Pretty much useless, unless they figure out a way to expand RAM. 8-16GB of RAM would boost the number of things you could use this for tremendously. Funny they should mention NLP. NLP tasks typically deal with very large datasets. You ain't gonna be able to do much if you can only allocate less than 50 megs per core.
I looked at the pricing and could not stomach it. A full blown Athlon 64 dual core box with 2GB of RAM costs less than a NAS box with no disks. And it can do a heck of a lot more. So that's what I ended up doing - bought an "energy efficient" version of Athlon 64, a mobo with integrated graphics, and stuffed it with SATA hard drives. RAID5, web server, file server, torrent, I even run scientific computations on it every now and then. I was running a VIA Epia box before it, but that one needed a SATA card to run RAID, since it only had two SATA ports. Best of all, I know that if the box goes titsup, I'll just replace the mobo and it will be able to run my RAID array again. The same can't be guaranteed with NAS boxes, since they use "proprietary" algorithms.
Unless your project is 100% exciting to everyone on the team, the answer is, you won't be able to manage it without adding some junior programmers. A dude with 10 years of experience and multiple death marches under his belt will simply find hard to get excited about the mundane. That's not what he's there for. He's there to take on the big challenges, design stuff that works and implement it in a way that he's not embarrased by it five years from now.
The corollary is either/or: 1. Most of your project must be "exciting" to developers on the team. Very few projects qualify. In this case you can spread the shitty bits around so that people are less annoyed by them. 2. You have to have a significant contingent of junior employees who will do the shitty bits that don't matter (but don't forget to throw them a bone and let them do something interesting as well).
Most importantly, show appreciation for the work people do, whether they're senior or junior. I've been in the industry for well over a decade, and you won't believe how much easier it is to motivate people if you just say thanks to each of them personally every now and then, and maybe slip in a perk here and there. For reasons I don't understand, a lot of managers focus a lot more on cracking the whip. Big mistake, if you want people to stick around and actually produce something decent.
>> Microsoft plans to address with Windows 7 and that >> Apple is likely to soon upgrade its platform for as well.
Apple will likely release TWO versions of Mac OS X, before Windows 7 even comes out (and by "comes out" I mean _really_ comes out - SP1, not the beta that they call their final release). Given that Apple ships SSD laptops already, I'll be STUNNED if Snow Leopard doesn't contain SSD optimizations.
You don't become a Nobel Prize winner by being stupid and not knowing how to play "the game". You should see the level of politics in academia - Washington DC will be a piece of cake for this guy.
Why the heck does a drive that has uniform, low latency random access would even NEED NCQ? NCQ was designed to optimize the seek order in mechanical drives with heads.
It doesn't matter. Method is not separable from the machine in this case from legal standpoint. That's why a lot of patents mention "an apparatus to do blah blah blah".
Put another way, hitting a nail with a hammer is obvious. Hitting a nail with a hammer in a way that does something non-trivial is not.
Algorithms are not patentable in many countries. So what people do to patent them is they say that they apply for a patent on a "computer system running the algorithm described". Which is a reasonable thing to do since it's pretty hard to run algorithms on a sheet of paper these days.
Why should I respect him as a businessman? He missed the Internet. He missed search. He missed ad-funded business model. He missed digital music. He let Win Mobile to stagnate for years. He's overseen the Vista debacle. He got into Xbox business and sunk $6B into it so far with no prospect of ever recouping that loss.
A smaller company would have died after one of these.
It's kinda hard to fuck up much worse while running a company with unlimited financial resources, employing some of the brightest minds on the planet. That said, Steve Ballmer has been outdoing BillG's fuckups in every respect.
I respect the guy as a philantropist, hats off to him for that effort. But as a businessman in high tech? Not so much.
This is the excuse I heard from unsuccessful people who think they can be successful just by putting in the time and effort.
Truth is, if you're doing something on your own, being timing is crucial. eBay was in the right place at the right time. They weren't particularly talented and now you can't do another eBay. Same with PayPal. Same with Google. Same with Yahoo. Same with just about any truly successful company out there. Perhaps the most vivid example of this is early Microsoft. Their success was built on the software they didn't even write.
No matter how much time and effort you put in today, you will not replicate the success of those companies in their respective niches. Solely because you're not in the right place at the right time.
So you think that success of Bill Gates is attributable to skill, not to the fact that he was in the right place at the right time to trick IBM into distributing the operating system he was in the right place and at the right time to buy for $50K?
