Jesus did exist 2000 yeas ago. That is a known historical fact. Whether or not he was the Son of God sent to earth to save mankind is, of course, still debateable. Either way, belief in Jesus does not automatically make one a creationist- there are people who believe that the Universe is 13 billion years old and that Jesus is the Son of God.
While we're at it, the age of the earth is currently accepted scientific theory. Even most scientists will admit that they are less sure of the age of the universe than they are of the fact that a man called Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth around 2000 years ago.
in defence of lj on this point, i don't think any of the issues they didn't already know about (mobo's that won't auto negotiate, db's that don't restart automatically) wouldn't have been uncovered by scheduled reboots. most of their problems were results of the hard shutdown. so unless you're just pulling the plug on your servers when you do a scheduled shutdown, this isn't really comparable.
the issues that they already knew about, on the other hand, were all issues that never seemed like a big deal to them before because they were thinking in terms of one computer going down at a time, not all of them at once....
there are a few other issues in there that i would criticize them on, but not doing scheduled reboots isn't on of them. in this case, however, i'll pass on criticism, and instead thank them for being as candid as they have been in explaining what happened and how they are going about ensuring it doesn't happen again.
How would it be any cheaper for the company accross the street in NYC to code it than your own companys workers? Or a contracter?
as i pointed out in another post, there are a lot of companies that need programming tasks performed from time to time but not enough to justify a full time programmer (or team of programmers). there are other companies that keep only enough programmers around to handle steady low volume tasks, and outsource projects larger than what their team can handle to consulting companies with a large pool of ready workers. in those cases, hiring a firm to do the work is certainly cheaper than hiring your own employees, and much less hassle than trying to round up a large enough team of individual contractors to do the job.
yes, i don know the economic trends, but that doesn't jsutify everyone around here jumping to conclusions the way they have been. there are still a lot of consulting companies here in the U.S. as well.
i had a friend who did some brief experiments to prove it could work but never got much further than that. a while back i saw a program on freshmeat that performed this task for arbitrary clients, which i believe used udp to perform the timing/port negotiations (so it would only work behind firewalls that allowed udp). i personally never actually tried it, but he had a site up explaining the mechanics, and stated that he had been successfully using the method for a while.
It was the chorus of a popular song in the early 1980's. i got the idea after reading somewhere that many girls will give that number out in clubs as a way of putting off guys that bug them too much for a phone number.
i mostly used it back when i was working as a consultant, for similar reasons. the last thing i wanted was random other people from a company i was consulting for calling me up on my cell phone asking me to fix their home computer, but some people wouldn't leave me alone unless they had a phone number where they could reach me. it had the desired effect- even the people who realized i was giving them a bogus number would drop it after that.
on the other hand, in some (many?) area codes it is a real phone number, and apparently has caused no end of irritations to the people unlucky enough to have it, apparently even to this day: http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/8675309.as p
good grief, like 2/3's of the comments here are rants about paying people in another country to do your work or claiming that the poster is screwed because he did business with a company from another country. he never stated where the business he asked to do the work is located. it's possible that they are in the same city. (of course, they might be in india, but nobody here knows that, you're all jumping to conclusions.)
there are a lot of companies that need programming work done from time to time but don't see the need to pay dedicated programmers full time salaries. there are also companies that have dedicated programmers, but occasionally have more work at one time than their in house staff can handle. i've done work for both types of companies before- sometimes they were located only blocks away from me.
anyway, that being said, if you had a contract, and it specified that you wouldn't pay until the work was complete, you should first try and stop payment with your bank if it's not too late. if it is too late, i would get a lawyer on retainer, and notify the firm of that fact. sometimes just knowing that will be enough to get them to cooperate with you. if not, then you've already taken the first step towards either getting your working product or getting your money back.
and it may be too late now, but for future reference, never sign a contract that doesn't give you the source code. now, even if you resolve this issue with your provider, you are stuck going back to them for any future modifications....
there is nothing in the posters question to indicate where the company they outsourced to is located. they may be in the sae building, or accross the street for all you know...
i've seen someone experimenting with this before. it's actually not too difficult to do once you have two computers that are both trying to set up the connection. how to alert the second computer that the first wants to initiate a connection is the challenge. in this case the supernode seems to be responsible for that aspect.
