What's making your question hard is the "make it like one volume" restriction. The problem is trivial otherwise. If I were you, I'd be asking whoever tasked you with this to *really* justify on a technical level why they need it to appear as a single volume, since that makes all the possible solutions slower, more costly, and more difficult to maintain.
Chances are extremely high that what they really want is a "/bigfatfs" directory visible everywhere in which they will store many discrete items in subdirectories by project or by dataset or by user. You should convince them to let you build it from commodity machines serving a few TB each mounted as seperate filesystems underneath that umbrella directory. Then your only challenge is coherent management of the namespace of mountpoints for consistency across the environment (which there are longstanding tools for, like autofs + (ldap, nis, nis+, whatever)), and administration/assignment of new space requests within your cluster (that could be scripted to automatically allocate from the least-used volume which can satisfy the request (where least used could mean space or could mean activity hotness based on the metrics you're logging)).
Both in the case of the seal and a signature, it is *not* a trademark. Both have real, legal, contractual meanings. When you sign a check, that means you owe someone money. When you signa contract or lease agreement, you are bound to those terms legally. Your signature has nothing to do with a trademark, and everything to do with legally binding yourself to a contract or a debt. The presidential seal is what gets stamped on international treaties to ratify them in the name of our country, things like that. It is the official signature of the Office of the POTUS.
Re:Only a matter of time
on
The Los Alamos Bug
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It is far easier for us to create true intelligence from scratch within a software simulation than in wetware. We can literally run millions of generations of evolution very quickly there, and have very fine-grained control over the natural selection process. If we managed to create intelligence, the first place we'll create it will be in software. We might move on to apply the techniques to wetware and let it evolve a little slower in a little more natural environment, but probably by then SkyNet will already have enslaved us all, and it'll take care of the wetware experiments from there on out.
People want a portable appliance. That's what the iPod excels at. Simple user interface, intuitive, stylish. They don't want an "Operating System", which has "Java(tm)"-enabled "Application Software", which they can launch from some fancy "Applications Manager", etc. They want to push play and go. Hence PDAs fail, and iPod wins.
IMHO, Nokia makes the best cellphones around. The number one thing I think they do better than everyone else is build well-design intuitive human interfaces (both in terms of onscreen menus and the hardware of the phone itself (button types, locations, etc)). Aside from that, they're pretty solidly built for a cellphone, and in my experience tend to get better reception in poor-reception areas. I would pay more for Nokia anyday.
*If* they start requiring hardware crypto devices, I'd like to see them do it as a two-parallel-keys system to make loss/theft easier to deal with. The idea is that they issue you two completely seperate keys (as in seperate seeds inside them in the case of rolling pin devices like the one you describe or RSA's SecureID). Both are registered to your account. Either one can be used for full access, and either one can be used to request that the bank terminate the access of the other. You keep one on you, and you keep the other in a safe at home. If your primary is lost/stolen from your wallet/purse/pocket/office/whatever, you have a backup which can be used to disable it and continue working with your account until a replacement is sent. If your house is broken into and the safe is stolen while you're away, you can disable that one with your primary one. Revocation should be a painless automated cryptographic process you can do at any ATM, Teller, over the phone, or through your web banking interface.
We haven't completely replaced all of those technologies.
Drafters still like to use drafting boards, even when they've got advanced CAD tools sitting right next to them. Technology has not managed to obviate the need for a drafting board.
Adding machines? Have you been in a store lately that wasn't run by a multi-national meglomaniac corporation? Many smaller stores and businesses still don't put a PC at the front desk, instead they use big fat 70's looking calculators. Even when they do have PCs, they often still stick to the little electonic adding machines because it's more convenient than firing up a calculator app at a computer terminal. (Ok, I know you meant the big room-sized calculating computers, but I had to have something for this item, so I'm feigning ignorance. In any case transistors were already around at the time, all we've done since is shrink them, not replace them...)
Most POTS telephone lines in the US still support rotary dialing AFAIK (at least they did last time I cared, maybe 5 years ago). While it takes a little longer, it is more reliable (even with a broken dialer, you can tap out the numbers manually with the hangup switch). And many customers, especially if older aged or living in rural areas, actually possess rotary phones.
