What no one pays attention to (and what's far, far more important) is that Microsoft also uses Facebook's web tracking data for behavioral ads targeting. All those "Like" buttons? Tracking! Each and every one reports your site visits back to Facebook, whether you click it or not, by virtue of merely showing up on the page. And Facebook has fairly low noise profile data on hundreds of millions of its customers spanning the globe. Nielsen just smokes nervously in the corner with its tiny panel of users, which everyone mines for co-visitation data when doing behavioral targeting.
What does all of this mean? It means Facebook (and by extension Microsoft) knows what sites you (and other people like you) go to, and they can determine age, gender, interests, etc even for the users on whom Facebook has no data, with fairly decent precision. In other words, whether you have a Facebook account or not, the Big Zuckerberg is watching.
As far as this "copying" - it's BS on Google's part plain and simple. They just added one more signal to their neural net, and it's ranking long tail terms similarly to Google because they don't have human data on them. That's hardly "stealing".
I would pay more attention, if Netgear was competent in their own area of expertise at least, and could create a wireless router half as good as Airport Extreme. It's freaking embarrassing when Apple sells the only decent option as far as dualband routers are concerned, and it's a side thing for them.
To some extent votes count everywhere. If everyone knows they didn't vote for the guy but the guy gets elected anyway, there's usually a revolt, and regimes generally prefer to not go there because outcome is never favorable.
You're missing the part where no one knew who the hell Putin Was just a year before, and the massive PR campaign which could be done by someone else (with oligarchs footing the bill). I would not be so sure about Putin winning a poker match, let alone a presidential election under those circumstances, if there wasn't a string of terror attacks and a small war.
From what I heard there were plenty of folks who'd take the job, and who were far more visible and far better known by the public than Putin was. Without a disaster like this, no one would have any reason to vote for the guy. He accomplished absolutely nothing worthwhile before getting elected (kinda like Obama, but I digress).
Which doesn't mean people will vote for _him_. Some of the recent examples of corruption (which Putin 100% knew about and participated in) are truly horrifying, even by standards of the 90's. Billions of dollars just disappear in Cayman Islands and no one gets even a slap on the wrist. Au contraire, my friend, people get promoted for stealing taxpayer money.
This means a significant fraction of that money ends up in the accounts of Putin, Medvedev & co, otherwise they'd be fighting corruption like there's no tomorrow. They can't even pretend they don't know.
From what I hear, folks (particularly the 20-somethings who grew up without the Soviet baggage) are getting bored of the whole "Putin is god" mantra that's been going on there for nearly a decade. And they're the first generation that's truly free of ideology or restraint. They can really fuck things up when it comes down to it.
They have presidential elections coming up next year, and someone dug up the same playbook that brought Putin to power. As some of you may recall, in 1999 there were massive bombings in Moscow, and as a result Putin, who was literally nobody to the public just a few months before, was elected president. All it took is 24x7 rotation on TV and a tough stance on Chechen terrorists. Yeltsin resigned abruptly, Putin spent some time as his lawful successor, and then got elected by a landslide thanks to his promise to deal with the issue. If it wasn't for those bombings, I think most Russians will agree, there was no way in hell he'd get the presidency.
The whole thing is awfully suspicious. For instance, after the blast, the airport _wasn't evacuated_. This could mean incompetence on FSB's (Russian counterpart of the FBI) part, or it could mean that they _knew_ there wasn't a second bomb.
What this tells me is Putin (and folks who are behind him), is gearing up to take over the reins from Medvedev in 2012.
If you value your time more than utility of having a general purpose computing appliance, there's also FreeNAS, which is trivial to set up, and supports ZFS.
Here's what I think of Drobo: it's ridiculously overpriced for what it is. You can have an AMD-based dual core machine with 4TB of RAID5 storage and 4GB of RAM for less than a diskless Drobo would cost you. You could put Linux on it and configure RAID5 across three 2TB disks. Then you could whip up a VM in KVM and have a safe torrent / web server machine DMZd to the outside, and an extremely capable file / media server within your local subnet. All for _less_ than a diskless Drobo. Seriously, why the fuck do people buy these things?