basically each computer attempts to initiate a connection to the other computer on a port that has been agreed to in advance. the first computer to attempt will fail, due to the firewall on the other end. however, his firewall will now be expecting return traffic originating from the port that his computer attempted to connect to. therefore, the second connection attempt, from the other computer, will succeed. now, both firewalls are allowing return traffic through in response to a connection initiated from inside the firewall. all the supernode has to do is allow for negotiation of timing and source and destination port numbers, and the rest is quite simple.
i don't think that the outside influences had as much to do with the collapse as you think. from where i sat during the whole mess, the biggest problem was the venture capital firms and wall street hysteria. everybody saw how much money was generated by the early tech ipo's and they all wanted in the game. analysts, vc's, and underwriters all were trying their best to keep growing the bubble bigger so they could cash in on it. everyone said that the internet would allow all kinds of new ways to generate revenues, and vc's were all eager for some easy money.
after a while people figured out that the only real ways to make money on the internet were pretty much the same as everywhere else- you can sell a good or service, or you can advertise. of course by this time, everything was already overvalued, and everyone who really knew anything about investing knew it, but the people who already had their money in kept pushing it higher in the hopes that they could get their money out and leave somebody else holding the ball, so to speak. the stock market had turned into a giant game of hot potato.
eventually the tech stocks flopped, almost accross the board. a lot of people got burned really bad, from day traders to professional investors to vc's to the tech sector employees. but the ones that really felt it first were the vc's. thy got burned bad and suddenly were a lot stingier about giving out their money. it became almost impossible to start a new business that had anything to do with technology, or to get additional funding for young companies. a lot of very promising young companies died out, and a lot of comapnies who thought they had already 'made it' suddenly had a very difficult road ahead of them. (remember the etrade commercial with the monkey riding his horse through a ghost town?)
so while the old guard certainly had a hand in things with all its monkeying around, the real problem was that there just wasn't any money left for the new guys. all the vc's and institutional investors went back to looking for 'safe' investments (which often meant the old guard), and the average guy on the street wouldn't touch the stock market with a ten foot pole. the dmca and a lot of other laws like it didn't really come on the scene until pretty late in the game. the old guard took a long time to catch on to what had almost happened to them. after the bubble burst they had to have felt lucky to have come out as well as they did- that's when they really started throwing up legal roadblocks, to prevent what almost did happen from happening for real in the future.
the point is that it wasn't profitable for the government or the american people as a whole. however, there are large numbers of people in power and close to those in power who have profited tremendously from this war. (haliburton, for example...)
Wasn't making money off Iraq the one point of the war?
of course not- we went to war to liberate the iraqi people from oppresson and to shut down saddam hussein's wmd programs. and we were welcomed by the iraqi people as liberators, not occupiers.
Note that in the states, a phone number that contains "xxx-555-yyyy" is bogus (used only in the movies).
although i've never tried it with any type of law enforcement official, i've found that xxx-867-5309 is a great answer to give people who have no business knowing my phone number. almost no one ever notices, and the few who do don't bother to point it out.
i don't know. it sounds to me like the way they've been running battle.net for years. overpromise, underachieve, and they might have a fix in place six months from now. which will cause new problems they may or may not get around to fixing another six months later...
i think currently in most jurisdictions a 'life' sentence has a maximum length (40 years, i think), hence the reason why you hear of people guilty of particularly bad crimes sentenced to multiple life sentences.
iirc, the infamous serial killer jeffrey dahmer was given a few hundred life sentences when he was tried.
there is a small additional risk. as the article points out, pooling the investments over a large number of people reduces the effect of timing on your retirement income. if everyone has a completely isolated account, then a person who reaches retirement age right at the end of a major recession is going to have their retirement income severely reduced. if you pool everyone's retirement savings together into one big account then you can even things out a bit.
and as other posters have noted, it takes a radio signal 250 ms to travel from the earths surface to geosynchronous orbit and back. so if the air force is willing to spend enough money making the hardware fast enough, there is still room for significant improvement over 2 seconds or even 600ms.
also, with a large enough budget, they may decide that geosynchronous satellites are not necessary. if they were willing to put up something around 60-100 leo satellites, and tackle the associated synchronization and handoff issues, they could probably get ping times down to around 10-20 ms.