Even if all the database can tell them reliably is that HP ColorLaserJet Model 55 Serial Number 89928798734 was distributed to a certain Best Buy store, that goes a long way. When the Secret Service finds counterfeit bills, they know from the serial what store it was originally purchased in. Chances are it didn't move far, and chances are that Best Buy's records can lead to a very short list of potential buyers. Even if it was resold by one of them, the investigation becomes fairly trivial at that point.
But perhaps more importantly, even if you can't use it (embedded serial numbers in documents) as a primary method of tracking down the counterfeiter, you can certainly use it as court evidence once you do catch them by other means. It's pretty damning evidence if they can show that they seized a printer with serial number 89928798734 at your home address, and they can also show conterfiet currency or documents with the same serial number embedded that showed up elsewhere.
The primary purpose of The Perl Foundation, IMHO, is to pick up cash and give it out to appropriate people so they can eat and sleep in peace while they make Perl better. Some of the most insanely talented Perl developers (as in developers of perl itself and the core modules in it, rather than users of perl) get some cash through this foundation, and they're the ones making the design-related decisions.
To you and your like minded responders: from the point of view of someone who stays current with perl, your question certainly seems like a troll.
Perl continues to be a one of the most advanced languages in existance (slashdot jokes about how horribly bad one can shoot oneself in the foot with it notwithstanding). There is every reason to start a new project in Perl today. I'm really not even going to try to run down a list of reasons why here, they're just too numerous. If you haven't given serious professional development in Perl a shot, you're missing out. Perl really doesn't have any equals. Python comes close to being an alternative to Perl where the rules are more strictly enforced (which removes a lot of interesting possibilities), whitespace matters syntactically (and that's just insane in a modern language), and the majority of CPAN is missing.
Take any paradigm, and method or way of developing, and unique and interesting feature of some other language, and it all can, will, and probably has been done in Perl. It is on some ways the ultimate metalanguage. You want OO? You have your choice of a wide array of completely different styles of OO (both in terms of internals and interfaces), whatever suits your needs. Are you a fan of functional programming ala Haskell? Try Language::Functional ( http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/Language-Function al-0.03/Functional.pm ). TheDamian even wrote a module that allows one to write perl code as correct sentences and paragraphs in proper Latin, even given Latin's lack of defined rules about word ordering. (see: http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perl igata-0.50/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm for the module, and http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ Perligata.html for the academic explanation)
Perl 6 + Parrot I suspect will be even stronger than Perl 5, but only time will tell. Perl 5 will of course be around virtually forever, even with what deficiencies it has.
BTW, there is recently a great new Perl book out called "Perl Best Practices", which goes about the business of telling you how to not write spaghetti unmaintainable broken perl code (of course, they way you do that isn't much different than how you do it in any other language, which just goes to show that the problem isn't neccesarily that Perl invites good programmers to program badly - the problem is that perl is so accessible and easy that it invites bad programmers to program at all).
It's already been certain that it passes from birds to humans since at least 1997. It has had an average mortality rate in humans of somewhere in the neighborhood of ~70% in the various places it has crossed over significantly. The *only* thing between where it's at now and a worldwide pandemic that could wipe out millions of people is the mutation for human to human transmission (which apparently has a small chance of happening anytime a human or a pig manages to get infected simultaneously with this bird flu and a conventional human-to-human flu like we get every year). Go to the World Health Organization's website, google up the documents they have there that are directed at national-level policymakers and health officials on the subject. They spell out "likely major world catastrophe that we have no reasonable way to respond to in the next few years" pretty plainly. The US (as well as the rest of the world) won't have enough vaccine to cover even 10% of the population when and if it starts breaking out in human to human form. Lawmakers are already talking about new federal quarantine procedures and powers that might be neccesary when this hits in order to manage the geographic spread.
All of that being said, there is nothing to do about as an average citizen of the world right now. The best plan on a personal level, as far as I can see, is:
1. Pay more attention to good hygiene (which you should be doing anyways): Wash your hands often and correctly, eat with clean utensils, that kind of thing. 2. If and when human to human transmission is confirmed anywhere in the world, start avoiding crowds, public restrooms, airports, and international travelers, and start taking that hygiene even more seriously. 3. If and when it is obviously becoming a serious epidemic/pandemic, even if it isn't yet too bad in your area yet, get out of town if you live in a major city. Find a friend to stay with out of town in the country somewhere.
