway, learning is really all about repetition and it takes repeating something for approximately 21 days (not every day but repetition dispersed along that time period) to cement something in your brain. So here's the most effective strategy I know of:
1. Read the text book, even if it's boring and even if you don't understand it, read it. You can read without understanding. This is just building a foundation for later when you have the a-ha moment.
2. Go to lecure and don't take notes. Instead keep your eyes on the professor's face the entire lecture. You will be amazed how much more you remember.
3. Do the homework, even if it's repetitive and easy. It will save you study time later. Most courses use a spiral method where they reprise certain things throughout the course. If you didn't get it enough the first time you'll just fall deeper and deeper into a pit of dispair.
4. Figure out the pattern your instructor uses to make test questions. Do they come from the book? Do they come from other materials? Usually you'll see some patterns and know what to study.
Unfortunately, they have multiple datacenters and they are running cached mysql with some magic glue so it often does take several minutes for changes to propagate from coast to coast, become cached, etc. That's why the default feed is not live, but you can click it to get it--they would be brought to their knees doing all live updates.
They do use a technique called sharding which keeps the row counts down. Basically they break up all the users into different tables, databases or even servers. Then they try to keep users who talk to each other frequently in the same "shard". This minimizes the joins and of course enables more horizontal scalability. Personally, I think they could probably do more with a mainframe style of system but they don't have the money for that. Not that I hate LAMP but really the site is shoddy. Unpredictable at best, and really it doesn't do much. Just holds some information from almost every person in the U.S.
So what? TransUnion and Experian have held our entire credit histories and can not only retrieve them but score them with a complex algorithm in a few milliseconds. Which goes to show (and I've been trying to tell my boss this with some success) is that it's not just the data or the complexity but the interactivity that really intensifies the need for speed. Ajax and stuff is cool but it's only cool when it works fast. Otherwise it sucks.
So now we're dealing with hundreds of tiny requests rather than one big one. Apache was designed to handle those big requests. So you run into lots of issues there. Yeah, there's lighty and nginx which are going to be the new kings of that stuff. I'm thinking about probably moving my web services to a separate web server from my big MVC framework pages.
iNet has no control over BitTorrent system and [is] not responsible for BitTorrent system.
To define it as a system is interesting, when it's really a "society". Bittorrent is simply the protocol of the society of people who wish to acquire media on the internet in a free (not as in beer) manner. If the media companies could provide a way to allow people to pay a reasonable licensing fee by choice for the content they provide then people would use it. Unfortunately the vast majority of people don't feel the content is worth what they charge. But the same individuals are also motivated by social pressure to watch the content, pressure that is created by the media advertising. So they make us want the content, but then don't provide it at a reasonable cost. This causes humans to naturally seek the path of least resistance, even if it means bending a few "laws" that are out of date and not really even relevant any more. Media would love to be drug pushers and they really are to a certain extent. Where it breaks down is that they create demand and are unable to provide supply therefore the free market takes over and makes it available. There is only one solution, to stop making the content, or to form a police state that regulates the content for the companies. Neither are a viable solution for anyone. Their profits will plummet in either situation. So what will happen is that there will be more consolidation in the industry, less competition, and only the company that can make content people want for as cheaply as possible will succeed. It looks like iTunes was a pretty good first guess. People will pay $1 for things if it's convenient. I don't see the industry going out of it's way to increase the convenience of acquiring their content so likely they will fold and the people who actually make the content will have to find a new way make it cheaply and get it to the customer.
Most of what PHP does is written in C and C++. As a scripting language, PHP relies on extensions. In general these are C libraries. Yes, you have some glue that is JIT and slow but for heavy lifting like database queries or graphics or whatever you're already in C. Like I do some graphics stuff using PHP to render the page, but all the gd_xxx() functions are calling directly to the gd extension which implements calls to the GD library which is either statically compiled or in shared memory. Yes, the for loop code is compiled into opcodes and run but I also use APC which caches the opcodes so it just gets run. I'm not going to run around and claim that PHP is the best or fastest but it's good at what it does, which is be a glue around C libraries. And the new version is pretty good with object orientation. Also check out Zend Framework which is really the only professional framework for PHP. MVC, lots of other stuff. It's quite good now (it wasn't a year ago). There's even a debugger extension for the apache module so you can run a firefox extension like firebug or their debugger toolbar and debug right on the production server (uses SSH to talk to the runtime)
Facebook is garbage and I give them 2 years from today before someone else has come along and taken half their business because the code is so poor. It's stories like these that really ram home the point that the company is run by 20 year olds. If it wasn't for myspace making them look good, they wouldn't be anywhere. Yahoo has had groupware and social networking for a lot longer and it frankly works better. Facebook just had the whole "private club for college students" thing going. I don't see the point. They have critical mass right now, it's the fad, but I don't see this lasting.
Not to be pedantic but I think you meant 'killall -9 car'.
$ kill -9 car
-bash: kill: car: arguments must be process or job IDs
It's open source, so you could contribute your ideas on their site. Just a thought. Personally, I think if you took everyone on Slashdot and got them to contribute you might be able to find some good solutions to the basic systemic problems of going to the moon and get enough momentum that you could do another round of donations and actually get something from the big boys. But I do agree that asking for an open source CAD project is kindof.... backwards.
Yeah, but then they'd never get a woman on the moon!
Human woman, perhaps, but a female wookie....woooooonnnngngngngngng!
Exactly, they need to find a fuel or fuel package (tuned carbon lattice) that will release/convert most of the energy in the microwave range, then just use a big inductor around or near the reactor to pipe it right out as electrons.
High-powered computers of the future and nanotechnology, of course.
It seems much of our need for government of any kind is to protect us from the other people anyway. Most everything else is provided by the market.. Once energy is free it's just a matter of who can use it fastest, and that's always going to be small organizations.
Yes, but GOOGLE doesn't know what sites you visit if you don't use their search or their toolbar or visit a site with their ads on it. But they want to know everything. So in the name of "better internet", not unlike the things people do in the name of Jesus, a little egg with evil inside is laid.
By the way, if you haven't seen panopticlick you should check it out. If you add the first three octets of ip address there would be more than enough info to identify your computer. What's scary is that Google (and msft and others [feds?]) have been doing this for years to track browser and no one has heard about it publically. Eric Schmidt says "if you're doing something online you don't want anyone knowing about, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." And that's all good in a utopian balanced world where there is no evil that might one day become stronger than you and you'll need to hide from it to battle it effectively. As such, and as such as the founders of this country sought never to happen AGAIN in this world, I think it would be best to leave the frickin broken ass, slow, decentralized DNS system alone and anonymous. Of course, the root servers know all ;) Thanks Verisign (who also is the root of most SSL certs and decides whether or not to vouch for them). It's amazing but when you really look at it, there's really only 5-10 companies that control the bulk of the internet.