i have had cable at my last two apartments only because i didn't want to get stuck with the one year service agreements dsl typically requires in apartments that i knew i likely wouldn't live in for more than a year. both times i waited until there was a substantial special ($30/month for 6 months) before signing up. having used cable, dsl, and dial up at various times in the past, i would rather pay $10 for dial up than $60 for cable, regardless of the speed difference. (rate for a non-cable subscribers where i live is $55/month i believe, so grandparent is not far off)
fortunately once again i will be moving just before the special offer expires, and since this move is going to be (more or less) permanent, i suspect i will be getting dsl. i fthey would drop the regular price for cable down to around $30-$40 i'd probably go for it, but if i'm going to pay $60/month for internet anyway, i might as well get a static ip and a tos that allows me to run my own services.
There is no implementation of true communism (or rather there cant be, because of the nature of the humans)
there might be, if nanotechnology ever advances to the point that any object is only as valuable as the raw materials that make it up. if anyone with the necessary raw materials can make a perfect copy of an arbitrary object, it would go a long way towards overcoming the major obstacle towards a true communist economic system.
will it be enough? doubtful, but maybe. do i think nanotechnology will reach that level of sophistication within my lifetime? no, not really, but that wasn't the point, was it...
Perhaps not so well stated, but hopefully you can see that the two fundamentally nearly opposites
that depends whether you are discussing communism as an economic model or communism as a governmental model. a person capable of self government can still believe that property belongs to society rather than individuals. a democracy with a communist economic system, while far-fetched due to simple human nature, is not a contradiction in terms.
i think the parent was implying that a communist is the opposite of a totalitarian dictator.
if bill gates says open source equates to communism, any description made of bill gates made on that basis would necessarily be considered (by the describer) to be the opposite of communism.
Slashdot Mirror
Jesus did exist 2000 yeas ago. That is a known historical fact. Whether or not he was the Son of God sent to earth to save mankind is, of course, still debateable. Either way, belief in Jesus does not automatically make one a creationist- there are people who believe that the Universe is 13 billion years old and that Jesus is the Son of God.
While we're at it, the age of the earth is currently accepted scientific theory. Even most scientists will admit that they are less sure of the age of the universe than they are of the fact that a man called Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth around 2000 years ago.
in defence of lj on this point, i don't think any of the issues they didn't already know about (mobo's that won't auto negotiate, db's that don't restart automatically) wouldn't have been uncovered by scheduled reboots. most of their problems were results of the hard shutdown. so unless you're just pulling the plug on your servers when you do a scheduled shutdown, this isn't really comparable.
the issues that they already knew about, on the other hand, were all issues that never seemed like a big deal to them before because they were thinking in terms of one computer going down at a time, not all of them at once....
there are a few other issues in there that i would criticize them on, but not doing scheduled reboots isn't on of them. in this case, however, i'll pass on criticism, and instead thank them for being as candid as they have been in explaining what happened and how they are going about ensuring it doesn't happen again.
How would it be any cheaper for the company accross the street in NYC to code it than your own companys workers? Or a contracter?
as i pointed out in another post, there are a lot of companies that need programming tasks performed from time to time but not enough to justify a full time programmer (or team of programmers). there are other companies that keep only enough programmers around to handle steady low volume tasks, and outsource projects larger than what their team can handle to consulting companies with a large pool of ready workers. in those cases, hiring a firm to do the work is certainly cheaper than hiring your own employees, and much less hassle than trying to round up a large enough team of individual contractors to do the job.
yes, i don know the economic trends, but that doesn't jsutify everyone around here jumping to conclusions the way they have been. there are still a lot of consulting companies here in the U.S. as well.
i had a friend who did some brief experiments to prove it could work but never got much further than that. a while back i saw a program on freshmeat that performed this task for arbitrary clients, which i believe used udp to perform the timing/port negotiations (so it would only work behind firewalls that allowed udp). i personally never actually tried it, but he had a site up explaining the mechanics, and stated that he had been successfully using the method for a while.