Potentially somewhere inbetween 2 and 3, you may want a breathing mask for use in some situations which can filter the virus. The WHO has stated that masks sold in the US which conform to the standard "N-95" are up to the task. If you go to any hardware store or walmart, the disposable white 3M masks with the yellow ubber bands that go around the back of your head (that they sell near the paint supplies to keep you from huffing the fumes) that say "N 95" on them are readily available, cheap, and sufficient. You might wanna buy a packet of them ahead of time and throw them in the closet. What's a couple bucks just in case?
It was a joke anyways. But in any case, IIRC, in layman's terms, a Hypothesis is a wild-assed guess that might be based on insight, experiences, or beliefs about something. When you formalize that Hypothesis into a statement of specific testable claims (as in, there must be some plausible way to prove or disprove your claims experimentally), then you have a Theory, which then needs to be proven or disproven if possible (of course, for some theories they are disprovable but not provable, so the longer we go without a disproof, the more sure we are that the theory holds water).
And that of course, is at the heard of the idiotic Evolution vs "Intelligent Design" debate. "Intelligent Design" is at best a misguided and pointless hypothesis in science terms (regardless of potentially rational philosphical and spiritual meanings), it is not a theory at all. Evolution is a real theory with testable claims, and people have conducted experiments using the scientific method which have upheld the claims of evolution.
And therein lies the problem. "Most customers don't have the time or skills...", "Constomers don't want code...", etc. If something technical is important to your company, then your company should be employing someone who understands these things, if nothing else so that somebody in your company can make an informed decision that's in the company's best interests. By definition, any external company is not there to help you, they're just there to make money off of you, and to exploit you if at all possible. Marketing-speak is designed to swindle those that don't know any better. If your company is smart enough to have someone involved in the decision who knows what it is exactly that you need, then the Marketing-speak serves as nothing more than an annoying barrier to figuring out what exactly the hell the vendor is actually selling you.
Anytime marketing-speak is neccesary and effective, someone is getting swindled (or at the very least, they're leaving themselves open to being swindled, and whether they get what they need at a reasonable cost or get swindled is a matter of blind luck).
How about announcing an iTunes client for Linux? Or at the very least, allowing third parties to release iTunes Linux clients and not constantly thwarting their attempts to bring new customers to the platform? I don't run anything but Linux, at work and at home. I haven't bought an iPod yet because I cannot get reliable iTMS services.
Goes into detail about how sports and exercise can make depression *worse* by feeding you too much adrenaline, which serves to aggravate the anxiety problem in your brain's chemistry. (That's part 2, you should read part 1 as well).
I have no knowledge about these things, but my Slashdot Wild-Assed Guess is that what would suck about an "over the top shot" route for a passenger aircraft is the risks for the passengers. In any of a number of scenarios flying over open water or over inhabited land, a plane may need to (and be able to) set down hard in the middle of nowhere and still have a decent chance to save the majority of the passengers. Even if the pilot manages to make some kind of controlled descent into arctic waters (or onto arctic ice) and the passengers make it out of the plane on those rubber raft slides, they're stuck in a very unhospitable and very cold environment that will take rescue operations considerably longer to reach.
For one, it's first-gen stuff. It will likely gain density quickly in the future. Also, don't forget this is basically NVRAM: way faster than a hard-drive, and way more permanent than DRAM. It fills a unique niche and cannot directly be compared to or replace either of the two. (Well, it could replace hard drives, if it shrunk enough). The day is coming (slowly) when the primary storage on any computer system will probably be some sort of nonvolatile solid-state device. Hard drives with spindles will be for bulk data (music, movies, documents), while the OS goes on the nonvolatile ram which is neccesarily much smaller in size, but more reliable and faster to access. You can do things that way now under Windows or Linux by buying a 1-4 GB-ish solid state flash disk for your root disk (or C: drive) and then putting in a large normal hard drive for all your bulk data, but current SSD technology is overpriced and suffers from various little problems, both of which make it impractical for mass deployment even if the OS vendors put more thought into supporting the setup.
And why is anyone even bitching about it? If removing Windows costs money for other wierd reasons like the above, then just buy a Windows machine and reformat the hard-drive.