1. Relentlessly delete crap. No point in keeping five versions of the same photo around. No point in keeping bad photos around (blurry, overexposed, etc). No point in keeping photos you'll never want to see again. This gets rid of at least 90% of photos right away. 2. Import images into Aperture. One project per month, albums within the project for events and subprojects. 3. During the year, periodically rsync the library to RAID5 array (that's in addition to TimeMachine backups every 10 days) 4. At the end of the year, move originals to an external FireWire 800 hard drive. This is pretty nifty, and I don't know if anything other than Aperture supports this feature - you still can see the photos, but at the lower resolution. Once you connect the external drive, the full versions automagically become available. Once images are copied off the hard drive, the external drive and the Aperture library gets rsync'd off to RAID5 again.\ 5. An encrypted version of the full yearly backup sits on the shelf at a friend's house, in the form of a 2TB USB hard drive. 6. When viewing old pictures, delete crap that you did not delete the first time around due to not being sure it's crap.
Exponential is still pretty darn hard for large powers. Easier than brute force search, but every additional bit in key length will add to the exponent, and it's awfully easy to add bits to keys, assuming your key is not already e.g. 4096 bit long.
It doesn't matter if it's patent encumbered or not. It does matter whether it has a company behind it that could have the ammo to countersue the plaintiff. Google is such a company. As long as Google is behind Vorbis and VP8, others have far less to worry about when using these formats.
There was a period in my life where I stayed in the same job for a long time. Predictably, got merit increases every year, and they were above the cost of living, but not dramatic. Left the company, went elsewhere - 20% bump right away. Left that company, went elsewhere - another 30% bump. You don't really know what you're worth unless you offer your skills on the open market. If a company already has you and you're not looking to move, there's no incentive for them to offer you more money. They think you're content with what you get. And truth be told, I was content. I just wasn't sure I'd ever be able to buy a decent house or retire, but life was good and easy otherwise.
Several Postgres processes can't operate simultaneously on the same DB - says so right in the docs (see 8.2.19). You could conceivably hack them to do so, but you would have to prevent them from overwriting each other's changes, or keep one process in standby mode of some kind in case the other one dies.
Therefore, if one process is fucked, your shard disappears even if data files are still there. That's bad.
Everything is "patent encumbered", including Vorbis and Matroska. The fact that they haven't been challenged yet only speaks to their relative lack of popularity.
The question is, will there be a company with enough ammo to stand up to the challenges in court. Google is saying, yes. They'll go to court for WebM, and they have a decent chance of winning since they now own (and license for free to you, including reference, open source codec and hardware implementations) a bunch of patents dating back as far as late 90's that make MPEG LA and Fraunhofer toothless against them.
For years Slashdot seems to have yearned for a wider adoption of Vorbis and Theora. Theora didn't quite cut it, so Google replaced it with VP8, and has thrown its weight (and its patent portfolio) behind Vorbis as well. But since it's Google, now Slashdot seems to support a royalty and patent encumbered h264 instead of pining for WebM (which is VP8 + Vorbis wrapped into a Matroska container) to win, for which there's a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty free license on everything, including fucking _ASIC designs_. WTF people? Do you have no principles?
You still haven't described how you'd implement sharding (at which point with most realistic relational schemas you're likely to lose the ability to do joins), load balancing and transparent, reliable failover. SANs don't free you from the need to do DB replication, since several processes can't write to the same set of files without massive synchronization overhead, so you're in a losing position right from the start, SANs notwithstanding.
But even assuming you got all of this to work, you're still doing it on high end hardware, whereas Cassandra can do the same on bare motherboards with cheap SATA drives velcroed on (which is how FB uses it), at a fraction of the cost, with higher reliability (since it was built for shitty hardware), and possibly with higher per-node performance.