It was the chorus of a popular song in the early 1980's. i got the idea after reading somewhere that many girls will give that number out in clubs as a way of putting off guys that bug them too much for a phone number.
s p
i mostly used it back when i was working as a consultant, for similar reasons. the last thing i wanted was random other people from a company i was consulting for calling me up on my cell phone asking me to fix their home computer, but some people wouldn't leave me alone unless they had a phone number where they could reach me. it had the desired effect- even the people who realized i was giving them a bogus number would drop it after that.
on the other hand, in some (many?) area codes it is a real phone number, and apparently has caused no end of irritations to the people unlucky enough to have it, apparently even to this day:
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/8675309.a
good grief, like 2/3's of the comments here are rants about paying people in another country to do your work or claiming that the poster is screwed because he did business with a company from another country. he never stated where the business he asked to do the work is located. it's possible that they are in the same city. (of course, they might be in india, but nobody here knows that, you're all jumping to conclusions.)
there are a lot of companies that need programming work done from time to time but don't see the need to pay dedicated programmers full time salaries. there are also companies that have dedicated programmers, but occasionally have more work at one time than their in house staff can handle. i've done work for both types of companies before- sometimes they were located only blocks away from me.
anyway, that being said, if you had a contract, and it specified that you wouldn't pay until the work was complete, you should first try and stop payment with your bank if it's not too late. if it is too late, i would get a lawyer on retainer, and notify the firm of that fact. sometimes just knowing that will be enough to get them to cooperate with you. if not, then you've already taken the first step towards either getting your working product or getting your money back.
and it may be too late now, but for future reference, never sign a contract that doesn't give you the source code. now, even if you resolve this issue with your provider, you are stuck going back to them for any future modifications....
there is nothing in the posters question to indicate where the company they outsourced to is located. they may be in the sae building, or accross the street for all you know...
i've seen someone experimenting with this before. it's actually not too difficult to do once you have two computers that are both trying to set up the connection. how to alert the second computer that the first wants to initiate a connection is the challenge. in this case the supernode seems to be responsible for that aspect.
basically each computer attempts to initiate a connection to the other computer on a port that has been agreed to in advance. the first computer to attempt will fail, due to the firewall on the other end. however, his firewall will now be expecting return traffic originating from the port that his computer attempted to connect to. therefore, the second connection attempt, from the other computer, will succeed. now, both firewalls are allowing return traffic through in response to a connection initiated from inside the firewall. all the supernode has to do is allow for negotiation of timing and source and destination port numbers, and the rest is quite simple.
i don't think that the outside influences had as much to do with the collapse as you think. from where i sat during the whole mess, the biggest problem was the venture capital firms and wall street hysteria. everybody saw how much money was generated by the early tech ipo's and they all wanted in the game. analysts, vc's, and underwriters all were trying their best to keep growing the bubble bigger so they could cash in on it. everyone said that the internet would allow all kinds of new ways to generate revenues, and vc's were all eager for some easy money.
after a while people figured out that the only real ways to make money on the internet were pretty much the same as everywhere else- you can sell a good or service, or you can advertise. of course by this time, everything was already overvalued, and everyone who really knew anything about investing knew it, but the people who already had their money in kept pushing it higher in the hopes that they could get their money out and leave somebody else holding the ball, so to speak. the stock market had turned into a giant game of hot potato.
eventually the tech stocks flopped, almost accross the board. a lot of people got burned really bad, from day traders to professional investors to vc's to the tech sector employees. but the ones that really felt it first were the vc's. thy got burned bad and suddenly were a lot stingier about giving out their money. it became almost impossible to start a new business that had anything to do with technology, or to get additional funding for young companies. a lot of very promising young companies died out, and a lot of comapnies who thought they had already 'made it' suddenly had a very difficult road ahead of them. (remember the etrade commercial with the monkey riding his horse through a ghost town?)
so while the old guard certainly had a hand in things with all its monkeying around, the real problem was that there just wasn't any money left for the new guys. all the vc's and institutional investors went back to looking for 'safe' investments (which often meant the old guard), and the average guy on the street wouldn't touch the stock market with a ten foot pole. the dmca and a lot of other laws like it didn't really come on the scene until pretty late in the game. the old guard took a long time to catch on to what had almost happened to them. after the bubble burst they had to have felt lucky to have come out as well as they did- that's when they really started throwing up legal roadblocks, to prevent what almost did happen from happening for real in the future.
the point is that it wasn't profitable for the government or the american people as a whole. however, there are large numbers of people in power and close to those in power who have profited tremendously from this war. (haliburton, for example...)