I've always though that Mono was a waste of time..NET hasn't been around for very long at all. If you've got the brains to switch to Linux now, where were those brains two years ago when you wrote your now "legacy.NET code", and how much trouble would it be, really, to just own up to the mistake and start over from scratch in a better environment instead of bringing your.NET cruft over to Linux with you? I don't see it being practical and useful and interesting until about 5-8 years down the road when almost nobody is writing new software for.NET, and the last few braindead idiots are finally getting the point, and need to move quickly to Linux and bring with them (temporarily while they do real porting) 10 years of built up.NET infrastructure. And I cannot fathom how the (talented and insightful, obviously) Mono developers can stomach putting in all this effort for future idiots who are in the process of committing the sins that will ultimately lead to Mono's usefulness right now, as they code it.
Agreed. I used MySQL a few times back in the day, just because it was extremely easy to set up for extremely trivial tasks. But, IMNSHO, PostgreSQL is *the* ultimate opensource general purpose RDBMS (or O-RDBMS really). If you compare them by real-world attributes (supported features, robustness, performance, etc), PostgreSQL owns the competition, and even gives Oracle's RDBMS a good run for its money. For my purposes, this is how Oracle vs PostgreSQL stacks up right now:
Oracle: expensive, difficult and convoluted to install and maintain, lots of add-ons that PostgreSQL has no desire to match (application servers, Forms, etc), probably better performance on very large databases on very large hardware (but not by much anymore), integrated storage management (as of 10g), and built-in masterless clustering for scalability and availability.
PostgreSQL: free, easy to install (in the case of a modern linux distro, just use the OS package management), very good performance even on complicated things that only Oracle used to be good at, may not scale well beyond 4-8-ish way machines. No built-in clustering, but something may eventually come of the handful of add-on projects that currently do limited forms of clustering.
I don't even see the point of MySQL for anything anymore, unless you're using it for reasons of popularity and/or habit (It's what we already use for 10 other projects, it's what I learned first, it's what I'm comfortable with, it's what most of our new hires will know better, etc). The bookstore shelves reflect MySQL's historical popularity too. Even at stores around here with good technical book selection, the ratio of MySQL books to PostgreSQL books on the shelves is ~ 10:1, and you can rarely find a specific PostgreSQL book you're looking for in stock.
gcc-4.x is a big, big step. If I were a distro, I'd make a major version bump just for gcc's major version bump if for no other reason. You want your clients to be very aware of all the potential fallout from the gcc upgrade, especially this early.
Rather than constructing a framework around the idea of building "beneficial" worms that work through the same exploits as real worms, and having to respond to security problems by passing around a disinfectant worm by the same (newly dicovered) vectors as the bad worms roaming your network, wouldn't it be a lot easier to fix the operating systems, networks, and the policies applied to them, such that you don't have a malicious worm problem to begin with?
Slashdot Mirror
What's making your question hard is the "make it like one volume" restriction. The problem is trivial otherwise. If I were you, I'd be asking whoever tasked you with this to *really* justify on a technical level why they need it to appear as a single volume, since that makes all the possible solutions slower, more costly, and more difficult to maintain.
Chances are extremely high that what they really want is a "/bigfatfs" directory visible everywhere in which they will store many discrete items in subdirectories by project or by dataset or by user. You should convince them to let you build it from commodity machines serving a few TB each mounted as seperate filesystems underneath that umbrella directory. Then your only challenge is coherent management of the namespace of mountpoints for consistency across the environment (which there are longstanding tools for, like autofs + (ldap, nis, nis+, whatever)), and administration/assignment of new space requests within your cluster (that could be scripted to automatically allocate from the least-used volume which can satisfy the request (where least used could mean space or could mean activity hotness based on the metrics you're logging)).
Both in the case of the seal and a signature, it is *not* a trademark. Both have real, legal, contractual meanings. When you sign a check, that means you owe someone money. When you signa contract or lease agreement, you are bound to those terms legally. Your signature has nothing to do with a trademark, and everything to do with legally binding yourself to a contract or a debt. The presidential seal is what gets stamped on international treaties to ratify them in the name of our country, things like that. It is the official signature of the Office of the POTUS.
It is far easier for us to create true intelligence from scratch within a software simulation than in wetware. We can literally run millions of generations of evolution very quickly there, and have very fine-grained control over the natural selection process. If we managed to create intelligence, the first place we'll create it will be in software. We might move on to apply the techniques to wetware and let it evolve a little slower in a little more natural environment, but probably by then SkyNet will already have enslaved us all, and it'll take care of the wetware experiments from there on out.
People want a portable appliance. That's what the iPod excels at. Simple user interface, intuitive, stylish. They don't want an "Operating System", which has "Java(tm)"-enabled "Application Software", which they can launch from some fancy "Applications Manager", etc. They want to push play and go. Hence PDAs fail, and iPod wins.