Success is being in the right place at the right time. That's 50% of it. The remaining 50% are 30% hard work and 20% talent. The point being, unless you're in the right place at the right time and you see the opportunity, your hard work and talent are unlikely to pay off.
Gruber will come up with a justification even if Steve Jobs urinates in his face and shits on his head. Among all fanbois, John is fanboi par excellence.
The new UI looks like KDE 4 to me, with the wrong bits of OS X thrown in. That said, there's no doubt it will change by the time they release it, so I'll reserve my judgment.
>> They manage to take simple concept, and bury under >> layer upon layer of useless complexity
This is a very astute observation. As a MSFT veteran, I can tell you why this happens. Microsoft as a company does not value simplicity. Simplicity in design is perceived as a lack of technical skill and therefore considered a weakness. It has to be uber-super-insane architecture starting right from V1, and it has to be so complex that it'll only be useful by V3, and even then only by people who already know a lot of the other equally grotesque Windows APIs. Otherwise people won't get promoted.
The most recent and most dramatic example of gross overengineering so far is Avalon, AKA WPF. I bet the same is true of Azure, knowing that it comes from Windows and there are a bunch of very senior people in the org. Which is why I predict that it will be an epic fail.
You see, Ted, anus is not like a big truck. It's more like a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Find an old CRT monitor, put your GSM phone on the screen when it's on and then call it. Observe the distortions on the screen. Should probably work with CRT TV's also, I haven't tried.
Now, if after a while FAS reverses its decision, we will know that Google bribed the officials. Nearly any problem in Russia (or in the US, for that matter) can be resolved with a large enough bag of money.
That is so. It better be equal to Masters, since most schools over there require that you study for at least 5 years before they issue you a diploma. 6 years is not uncommon either. Then there's the issue of high schools. If you compare Russian high school with US one, grade by grade, US kids are 1.5 to 2 years behind. This means little to no remedial education is necessary once they start their higher education. And all good schools require applicants to pass entrance exams. Simply completing a test is not enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much useless, unless they figure out a way to expand RAM. 8-16GB of RAM would boost the number of things you could use this for tremendously. Funny they should mention NLP. NLP tasks typically deal with very large datasets. You ain't gonna be able to do much if you can only allocate less than 50 megs per core.
I looked at the pricing and could not stomach it. A full blown Athlon 64 dual core box with 2GB of RAM costs less than a NAS box with no disks. And it can do a heck of a lot more. So that's what I ended up doing - bought an "energy efficient" version of Athlon 64, a mobo with integrated graphics, and stuffed it with SATA hard drives. RAID5, web server, file server, torrent, I even run scientific computations on it every now and then. I was running a VIA Epia box before it, but that one needed a SATA card to run RAID, since it only had two SATA ports. Best of all, I know that if the box goes titsup, I'll just replace the mobo and it will be able to run my RAID array again. The same can't be guaranteed with NAS boxes, since they use "proprietary" algorithms.
Unless your project is 100% exciting to everyone on the team, the answer is, you won't be able to manage it without adding some junior programmers. A dude with 10 years of experience and multiple death marches under his belt will simply find hard to get excited about the mundane. That's not what he's there for. He's there to take on the big challenges, design stuff that works and implement it in a way that he's not embarrased by it five years from now.
The corollary is either/or:
1. Most of your project must be "exciting" to developers on the team. Very few projects qualify. In this case you can spread the shitty bits around so that people are less annoyed by them.
2. You have to have a significant contingent of junior employees who will do the shitty bits that don't matter (but don't forget to throw them a bone and let them do something interesting as well).
Most importantly, show appreciation for the work people do, whether they're senior or junior. I've been in the industry for well over a decade, and you won't believe how much easier it is to motivate people if you just say thanks to each of them personally every now and then, and maybe slip in a perk here and there. For reasons I don't understand, a lot of managers focus a lot more on cracking the whip. Big mistake, if you want people to stick around and actually produce something decent.
>> Microsoft plans to address with Windows 7 and that
>> Apple is likely to soon upgrade its platform for as well.
Apple will likely release TWO versions of Mac OS X, before Windows 7 even comes out (and by "comes out" I mean _really_ comes out - SP1, not the beta that they call their final release). Given that Apple ships SSD laptops already, I'll be STUNNED if Snow Leopard doesn't contain SSD optimizations.
You don't become a Nobel Prize winner by being stupid and not knowing how to play "the game". You should see the level of politics in academia - Washington DC will be a piece of cake for this guy.
to reprogram the missile guidance systems with GPS coordinates of Dell headquarters. Do it. DO IT NAO!