Wasn't making money off Iraq the one point of the war?
of course not- we went to war to liberate the iraqi people from oppresson and to shut down saddam hussein's wmd programs. and we were welcomed by the iraqi people as liberators, not occupiers.
sheeesh, i thought everyone knew that by now...
Note that in the states, a phone number that contains "xxx-555-yyyy" is bogus (used only in the movies).
although i've never tried it with any type of law enforcement official, i've found that xxx-867-5309 is a great answer to give people who have no business knowing my phone number. almost no one ever notices, and the few who do don't bother to point it out.
i don't know. it sounds to me like the way they've been running battle.net for years. overpromise, underachieve, and they might have a fix in place six months from now. which will cause new problems they may or may not get around to fixing another six months later...
i think currently in most jurisdictions a 'life' sentence has a maximum length (40 years, i think), hence the reason why you hear of people guilty of particularly bad crimes sentenced to multiple life sentences.
iirc, the infamous serial killer jeffrey dahmer was given a few hundred life sentences when he was tried.
you know, if you READ the link, it would tell you that IS precisely the reason why they retired it...
yeah, i know... i must be new here.
there is a small additional risk. as the article points out, pooling the investments over a large number of people reduces the effect of timing on your retirement income. if everyone has a completely isolated account, then a person who reaches retirement age right at the end of a major recession is going to have their retirement income severely reduced. if you pool everyone's retirement savings together into one big account then you can even things out a bit.
careful you idiot, i said across her nose, not up it!
and as other posters have noted, it takes a radio signal 250 ms to travel from the earths surface to geosynchronous orbit and back. so if the air force is willing to spend enough money making the hardware fast enough, there is still room for significant improvement over 2 seconds or even 600ms.
also, with a large enough budget, they may decide that geosynchronous satellites are not necessary. if they were willing to put up something around 60-100 leo satellites, and tackle the associated synchronization and handoff issues, they could probably get ping times down to around 10-20 ms.
apparently microsoft wasn't too upset when verisign accidentally issued a certificate with microsoft's name on it to some scammers.
- girl (the more titties the better)
while there are rare exceptions (total recall springs to mind) most movies i have seen only feature girls with 2 'titties'.
those boarding procedures sound almost exactly like southwest airlines, one of only two (that i am aware of) profitable airlines here in the us.
i have had cable at my last two apartments only because i didn't want to get stuck with the one year service agreements dsl typically requires in apartments that i knew i likely wouldn't live in for more than a year. both times i waited until there was a substantial special ($30/month for 6 months) before signing up. having used cable, dsl, and dial up at various times in the past, i would rather pay $10 for dial up than $60 for cable, regardless of the speed difference. (rate for a non-cable subscribers where i live is $55/month i believe, so grandparent is not far off)
fortunately once again i will be moving just before the special offer expires, and since this move is going to be (more or less) permanent, i suspect i will be getting dsl. i fthey would drop the regular price for cable down to around $30-$40 i'd probably go for it, but if i'm going to pay $60/month for internet anyway, i might as well get a static ip and a tos that allows me to run my own services.
There is no implementation of true communism (or rather there cant be, because of the nature of the humans)
there might be, if nanotechnology ever advances to the point that any object is only as valuable as the raw materials that make it up. if anyone with the necessary raw materials can make a perfect copy of an arbitrary object, it would go a long way towards overcoming the major obstacle towards a true communist economic system.
will it be enough? doubtful, but maybe. do i think nanotechnology will reach that level of sophistication within my lifetime? no, not really, but that wasn't the point, was it...
Perhaps not so well stated, but hopefully you can see that the two fundamentally nearly opposites
that depends whether you are discussing communism as an economic model or communism as a governmental model. a person capable of self government can still believe that property belongs to society rather than individuals. a democracy with a communist economic system, while far-fetched due to simple human nature, is not a contradiction in terms.
i think the parent was implying that a communist is the opposite of a totalitarian dictator.
if bill gates says open source equates to communism, any description made of bill gates made on that basis would necessarily be considered (by the describer) to be the opposite of communism.