IMHO, Nokia makes the best cellphones around. The number one thing I think they do better than everyone else is build well-design intuitive human interfaces (both in terms of onscreen menus and the hardware of the phone itself (button types, locations, etc)). Aside from that, they're pretty solidly built for a cellphone, and in my experience tend to get better reception in poor-reception areas. I would pay more for Nokia anyday.
*If* they start requiring hardware crypto devices, I'd like to see them do it as a two-parallel-keys system to make loss/theft easier to deal with. The idea is that they issue you two completely seperate keys (as in seperate seeds inside them in the case of rolling pin devices like the one you describe or RSA's SecureID). Both are registered to your account. Either one can be used for full access, and either one can be used to request that the bank terminate the access of the other. You keep one on you, and you keep the other in a safe at home. If your primary is lost/stolen from your wallet/purse/pocket/office/whatever, you have a backup which can be used to disable it and continue working with your account until a replacement is sent. If your house is broken into and the safe is stolen while you're away, you can disable that one with your primary one. Revocation should be a painless automated cryptographic process you can do at any ATM, Teller, over the phone, or through your web banking interface.
We haven't completely replaced all of those technologies.
Drafters still like to use drafting boards, even when they've got advanced CAD tools sitting right next to them. Technology has not managed to obviate the need for a drafting board.
Adding machines? Have you been in a store lately that wasn't run by a multi-national meglomaniac corporation? Many smaller stores and businesses still don't put a PC at the front desk, instead they use big fat 70's looking calculators. Even when they do have PCs, they often still stick to the little electonic adding machines because it's more convenient than firing up a calculator app at a computer terminal. (Ok, I know you meant the big room-sized calculating computers, but I had to have something for this item, so I'm feigning ignorance. In any case transistors were already around at the time, all we've done since is shrink them, not replace them...)
Most POTS telephone lines in the US still support rotary dialing AFAIK (at least they did last time I cared, maybe 5 years ago). While it takes a little longer, it is more reliable (even with a broken dialer, you can tap out the numbers manually with the hangup switch). And many customers, especially if older aged or living in rural areas, actually possess rotary phones.
Even if all the database can tell them reliably is that HP ColorLaserJet Model 55 Serial Number 89928798734 was distributed to a certain Best Buy store, that goes a long way. When the Secret Service finds counterfeit bills, they know from the serial what store it was originally purchased in. Chances are it didn't move far, and chances are that Best Buy's records can lead to a very short list of potential buyers. Even if it was resold by one of them, the investigation becomes fairly trivial at that point.
But perhaps more importantly, even if you can't use it (embedded serial numbers in documents) as a primary method of tracking down the counterfeiter, you can certainly use it as court evidence once you do catch them by other means. It's pretty damning evidence if they can show that they seized a printer with serial number 89928798734 at your home address, and they can also show conterfiet currency or documents with the same serial number embedded that showed up elsewhere.
The primary purpose of The Perl Foundation, IMHO, is to pick up cash and give it out to appropriate people so they can eat and sleep in peace while they make Perl better. Some of the most insanely talented Perl developers (as in developers of perl itself and the core modules in it, rather than users of perl) get some cash through this foundation, and they're the ones making the design-related decisions.
To you and your like minded responders: from the point of view of someone who stays current with perl, your question certainly seems like a troll.
n al-0.03/Functional.pm ). TheDamian even wrote a module that allows one to write perl code as correct sentences and paragraphs in proper Latin, even given Latin's lack of defined rules about word ordering. (see: http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perl igata-0.50/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm for the module, and http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ Perligata.html for the academic explanation)
Perl continues to be a one of the most advanced languages in existance (slashdot jokes about how horribly bad one can shoot oneself in the foot with it notwithstanding). There is every reason to start a new project in Perl today. I'm really not even going to try to run down a list of reasons why here, they're just too numerous. If you haven't given serious professional development in Perl a shot, you're missing out. Perl really doesn't have any equals. Python comes close to being an alternative to Perl where the rules are more strictly enforced (which removes a lot of interesting possibilities), whitespace matters syntactically (and that's just insane in a modern language), and the majority of CPAN is missing.
