It's been my experience that hard drives will either fail within a year or two, or will last quite a long time.
Although I know from an engineering standpoint, that old drives would appear to be more prone to failure, I've observed that drive failures tend to be randomly distributed events. In other words, a new drive may be just as likely to fail as an old drive -- it's just a matter of odds and time.
Swapping out an old drive for a new one does not even necessarily reduce the risk of failure. Many drives fail in their first months of operation. QA certainly isn't what it used to be.
If you're this concerned about the integrity of your data, you should be making frequent backups and/or using a mirrored RAID setup. With RAID you don't need to worry about drives aging and swapping them in and out, because you lose nothing when a drive fails, allowing you to wait until it does so, eliminating any guesswork. When a drive fails, you replace it, and in the meantime the spare picks up the slack. As long as you've got a clean power source, and replace the dead drive in a timely manner, the odds of the other drive failing in the interim are miniscule. (If you're *really* worried, you can jump up to a 3 or 4 drive configuration, although at that point, you should probably be considering some sort of tape backup solution instead to cut out the power supply as a variable)
In other words, don't sweat it. Keep an eye on the SMART data, and use RAID, and for all intents and purposes, you can sleep soundly at night.
Target has a few of those -- I believe there's another one in Chicago on the landing approach to O'Hare.
This one's on the approach to LaGuardia in NYC (on a completely unrelated note, if you look on the map, it's surrounded almost entirely by water, making it a rather unnerving landing as a passenger)
I'm sorry, but your comparisons just don't make any sense.
If you're going to compare riding in an Amtrak train to driving, then you'd better be driving a 1970s Ford Pinto on an unmaintained dirt road. Given the sad state of funding for rail transit at the national level, any comparisons are simply invalid.
Truck transportation also strikes me as by far the least efficent method you could possibly have for moving goods from one place to another over long distances. You don't need interstates for the "last-mile" delivery from a rail hub to the final recipient.
Tropicana's Juice Trains are a great example of freight done right.
A 50mm/1.8 lens is a *requirement* for anybody who wants to take photography remotely seriously.
Canon's 50mm/1.8 is their cheapest lens ($80), is among the 'sharpest' lenses they offer, and has one the widest maximum apertures offered. All at a very useful focal length. The lens itself is tiny (easily fits in a jacket pocket), which makes it great for travel.
Although I don't have direct experience with it, I've heard the same things about Nikon's 50mm prime.
The main caveat, however, is that you do get what you pay for in a few respecsts. 50mm primes are cheap to make, because geometrically speaking, producing an image from a 50mm lens requires very little glass, and few moving (focus) elements, so the optical quality is guarunteed to be excellent as above. Unfortunately, to drive the lens down to the insanely low price point, corners get cut in terms of the lens housing and the AF motor. You can drop a few hundred bucks for a version with an ultrasonic motor and metal housing (and likely an additional f-stop). If these things matter to you *that* much, you shouldn't mind the extra cost:-)
Although I'm going to agree with you on all of those points, I am going to chime in and say that T-Max is one of the biggest things I miss about film photography.
For one, shooting at ISO 3200 gives you razor-sharp results in almost any light conditions. Shooting digital at ISO 1600 in low-light produces noisy images, of which 3/4 are normally unusable. Film grain is preferable over sensor noise any day.
As far as films go, T-Max is pretty odd stuff. The range of light frequencies it responds to is quite different than most other B&W films, and it even responds well into the IR range. The dynamic range is excellent, and yet the photos are sharp and contrast-y.
Dynamic range (the range between the brightest and darkest portions of an image) is the biggest problem currently plaguing DSLRs, and I think we can look forward to the next generation of sensors offering far greater dynamic range, hopefully comprable to film.
That said, I shoot entirely digital these days. I don't miss paying for film, and certainly don't miss paying for processing.
Certain shoes (not necessarily [in]expensive ones) can cause you to over/under-pronate, which in turn can lead to knee/ankle/shin problems down the road. If your feet are hitting the ground at a bad angle, you're going to get injured. If you're able to run barefoot, your feet are likely more suited to it than the average person is.
