I've been looking at/. less and less because it just isn't as useful / relevant for me as it was years ago.
But I couldn't sleep, it's 0 Dark 30, and I thought, Why not look at what's happening on/.?
Florian Mueller? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!
I won't mourn the passing of/. like I did Groklaw, because even on it's best day/. was never as good as PJ on a bad one. As long as you're on a roll, why not invite Larry "Yes, I am an asshole" Ellison to give us instruction in the care and feeding of an Open Source project?
But seriously... Florian Mueller? On patents and copyright? I mean, Florian. Fucking. Mueller? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!
My understanding is that the visual aid for 28L is PAPI, not VASI. Unfortunately, it and the ILS have been out of service since early June because they are moving the threshold for 28L northward, farther away from the seawall. With both ILS and PAPI out, you truly are making a "visual approach".
Speaking as an old Army ATC, I cannot imagine why they didn't move the PAPI at the same time they moved the threshold. It doesn't take that long to recalibrate it. ILS does take longer, but an in-place PAPI is a powerful aid to staying on-path and on-slope.
My wife and I still read the local rag (The Press Democrat) because, although we've read most of the national and international news online 1 or 2 (or sometimes even 3) days before, there are stories in Sonoma County (and parts north) that simply don't show up anywhere else. It used to be owned by the NY Times organization, but it was recently bought by a group of local investors who are emphasizing the Local News aspect.
We might switch to the electronic version of it, but we will not lose our need to know what's happening in our own community.
Yes, Larry's minions may have their hands on the old MySQL code, but there's this little project called MariaDB that is MySQL++++. It is a direct, bit-for-bit drop-in, and it's faster and has more features and they even do bug fixes for (gasp!) free. Admittedly it's run by a guy who probably doesn't know that much about MySQL, but he seems to be muddling through.
Oh, and there's a company called Percona that actually does support for MariaDB, adds features, and then feeds them back to the MariaDB community, but that's clearly an unsustainable model.
There are also a few people out there who would suggest that moving "downmarket" from Oracle to Postgres will actually feel like upmarket. And it's supported by professional groups on six continents.
Actually, it was "Working Girl" (Harrison Ford, Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver). Apparently Abraham stole it and put his name on it.
Reference needed. Saying that someone "stole" something is a fairly strong statement.
The story concept of one person's idea being stolen by someone else is not exactly new with Kevin Wade's 1988 script. It's been a while since I've seen either of these movies, but the connection between them seems thin at best.
Agreed. I haven't closed my account, but I stopped contributing months ago.
Some of the well-asked open ended questions led to answers that were useful and thought provoking. Now it's turned into "How do I add 2+2 in <insert language>?".
Heck, these days performance seems to be dominated by lock contention, given the distributed nature of everything.
This, totally this.
I just rolled 40 years in this ridiculous industry, and the one thing that keeps coming up over... and over... and over again is that the total throughput of a system is often controlled by one or two locks / blocks (thread/process, disk, network, ear wax, etc.) buried deep, deep inside. You can micro-optimize code to your heart's content, but when you finally get around to profiling what's actually happening in the system that didn't scale from 100 hits/sec to 1000 hits/sec (or whatever) you arrive at an "Oh, shit!" moment when you realize that an assumption you made 6 months ago (Hey! This will never be a problem.) is now biting you in the ass.
ROFLCOPTER! Being the Geezer Geek® in our family/neighborhood I get the calls for... almost everything. I had one woman (who shall remain nameless (except she's my older sister)) who complained of all sorts of horrible things happening. Turns out it was an out-of-disk and there was a huge number of ~whatever files all over her filesystem. Cleaning them all up gave her about 40% free disk.
Webfaction.com - $9.95 monthly (cheaper with longer commitment).
Run by serious techies. Nginx as a frontend-server, Apache/whatever you want on the backend. MySQL, Postgres, whatever for a DB. Python (Django is a one-click install), Ruby, whatever. Long-running processes. Cron jobs. Better-than-average admin panel.
All in all, a great hosting company for smaller sites.
I'm not a shill, just a happy customer. I have several customers' websites there.