Take any paradigm, and method or way of developing, and unique and interesting feature of some other language, and it all can, will, and probably has been done in Perl. It is on some ways the ultimate metalanguage. You want OO? You have your choice of a wide array of completely different styles of OO (both in terms of internals and interfaces), whatever suits your needs. Are you a fan of functional programming ala Haskell? Try Language::Functional ( http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/Language-Functio
Perl 6 + Parrot I suspect will be even stronger than Perl 5, but only time will tell. Perl 5 will of course be around virtually forever, even with what deficiencies it has.
BTW, there is recently a great new Perl book out called "Perl Best Practices", which goes about the business of telling you how to not write spaghetti unmaintainable broken perl code (of course, they way you do that isn't much different than how you do it in any other language, which just goes to show that the problem isn't neccesarily that Perl invites good programmers to program badly - the problem is that perl is so accessible and easy that it invites bad programmers to program at all).
It's already been certain that it passes from birds to humans since at least 1997. It has had an average mortality rate in humans of somewhere in the neighborhood of ~70% in the various places it has crossed over significantly. The *only* thing between where it's at now and a worldwide pandemic that could wipe out millions of people is the mutation for human to human transmission (which apparently has a small chance of happening anytime a human or a pig manages to get infected simultaneously with this bird flu and a conventional human-to-human flu like we get every year). Go to the World Health Organization's website, google up the documents they have there that are directed at national-level policymakers and health officials on the subject. They spell out "likely major world catastrophe that we have no reasonable way to respond to in the next few years" pretty plainly. The US (as well as the rest of the world) won't have enough vaccine to cover even 10% of the population when and if it starts breaking out in human to human form. Lawmakers are already talking about new federal quarantine procedures and powers that might be neccesary when this hits in order to manage the geographic spread.
All of that being said, there is nothing to do about as an average citizen of the world right now. The best plan on a personal level, as far as I can see, is:
1. Pay more attention to good hygiene (which you should be doing anyways): Wash your hands often and correctly, eat with clean utensils, that kind of thing.
2. If and when human to human transmission is confirmed anywhere in the world, start avoiding crowds, public restrooms, airports, and international travelers, and start taking that hygiene even more seriously.
3. If and when it is obviously becoming a serious epidemic/pandemic, even if it isn't yet too bad in your area yet, get out of town if you live in a major city. Find a friend to stay with out of town in the country somewhere.
Potentially somewhere inbetween 2 and 3, you may want a breathing mask for use in some situations which can filter the virus. The WHO has stated that masks sold in the US which conform to the standard "N-95" are up to the task. If you go to any hardware store or walmart, the disposable white 3M masks with the yellow ubber bands that go around the back of your head (that they sell near the paint supplies to keep you from huffing the fumes) that say "N 95" on them are readily available, cheap, and sufficient. You might wanna buy a packet of them ahead of time and throw them in the closet. What's a couple bucks just in case?
It was a joke anyways. But in any case, IIRC, in layman's terms, a Hypothesis is a wild-assed guess that might be based on insight, experiences, or beliefs about something. When you formalize that Hypothesis into a statement of specific testable claims (as in, there must be some plausible way to prove or disprove your claims experimentally), then you have a Theory, which then needs to be proven or disproven if possible (of course, for some theories they are disprovable but not provable, so the longer we go without a disproof, the more sure we are that the theory holds water).
And that of course, is at the heard of the idiotic Evolution vs "Intelligent Design" debate. "Intelligent Design" is at best a misguided and pointless hypothesis in science terms (regardless of potentially rational philosphical and spiritual meanings), it is not a theory at all. Evolution is a real theory with testable claims, and people have conducted experiments using the scientific method which have upheld the claims of evolution.
And therein lies the problem. "Most customers don't have the time or skills...", "Constomers don't want code...", etc. If something technical is important to your company, then your company should be employing someone who understands these things, if nothing else so that somebody in your company can make an informed decision that's in the company's best interests. By definition, any external company is not there to help you, they're just there to make money off of you, and to exploit you if at all possible. Marketing-speak is designed to swindle those that don't know any better. If your company is smart enough to have someone involved in the decision who knows what it is exactly that you need, then the Marketing-speak serves as nothing more than an annoying barrier to figuring out what exactly the hell the vendor is actually selling you.
Anytime marketing-speak is neccesary and effective, someone is getting swindled (or at the very least, they're leaving themselves open to being swindled, and whether they get what they need at a reasonable cost or get swindled is a matter of blind luck).