Any experienced runner can relate to a particularly bad pair of shoes they've owned. I know my worst pair definitely wasn't the cheapest.
You just have to buy whatever fits you the best. For some people, this is inexpensive, and for others, it can cost quite a bit.
Chernobyl was after all one of the scarier designs in the USSR. Most of those have been phased out.
You're right that the RBMK reactor design that Chernobyl was based around is inherently dangerous (ie. if the coolant is removed, the reaction will continue to occur unless drastic countermeasures are implemented).
You are wrong, however, in assuming that the design's been phased out. According to Wikipedia, 13 RBMK reactors were built. Four have been shut down, and another is scheduled to be retired in 2010 (one of the other reactors at Chernobyl actually operated until 2000). The scary bit is that another's still being built. It's going to be awhile before they're all gone.
Personally, I feel that every country has to go through a period of unsustainable development, else it will never reach the phase of sustainable development.
The US, I confidently feel, is taking (baby) steps in the right direction. China will hopefully begin to do so soon as well, with others soon to follow.
Hard-core environmentalists scare me, because I feel that if they had their way, no further economic development would ever take place in the third-world. They tend to have a very jaded worldview (ie. their objection to the use of DDT in third-world countries, where it reduces deaths due to malaria by at least one order of magnitude)
Apple users and Windows users alike agree that the Finder is a huge steaming pile of crap that should have been completely overhauled a few versions back. It's not multithreaded, it isn't particularly elegant, and hasn't really evolved much since the OS 7 days (yikes!).
If you're performing an operation within the Finder that hits some sort of bottleneck (ie. a slow network link, unresponsive storage device, etc.), the entire system grinds to a halt. Likewise, the Finder performs comprably on my 450mhz G4 from 7 years ago as it does on my Core Duo Mini.
Aqua itself is pretty snappy. If you're interacting with applications directly (and not the finder), the system is fast and responsive provided that there's enough RAM. The 7-year old G4 still runs all the day-to-day software I use regularly just fine. There's a bit of a lag for graphical stuff like Expose or drawing long menus, but I suppose that you could attribute that to the 7-year old graphics card. Mind you, this is a computer that shipped with MacOS 8.6 on it when it was new. The latest version of Final Cut Pro runs unbelievably fast on it, with almost no UI lag. Rendering is a different story, but of course, that's to be expected.
I'll agree that Windows is probably the "snappier" of the two operating systems when running a well-equipped system, although this would appear to be due to a single software bottleneck (the finder). Apple, however, has done an incredibly admirable job of supporting their old hardware with new software releases. Try running XP (or Vista if you're feeling masochistic) on a 500mhz Pentium.
I don't think Intel's looking for flashy. That would be like Volkswagen hiring a team ofricers to design their cars. Alienware's PCs are certainly flashy, and they certainly look like crap.
I think Intel wants something sophisticated and subdued. Apple's got this down perfectly with their aluminum enclosures, and it's pretty hard to deny the the G5, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini are damned sexy machines.
I simply don't get why dell can't just produce machines with clean lines and subdued colors. Minimalism is the easiest school of art to imitate.
When I worked in NYC, all of my coworkers commuted via mass transit. I'm pretty sure the CEO did as well.
I think the "loser" in that situation would have been the fool paying $35 for gas, and waiting for hours in traffic every day. Massive traffic jams might get mentioned breifly on the local news -- train delays however, are front page news.
When I worked in my hometown, I was never discriminated against for biking to work. My coworkers were grateful to have an extra parking spot, and routinely offered me rides during incliment weather.
but not currently at the level that the users will see and appreciate.
This *should* have been in Tiger (experimental support for it was, and has been functional, although you're nuts to use it in a production application). It's on track to be included with Leopard, which is a very good thing. I certainly don't mind Microsoft or Apple copying each other on this. We really need higher-resolution screens.
To those of you who say that small fonts are useless because they're impossible to read, I urge you to go pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and flip through the financial section. The text in there is tiny, and yet is perfectly legible to anyone with reasonably good eyesight. If the resolution were there, we could actually *use* our screen real estate properly.