Right tool for the job, man, right tool for the job.
Try to deploy Postgres on a 5000 machine cluster, with replication and failover and then get back to me. And by "failover" here I mean the entire racks or ever network segments going away with nary a hiccup in serving, no manual intervention (except for bringing up replacement nodes), and no data loss.
Then there's the issue of RDBMSs being suboptimal for straightfoward user profile storage. You have to implement a lot of things by hand. Cassandra (or BigTable) gives you a versioned, fault tolerant, scalable, multidimensional map. It's really convenient for a lot of things, but it's not a replacement for proper DBs when you need realtime aggregation or joins.
Heck, even Google used MySQL here and there for this exact reason.
I think it's really unfortunate that folks consider these a replacement for your typical DB-like scenarios. They're merely a replacement for DBs in cases where the use of DB was a kludge in the first place, and calling multidimensional maps "databases" is really a misnomer.
How the hell was it "horrible" if the economies of most of the Soviet republics in the USSR were heavily subsidized from the RSFSR's budget?
Is life great there right now? And I don't mean life is great for the top 0.5% of the country by income, that's pretty much a given, but for the common man.
Also food coupons were only caused by Perestroyka spiraling out of control, and they were given to everyone, not just CPSU members. No one knew what food rationing was since the end of WWII.
Suvorov is a notorious defector who has a massive axe to grind. I would not take his words at their face value without a boulder-sized grain of salt.
I've talked to a few ex-USSR folks at work. They say for most people life was better back then. Social safety net was stronger, there was certainty in the future, there was industry (yes, including the massive military-industrial complex), people were generally paid well, science and engineering were strong, and there was no shortage of work. In fact by law you could end up in jail for _not_ working, but the law in question was rarely applied. You basically could say, with high probability, how your life would play out. I.e. finish high school, go to the university, become engineer or a scientist, get employment, get paid 150 rubles a month as a start (+yearly bonus), get in line for government subsidized housing, eventually get an apartment, buy a crappy Soviet car, work until you're 60 years old, retire.
Sure, the opportunity to get rich wasn't there, and sure you couldn't buy much in the way of western stuff (except for perhaps jeans), but realistically, only a small percentage of people become really rich, and they weren't into "stuff" back then anyway. Many compare USSR to North Korea, but really, there's no basis for such comparison. There was no "dear leader", no cult of personality and no famine (not since the 30's anyway, but then again the US was pretty shitty in the 30's as well).
Compare it to now: Moscow is really prosperous, and the rest of the country can barely make the ends meet. Those in power steal astronomical sums of taxpayer money (remember the old apparatchiks didn't need to steal, they were set for life by the government) with impunity. Corruption is horrifying, everything is bought and sold, and in some cases you don't even need to pay - just get the right guy to make a phone call. Government pensions to the retirees are laughable and impossible to live on. Oligarchs illegally privatized people's property (through rigged auctions etc) for pennies on the dollar, and now exploit those same people, paying them barely enough to buy food. Infrastructure is crumbling. And so on and so forth.
In other words, it's pretty bad there right now. But on the other hand, the folks at least have an opportunity to leave, which wasn't the case before.
In Singapore you can end up in jail for spitting on the sidewalk, and in China you can be executed for having drugs on you. Though I'd rather not put people in jail for MJ, of course.
That map doesn't say a whole lot. It could be that the police in the "red" countries is just more efficient at catching criminals and putting them behind bars. I have a hard time believing India, or most African countries for instance, have fewer criminals per thousand of population than the US.
They actually may, seeing that the entire GUI frontend of EVERYTHING in Vista and Windows 7 is basically a multithreaded version of Direct 3D. Those "reflections" on the edges of the window frame? They're textures. And textures require mapping.