A little more specifically: if there was prior art pertaining to Apple's patent, then the patent itself can be held to be invalid. If the patent is invalid, then there cannot be infringement. That extra step in the middle is important.
When we bought our house (2003) the guy helping me thought I was insane to pull dual CAT5e to each room for phone/data (we have a great crawl space) and 8(!) CAT5e to my new, detached office. But we're in Sebastopol, CA (in Russian, Sebastopol means "gopher") and the little f*ckers have already chewed into the Schedule 40 PVC conduit and destroyed 4 of the 8 CATe cables.
You can never have too many extra cables / conduits. Cable is cheap, retrenching is expensive.
One step beyond this: Use Ultra VNC's Single Click mode (free). Set up the config file to automatically connect to your listening VNC port. I've fixed email in Paris, my sister (and her machine) in Tucson, and a niece in Sydney, Australia. All they do is download a 200KB EXE file from my website. I even have Office 1 and Office 2, so if I'm in my wife's office they just click on that.
The whole thing takes less than ab out 30 minutes to setup and no one else ever has to deal with anything complicated.
The first thing that came to mind was a classic Cold War movie called Seven Days in May (1964). There was a shadowy group within the Pentagon called ECOMCON. Watched the movie and see if any parallels jump out at you.
My wife and I have dealt with all 4 of our parents passing away, and the one thing that is certain is that as soon as the bank/brokerage/whatever knows that the primary account holder is dead, they go hypervigilant. Either have the various accounts and safety deposit boxes in joint ownership, with rights of survivorship, or have unambiguous beneficiaries set for all for your/their accounts.
The courts can take months or years to get things straightened out, but if you need the money to keep paying the mortgage on their house you may not have that much time.
One last thing, make sure that they have given Medical Power of Attorney and Full Power of Attorney to one(!) trusted child / friend while they are still legally competent to do so! Almost worse than losing your parents altogether is watching a 6-way train wreck happen as people begin fighting over the spoils... before there are any spoils to fight over.
The most over-the-top DB God I know started in Pick-land (ca 1972?). Although he does (is forced to?) use SQL nowadays, he thinks in ways that do not come out of any SQL DBA handbook. As a result he gets DBMSs to do things that are... unnatural.
He is currently doing some data-cubing stuff for us that I didn't think could be done with something less than a DOD budget. He says his touchstone is thinking in Pick and then 'translating' to SQL.
I still think that the 2 missing courses from any CS degree program are 1) how to debug, and 2) history of computing.
When I left Tymshare (as an employee back in 1978) I told them they could call for help, but that the amount I would charge was based on who had been working on (i.e. f*cking with) the code since I left. I quoted $50/hour (remember, 1978), but there was one person who was a six-dimensional train wreck, and I said if I had to fix any of his bugs it would be $10/line of code.
Sure enough, about 9 months later they called. It was Train Wreak Guy® and it cost them about $30,000 for 3 days of my time to de-f*ck the database code.
Because I had told them ahead of time what it would cost there was no argument. I got my check and they were happy.
You must know my sister! She went on for 45 minutes about what she did and did not want, but then said it just *had* to be available in pink! I was thinking of getting her a cheapo Toshiba and can of spray paint.
I don't know where this "30 minutes" number came from. Maybe it was 30 minutes today, but all together it was at least 2 or 3 days, maybe even 4.
It's interesting to note that the only reason it took them that long was because the jury foreman was the only hold out in favor of Oracle. Apparently he was the one responsible for many of the questions that the jury kept sending to the judge.
Anyway, glad this is (almost) over. The only real thing left is for Judge Alsup to determine if the APIs are copyrightable at all. My personal bet is that he will rule that they are not and that this will drive a stake through the heart of Oracle and (hopefully) Larry Ellison.
But as PJ at GrokLaw keeps telling us: never make a bet on a legal ruling.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been looking at /. less and less because it just isn't as useful / relevant for me as it was years ago.
But I couldn't sleep, it's 0 Dark 30, and I thought, Why not look at what's happening on /.?
Florian Mueller? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!
I won't mourn the passing of /. like I did Groklaw, because even on it's best day /. was never as good as PJ on a bad one. As long as you're on a roll, why not invite Larry "Yes, I am an asshole" Ellison to give us instruction in the care and feeding of an Open Source project?