Why the heck does a drive that has uniform, low latency random access would even NEED NCQ? NCQ was designed to optimize the seek order in mechanical drives with heads.
It doesn't matter. Method is not separable from the machine in this case from legal standpoint. That's why a lot of patents mention "an apparatus to do blah blah blah".
Put another way, hitting a nail with a hammer is obvious. Hitting a nail with a hammer in a way that does something non-trivial is not.
Algorithms are not patentable in many countries. So what people do to patent them is they say that they apply for a patent on a "computer system running the algorithm described". Which is a reasonable thing to do since it's pretty hard to run algorithms on a sheet of paper these days.
Why should I respect him as a businessman? He missed the Internet. He missed search. He missed ad-funded business model. He missed digital music. He let Win Mobile to stagnate for years. He's overseen the Vista debacle. He got into Xbox business and sunk $6B into it so far with no prospect of ever recouping that loss.
A smaller company would have died after one of these.
It's kinda hard to fuck up much worse while running a company with unlimited financial resources, employing some of the brightest minds on the planet. That said, Steve Ballmer has been outdoing BillG's fuckups in every respect.
I respect the guy as a philantropist, hats off to him for that effort. But as a businessman in high tech? Not so much.
This is the excuse I heard from unsuccessful people who think they can be successful just by putting in the time and effort.
Truth is, if you're doing something on your own, being timing is crucial. eBay was in the right place at the right time. They weren't particularly talented and now you can't do another eBay. Same with PayPal. Same with Google. Same with Yahoo. Same with just about any truly successful company out there. Perhaps the most vivid example of this is early Microsoft. Their success was built on the software they didn't even write.
No matter how much time and effort you put in today, you will not replicate the success of those companies in their respective niches. Solely because you're not in the right place at the right time.
So you think that success of Bill Gates is attributable to skill, not to the fact that he was in the right place at the right time to trick IBM into distributing the operating system he was in the right place and at the right time to buy for $50K?
Success is being in the right place at the right time. That's 50% of it. The remaining 50% are 30% hard work and 20% talent. The point being, unless you're in the right place at the right time and you see the opportunity, your hard work and talent are unlikely to pay off.
that the press has enough sense to favor a sane candidate with a sane VP choice, instead of a cranky, geriatric dude with batshit insane VP.
I use LINQ almost exclusively in two ways:
1. To access stored procedures
2. To do SQL-like queries on in-memory collections
It works GREAT for both.
Gruber will come up with a justification even if Steve Jobs urinates in his face and shits on his head. Among all fanbois, John is fanboi par excellence.
The new UI looks like KDE 4 to me, with the wrong bits of OS X thrown in. That said, there's no doubt it will change by the time they release it, so I'll reserve my judgment.
>> They manage to take simple concept, and bury under
>> layer upon layer of useless complexity
This is a very astute observation. As a MSFT veteran, I can tell you why this happens. Microsoft as a company does not value simplicity. Simplicity in design is perceived as a lack of technical skill and therefore considered a weakness. It has to be uber-super-insane architecture starting right from V1, and it has to be so complex that it'll only be useful by V3, and even then only by people who already know a lot of the other equally grotesque Windows APIs. Otherwise people won't get promoted.
The most recent and most dramatic example of gross overengineering so far is Avalon, AKA WPF. I bet the same is true of Azure, knowing that it comes from Windows and there are a bunch of very senior people in the org. Which is why I predict that it will be an epic fail.
You see, Ted, anus is not like a big truck. It's more like a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
* only the first sentence is (partially) mine. :-)
Find an old CRT monitor, put your GSM phone on the screen when it's on and then call it. Observe the distortions on the screen. Should probably work with CRT TV's also, I haven't tried.
Now, if after a while FAS reverses its decision, we will know that Google bribed the officials. Nearly any problem in Russia (or in the US, for that matter) can be resolved with a large enough bag of money.
Um, no. Flash works with 64 bit Firefox. I don't know if it did before, but it most certainly does work now through nspluginwrapper.
Stupid, lazy, gullible, with a huge sense of entitlement - that's how 95% of Russians perceive Americans. Sad but true.
Once they start => once Russian kids start. I fail at pronoun agreement.
That is so. It better be equal to Masters, since most schools over there require that you study for at least 5 years before they issue you a diploma. 6 years is not uncommon either. Then there's the issue of high schools. If you compare Russian high school with US one, grade by grade, US kids are 1.5 to 2 years behind. This means little to no remedial education is necessary once they start their higher education. And all good schools require applicants to pass entrance exams. Simply completing a test is not enough.