Slashdot Mirror
What no one pays attention to (and what's far, far more important) is that Microsoft also uses Facebook's web tracking data for behavioral ads targeting. All those "Like" buttons? Tracking! Each and every one reports your site visits back to Facebook, whether you click it or not, by virtue of merely showing up on the page. And Facebook has fairly low noise profile data on hundreds of millions of its customers spanning the globe. Nielsen just smokes nervously in the corner with its tiny panel of users, which everyone mines for co-visitation data when doing behavioral targeting.
What does all of this mean? It means Facebook (and by extension Microsoft) knows what sites you (and other people like you) go to, and they can determine age, gender, interests, etc even for the users on whom Facebook has no data, with fairly decent precision. In other words, whether you have a Facebook account or not, the Big Zuckerberg is watching.
As far as this "copying" - it's BS on Google's part plain and simple. They just added one more signal to their neural net, and it's ranking long tail terms similarly to Google because they don't have human data on them. That's hardly "stealing".
I would pay more attention, if Netgear was competent in their own area of expertise at least, and could create a wireless router half as good as Airport Extreme. It's freaking embarrassing when Apple sells the only decent option as far as dualband routers are concerned, and it's a side thing for them.
To some extent votes count everywhere. If everyone knows they didn't vote for the guy but the guy gets elected anyway, there's usually a revolt, and regimes generally prefer to not go there because outcome is never favorable.
You're missing the part where no one knew who the hell Putin Was just a year before, and the massive PR campaign which could be done by someone else (with oligarchs footing the bill). I would not be so sure about Putin winning a poker match, let alone a presidential election under those circumstances, if there wasn't a string of terror attacks and a small war.
From what I heard there were plenty of folks who'd take the job, and who were far more visible and far better known by the public than Putin was. Without a disaster like this, no one would have any reason to vote for the guy. He accomplished absolutely nothing worthwhile before getting elected (kinda like Obama, but I digress).
Always ask, cui bono? Who benefits?
Which doesn't mean people will vote for _him_. Some of the recent examples of corruption (which Putin 100% knew about and participated in) are truly horrifying, even by standards of the 90's. Billions of dollars just disappear in Cayman Islands and no one gets even a slap on the wrist. Au contraire, my friend, people get promoted for stealing taxpayer money.
This means a significant fraction of that money ends up in the accounts of Putin, Medvedev & co, otherwise they'd be fighting corruption like there's no tomorrow. They can't even pretend they don't know.
From what I hear, folks (particularly the 20-somethings who grew up without the Soviet baggage) are getting bored of the whole "Putin is god" mantra that's been going on there for nearly a decade. And they're the first generation that's truly free of ideology or restraint. They can really fuck things up when it comes down to it.
They have presidential elections coming up next year, and someone dug up the same playbook that brought Putin to power. As some of you may recall, in 1999 there were massive bombings in Moscow, and as a result Putin, who was literally nobody to the public just a few months before, was elected president. All it took is 24x7 rotation on TV and a tough stance on Chechen terrorists. Yeltsin resigned abruptly, Putin spent some time as his lawful successor, and then got elected by a landslide thanks to his promise to deal with the issue. If it wasn't for those bombings, I think most Russians will agree, there was no way in hell he'd get the presidency.
The whole thing is awfully suspicious. For instance, after the blast, the airport _wasn't evacuated_. This could mean incompetence on FSB's (Russian counterpart of the FBI) part, or it could mean that they _knew_ there wasn't a second bomb.
What this tells me is Putin (and folks who are behind him), is gearing up to take over the reins from Medvedev in 2012.
If you value your time more than utility of having a general purpose computing appliance, there's also FreeNAS, which is trivial to set up, and supports ZFS.
Here's what I think of Drobo: it's ridiculously overpriced for what it is. You can have an AMD-based dual core machine with 4TB of RAID5 storage and 4GB of RAM for less than a diskless Drobo would cost you. You could put Linux on it and configure RAID5 across three 2TB disks. Then you could whip up a VM in KVM and have a safe torrent / web server machine DMZd to the outside, and an extremely capable file / media server within your local subnet. All for _less_ than a diskless Drobo. Seriously, why the fuck do people buy these things?