But seriously ... Florian Mueller? On patents and copyright?
I mean, Florian. Fucking. Mueller?
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!
My understanding is that the visual aid for 28L is PAPI, not VASI. Unfortunately, it and the ILS have been out of service since early June because they are moving the threshold for 28L northward, farther away from the seawall. With both ILS and PAPI out, you truly are making a "visual approach".
Speaking as an old Army ATC, I cannot imagine why they didn't move the PAPI at the same time they moved the threshold. It doesn't take that long to recalibrate it. ILS does take longer, but an in-place PAPI is a powerful aid to staying on-path and on-slope.
My wife and I still read the local rag (The Press Democrat) because, although we've read most of the national and international news online 1 or 2 (or sometimes even 3) days before, there are stories in Sonoma County (and parts north) that simply don't show up anywhere else. It used to be owned by the NY Times organization, but it was recently bought by a group of local investors who are emphasizing the Local News aspect.
We might switch to the electronic version of it, but we will not lose our need to know what's happening in our own community.
Yes, Larry's minions may have their hands on the old MySQL code, but there's this little project called MariaDB that is MySQL++++. It is a direct, bit-for-bit drop-in, and it's faster and has more features and they even do bug fixes for (gasp!) free. Admittedly it's run by a guy who probably doesn't know that much about MySQL, but he seems to be muddling through.
Oh, and there's a company called Percona that actually does support for MariaDB, adds features, and then feeds them back to the MariaDB community, but that's clearly an unsustainable model.
There are also a few people out there who would suggest that moving "downmarket" from Oracle to Postgres will actually feel like upmarket. And it's supported by professional groups on six continents.
Since this is an OSS project, can you suggest any tools similar to Understand that don't cost $995?
The only thing I could find was source navigator NG, but I have zero experience with it.
Actually, it was "Working Girl" (Harrison Ford, Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver). Apparently Abraham stole it and put his name on it.
Reference needed. Saying that someone "stole" something is a fairly strong statement.
The story concept of one person's idea being stolen by someone else is not exactly new with Kevin Wade's 1988 script.
It's been a while since I've seen either of these movies, but the connection between them seems thin at best.
Ah. We seem to have a StackExchange Moderator in our midst.
I note that, just like the mods that delete 4 year-old, highly viewed/rated posts, this one chooses to act as an AC.
Agreed. I haven't closed my account, but I stopped contributing months ago.
Some of the well-asked open ended questions led to answers that were useful and thought provoking. Now it's turned into "How do I add 2+2 in <insert language>?".
Heck, these days performance seems to be dominated by lock contention, given the distributed nature of everything.
This, totally this.
I just rolled 40 years in this ridiculous industry, and the one thing that keeps coming up over ... and over ... and over again is that the total throughput of a system is often controlled by one or two locks / blocks (thread/process, disk, network, ear wax, etc.) buried deep, deep inside. You can micro-optimize code to your heart's content, but when you finally get around to profiling what's actually happening in the system that didn't scale from 100 hits/sec to 1000 hits/sec (or whatever) you arrive at an "Oh, shit!" moment when you realize that an assumption you made 6 months ago (Hey! This will never be a problem.) is now biting you in the ass.
mellow dramatic twist of fate!
I don't know if this was deliberate or not, but it is now in my Phrase List and I hunger for a chance to use it.
This!
I checked the codes and they actually do mean that.
Elegant, classic, subtle, in-your-face.
+10!
ROFLCOPTER! Being the Geezer Geek® in our family/neighborhood I get the calls for ... almost everything. I had one woman (who shall remain nameless (except she's my older sister)) who complained of all sorts of horrible things happening. Turns out it was an out-of-disk and there was a huge number of ~whatever files all over her filesystem. Cleaning them all up gave her about 40% free disk.
Automated software, random idiots ... same thing really.
Shouldn't that be: Automattic software?
Webfaction.com - $9.95 monthly (cheaper with longer commitment).