And no, running it under Windows emulation software doesn't count.
How about announcing an iTunes client for Linux? Or at the very least, allowing third parties to release iTunes Linux clients and not constantly thwarting their attempts to bring new customers to the platform? I don't run anything but Linux, at work and at home. I haven't bought an iPod yet because I cannot get reliable iTMS services.
Don't forget BogoMIPS
And this:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/16/81428/800
Goes into detail about how sports and exercise can make depression *worse* by feeding you too much adrenaline, which serves to aggravate the anxiety problem in your brain's chemistry. (That's part 2, you should read part 1 as well).
I have no knowledge about these things, but my Slashdot Wild-Assed Guess is that what would suck about an "over the top shot" route for a passenger aircraft is the risks for the passengers. In any of a number of scenarios flying over open water or over inhabited land, a plane may need to (and be able to) set down hard in the middle of nowhere and still have a decent chance to save the majority of the passengers. Even if the pilot manages to make some kind of controlled descent into arctic waters (or onto arctic ice) and the passengers make it out of the plane on those rubber raft slides, they're stuck in a very unhospitable and very cold environment that will take rescue operations considerably longer to reach.
For one, it's first-gen stuff. It will likely gain density quickly in the future. Also, don't forget this is basically NVRAM: way faster than a hard-drive, and way more permanent than DRAM. It fills a unique niche and cannot directly be compared to or replace either of the two. (Well, it could replace hard drives, if it shrunk enough). The day is coming (slowly) when the primary storage on any computer system will probably be some sort of nonvolatile solid-state device. Hard drives with spindles will be for bulk data (music, movies, documents), while the OS goes on the nonvolatile ram which is neccesarily much smaller in size, but more reliable and faster to access. You can do things that way now under Windows or Linux by buying a 1-4 GB-ish solid state flash disk for your root disk (or C: drive) and then putting in a large normal hard drive for all your bulk data, but current SSD technology is overpriced and suffers from various little problems, both of which make it impractical for mass deployment even if the OS vendors put more thought into supporting the setup.
And why is anyone even bitching about it? If removing Windows costs money for other wierd reasons like the above, then just buy a Windows machine and reformat the hard-drive.
Sounds just like
I've always though that Mono was a waste of time.
Agreed. I used MySQL a few times back in the day, just because it was extremely easy to set up for extremely trivial tasks. But, IMNSHO, PostgreSQL is *the* ultimate opensource general purpose RDBMS (or O-RDBMS really). If you compare them by real-world attributes (supported features, robustness, performance, etc), PostgreSQL owns the competition, and even gives Oracle's RDBMS a good run for its money. For my purposes, this is how Oracle vs PostgreSQL stacks up right now:
Oracle: expensive, difficult and convoluted to install and maintain, lots of add-ons that PostgreSQL has no desire to match (application servers, Forms, etc), probably better performance on very large databases on very large hardware (but not by much anymore), integrated storage management (as of 10g), and built-in masterless clustering for scalability and availability.
PostgreSQL: free, easy to install (in the case of a modern linux distro, just use the OS package management), very good performance even on complicated things that only Oracle used to be good at, may not scale well beyond 4-8-ish way machines. No built-in clustering, but something may eventually come of the handful of add-on projects that currently do limited forms of clustering.
I don't even see the point of MySQL for anything anymore, unless you're using it for reasons of popularity and/or habit (It's what we already use for 10 other projects, it's what I learned first, it's what I'm comfortable with, it's what most of our new hires will know better, etc). The bookstore shelves reflect MySQL's historical popularity too. Even at stores around here with good technical book selection, the ratio of MySQL books to PostgreSQL books on the shelves is ~ 10:1, and you can rarely find a specific PostgreSQL book you're looking for in stock.
gcc-4.x is a big, big step. If I were a distro, I'd make a major version bump just for gcc's major version bump if for no other reason. You want your clients to be very aware of all the potential fallout from the gcc upgrade, especially this early.
Is that you, Mr Kaczynski?
http://www.thecourier.com/manifest.htm
Rather than constructing a framework around the idea of building "beneficial" worms that work through the same exploits as real worms, and having to respond to security problems by passing around a disinfectant worm by the same (newly dicovered) vectors as the bad worms roaming your network, wouldn't it be a lot easier to fix the operating systems, networks, and the policies applied to them, such that you don't have a malicious worm problem to begin with?