1. Relentlessly delete crap. No point in keeping five versions of the same photo around. No point in keeping bad photos around (blurry, overexposed, etc). No point in keeping photos you'll never want to see again. This gets rid of at least 90% of photos right away.
2. Import images into Aperture. One project per month, albums within the project for events and subprojects.
3. During the year, periodically rsync the library to RAID5 array (that's in addition to TimeMachine backups every 10 days)
4. At the end of the year, move originals to an external FireWire 800 hard drive. This is pretty nifty, and I don't know if anything other than Aperture supports this feature - you still can see the photos, but at the lower resolution. Once you connect the external drive, the full versions automagically become available. Once images are copied off the hard drive, the external drive and the Aperture library gets rsync'd off to RAID5 again.\
5. An encrypted version of the full yearly backup sits on the shelf at a friend's house, in the form of a 2TB USB hard drive.
6. When viewing old pictures, delete crap that you did not delete the first time around due to not being sure it's crap.
Exponential is still pretty darn hard for large powers. Easier than brute force search, but every additional bit in key length will add to the exponent, and it's awfully easy to add bits to keys, assuming your key is not already e.g. 4096 bit long.
It doesn't matter if it's patent encumbered or not. It does matter whether it has a company behind it that could have the ammo to countersue the plaintiff. Google is such a company. As long as Google is behind Vorbis and VP8, others have far less to worry about when using these formats.
There was a period in my life where I stayed in the same job for a long time. Predictably, got merit increases every year, and they were above the cost of living, but not dramatic. Left the company, went elsewhere - 20% bump right away. Left that company, went elsewhere - another 30% bump. You don't really know what you're worth unless you offer your skills on the open market. If a company already has you and you're not looking to move, there's no incentive for them to offer you more money. They think you're content with what you get. And truth be told, I was content. I just wasn't sure I'd ever be able to buy a decent house or retire, but life was good and easy otherwise.
Several Postgres processes can't operate simultaneously on the same DB - says so right in the docs (see 8.2.19). You could conceivably hack them to do so, but you would have to prevent them from overwriting each other's changes, or keep one process in standby mode of some kind in case the other one dies.
Therefore, if one process is fucked, your shard disappears even if data files are still there. That's bad.
What exactly is not clear?
Everything is "patent encumbered", including Vorbis and Matroska. The fact that they haven't been challenged yet only speaks to their relative lack of popularity.
The question is, will there be a company with enough ammo to stand up to the challenges in court. Google is saying, yes. They'll go to court for WebM, and they have a decent chance of winning since they now own (and license for free to you, including reference, open source codec and hardware implementations) a bunch of patents dating back as far as late 90's that make MPEG LA and Fraunhofer toothless against them.
For years Slashdot seems to have yearned for a wider adoption of Vorbis and Theora. Theora didn't quite cut it, so Google replaced it with VP8, and has thrown its weight (and its patent portfolio) behind Vorbis as well. But since it's Google, now Slashdot seems to support a royalty and patent encumbered h264 instead of pining for WebM (which is VP8 + Vorbis wrapped into a Matroska container) to win, for which there's a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty free license on everything, including fucking _ASIC designs_. WTF people? Do you have no principles?
You still haven't described how you'd implement sharding (at which point with most realistic relational schemas you're likely to lose the ability to do joins), load balancing and transparent, reliable failover. SANs don't free you from the need to do DB replication, since several processes can't write to the same set of files without massive synchronization overhead, so you're in a losing position right from the start, SANs notwithstanding.
But even assuming you got all of this to work, you're still doing it on high end hardware, whereas Cassandra can do the same on bare motherboards with cheap SATA drives velcroed on (which is how FB uses it), at a fraction of the cost, with higher reliability (since it was built for shitty hardware), and possibly with higher per-node performance.