Run by serious techies. Nginx as a frontend-server, Apache/whatever you want on the backend. MySQL, Postgres, whatever for a DB. Python (Django is a one-click install), Ruby, whatever. Long-running processes. Cron jobs. Better-than-average admin panel.
All in all, a great hosting company for smaller sites.
I'm not a shill, just a happy customer. I have several customers' websites there.
A little more specifically: if there was prior art pertaining to Apple's patent, then the patent itself can be held to be invalid. If the patent is invalid, then there cannot be infringement. That extra step in the middle is important.
When we bought our house (2003) the guy helping me thought I was insane to pull dual CAT5e to each room for phone/data (we have a great crawl space) and 8(!) CAT5e to my new, detached office. But we're in Sebastopol, CA (in Russian, Sebastopol means "gopher") and the little f*ckers have already chewed into the Schedule 40 PVC conduit and destroyed 4 of the 8 CATe cables.
You can never have too many extra cables / conduits. Cable is cheap, retrenching is expensive.
One step beyond this: Use Ultra VNC's Single Click mode (free). Set up the config file to automatically connect to your listening VNC port. I've fixed email in Paris, my sister (and her machine) in Tucson, and a niece in Sydney, Australia. All they do is download a 200KB EXE file from my website. I even have Office 1 and Office 2, so if I'm in my wife's office they just click on that. The whole thing takes less than ab out 30 minutes to setup and no one else ever has to deal with anything complicated.
The first thing that came to mind was a classic Cold War movie called Seven Days in May (1964). There was a shadowy group within the Pentagon called ECOMCON. Watched the movie and see if any parallels jump out at you.
This.
My wife and I have dealt with all 4 of our parents passing away, and the one thing that is certain is that as soon as the bank/brokerage/whatever knows that the primary account holder is dead, they go hypervigilant. Either have the various accounts and safety deposit boxes in joint ownership, with rights of survivorship, or have unambiguous beneficiaries set for all for your/their accounts.
The courts can take months or years to get things straightened out, but if you need the money to keep paying the mortgage on their house you may not have that much time.
One last thing, make sure that they have given Medical Power of Attorney and Full Power of Attorney to one(!) trusted child / friend while they are still legally competent to do so! Almost worse than losing your parents altogether is watching a 6-way train wreck happen as people begin fighting over the spoils ... before there are any spoils to fight over.
It can get ugly. Be prepared.
The most over-the-top DB God I know started in Pick-land (ca 1972?). Although he does (is forced to?) use SQL nowadays, he thinks in ways that do not come out of any SQL DBA handbook. As a result he gets DBMSs to do things that are ... unnatural.
He is currently doing some data-cubing stuff for us that I didn't think could be done with something less than a DOD budget. He says his touchstone is thinking in Pick and then 'translating' to SQL.
I still think that the 2 missing courses from any CS degree program are 1) how to debug, and 2) history of computing.
I snorted coffee through my nose when I saw: I read the internet for the articles.
When I left Tymshare (as an employee back in 1978) I told them they could call for help, but that the amount I would charge was based on who had been working on (i.e. f*cking with) the code since I left. I quoted $50/hour (remember, 1978), but there was one person who was a six-dimensional train wreck, and I said if I had to fix any of his bugs it would be $10/line of code.
Sure enough, about 9 months later they called. It was Train Wreak Guy® and it cost them about $30,000 for 3 days of my time to de-f*ck the database code.
Because I had told them ahead of time what it would cost there was no argument. I got my check and they were happy.
You must know my sister! She went on for 45 minutes about what she did and did not want, but then said it just *had* to be available in pink! I was thinking of getting her a cheapo Toshiba and can of spray paint.
It's interesting to note that the only reason it took them that long was because the jury foreman was the only hold out in favor of Oracle. Apparently he was the one responsible for many of the questions that the jury kept sending to the judge.
Anyway, glad this is (almost) over. The only real thing left is for Judge Alsup to determine if the APIs are copyrightable at all. My personal bet is that he will rule that they are not and that this will drive a stake through the heart of Oracle and (hopefully) Larry Ellison.
But as PJ at GrokLaw keeps telling us: never make a bet on a legal ruling.
I'm about 2 blocks south of town and I figure we'll see this in a few decades or so.