Right tool for the job, man, right tool for the job.
Try to deploy Postgres on a 5000 machine cluster, with replication and failover and then get back to me. And by "failover" here I mean the entire racks or ever network segments going away with nary a hiccup in serving, no manual intervention (except for bringing up replacement nodes), and no data loss.
Then there's the issue of RDBMSs being suboptimal for straightfoward user profile storage. You have to implement a lot of things by hand. Cassandra (or BigTable) gives you a versioned, fault tolerant, scalable, multidimensional map. It's really convenient for a lot of things, but it's not a replacement for proper DBs when you need realtime aggregation or joins.
Heck, even Google used MySQL here and there for this exact reason.
I think it's really unfortunate that folks consider these a replacement for your typical DB-like scenarios. They're merely a replacement for DBs in cases where the use of DB was a kludge in the first place, and calling multidimensional maps "databases" is really a misnomer.
The killer feature is that it actually horizontally scalable and fault-tolerant out of the box.
You've just described BigTable. :-)
How the hell was it "horrible" if the economies of most of the Soviet republics in the USSR were heavily subsidized from the RSFSR's budget?
Is life great there right now? And I don't mean life is great for the top 0.5% of the country by income, that's pretty much a given, but for the common man.
Also food coupons were only caused by Perestroyka spiraling out of control, and they were given to everyone, not just CPSU members. No one knew what food rationing was since the end of WWII.
Suvorov is a notorious defector who has a massive axe to grind. I would not take his words at their face value without a boulder-sized grain of salt.
I've talked to a few ex-USSR folks at work. They say for most people life was better back then. Social safety net was stronger, there was certainty in the future, there was industry (yes, including the massive military-industrial complex), people were generally paid well, science and engineering were strong, and there was no shortage of work. In fact by law you could end up in jail for _not_ working, but the law in question was rarely applied. You basically could say, with high probability, how your life would play out. I.e. finish high school, go to the university, become engineer or a scientist, get employment, get paid 150 rubles a month as a start (+yearly bonus), get in line for government subsidized housing, eventually get an apartment, buy a crappy Soviet car, work until you're 60 years old, retire.
Sure, the opportunity to get rich wasn't there, and sure you couldn't buy much in the way of western stuff (except for perhaps jeans), but realistically, only a small percentage of people become really rich, and they weren't into "stuff" back then anyway. Many compare USSR to North Korea, but really, there's no basis for such comparison. There was no "dear leader", no cult of personality and no famine (not since the 30's anyway, but then again the US was pretty shitty in the 30's as well).
Compare it to now: Moscow is really prosperous, and the rest of the country can barely make the ends meet. Those in power steal astronomical sums of taxpayer money (remember the old apparatchiks didn't need to steal, they were set for life by the government) with impunity. Corruption is horrifying, everything is bought and sold, and in some cases you don't even need to pay - just get the right guy to make a phone call. Government pensions to the retirees are laughable and impossible to live on. Oligarchs illegally privatized people's property (through rigged auctions etc) for pennies on the dollar, and now exploit those same people, paying them barely enough to buy food. Infrastructure is crumbling. And so on and so forth.
In other words, it's pretty bad there right now. But on the other hand, the folks at least have an opportunity to leave, which wasn't the case before.
In Singapore you can end up in jail for spitting on the sidewalk, and in China you can be executed for having drugs on you. Though I'd rather not put people in jail for MJ, of course.
That map doesn't say a whole lot. It could be that the police in the "red" countries is just more efficient at catching criminals and putting them behind bars. I have a hard time believing India, or most African countries for instance, have fewer criminals per thousand of population than the US.
They actually may, seeing that the entire GUI frontend of EVERYTHING in Vista and Windows 7 is basically a multithreaded version of Direct 3D. Those "reflections" on the edges of the window frame? They're textures. And textures require mapping.