This could potentially become a huge problem for Americans traveling overseas, especially considering that the Government advises Americans abroad to not advertise the fact, while at the same time, they're equipping us with radio beacons that scream "HEY! OVER HERE! THAT'S RIGHT! HERE! LOOK! AMERICAN! AMERICAN!"
I'm using a 1680x1050 monitor, and I personally have no problem with Tufte's website. If you've got a huge high-resolution monitor, you're pretty foolish to be browsing with your windows maximised. With the window open to about 2/3 the width of the screen, the content fits perfectly.
The absolute *worst* UI paradigm that has plagued the computing world for the past decade is the maximize button. Ever since multitasking was supported at the OS level, we've had the marvelous ability to work on more than one thing at a time. I don't spread every page of my newspaper out across the kitchen table when I read it. Why should I do the same for my web pages?
Apple was smart to have left it out of OS X, and Microsoft should have left it out of Win95, or killed it with XP. For the first week, it's annoying to drag the corners of the windows around, until you realize how much more productive you can be by having two pieces of work side-by-side. Heck, even for single-tasking, multiple windows are great. If I'm writing a research paper on Shakespeare, I can have a copy of Hamlet open right alongside the paper for quick reference and easy quotations.
Of course, those 14" 1600x1200 laptop screens *are* a problem, because they make text and images unbearably tiny. Apple's the first (mainstream) vendor to tackle this issue head-on, and the next version of OS X should be resolution-independent, which should open the door for smaller, higher-resolution screens that won't kill our eyesight.
Don't be too sure. Just because the network's future-proofed doesn't mean that the company is
Cablevision's had some *huge* financial troubles --- mainly as a result of dumping so much money into their infrastructure. During one of their financial crises, they completely pulled out of my town in the middle of one of their massive upgrades, leaving the people there high and dry with a fractured network that no sane company would want to buy.
(Un)fortunately for the town, an insane company purchased the network, devised a hodgepodge method to link the old stuff with the new stuff, and then screwed their customers with terrible service. They've the fourth cable franchise in 12 years for the town. 2 have gone bankrupt, and the other (cablevision) pulled out due to financial troubles.
And it's not because their rates were low. They were much higher than normal cable rates should be. Cable companies have a reputation for being poorly run, offering awful customer service, and sucking in general.
I've been happyily on DSL, (and more recently fibre) internet and satelitte TV for several years. It's a godsend compared to the troubles that my neighbors go through. It costs less, my service is more reliable, and is generally superior to cable in every way possible. I also like the idea of supporting capitalism and free-competition.
Good question. There are a few valid uses, but from the look of it, it appears that the API's crippled such to prevent most of them.
After briefly glancing at the documentation, it looks like this is only good for pulling information from facebook, but not actually being able to make changes or add information.
Granted, this makes it a bit more secure and less prone to spam, but still.... an interface that would allow me to programatically upload photos or create events would be great.
Kudos to the facebook guys for making a social networking site that's actually usable.
Java became big all of the sudden 2 or 3 years ago.
Many of the applications written around the time are now reaching the level of maturity, and are being seen more and more in the enterprise.
Today, I think it's generally agreed upon at all levels of the enterprise that.NET/Mono is superior to Java in most areas. It's also apparent that.NET offers a significantly more pleasant experience to the end-user.
What, if anything, does that have to do with the content of the article?
I doubt that Zune will kill Microsoft, although it does seem like it will be largely ignored.
Apple's too entrenched in the audio-player market. Microsoft should pick a new territory to explore, and firmly establish themeslves in if they want to compete with apple.
Just like VB, Access isn't meant to be used for 'Real' applications.
It's a great rapid prototyping tool, and I actually use it fairly often for small databases, or when I need to hammer out a small set of code very quickly that onl needs to run properly once.
Once you get into a large multi-user database, Access is pretty bad. But that's because it's the wrong tool for the job. If the database has grown this large, it's probably time to rewrite/modify the application anyway. Despite the cries of the OSS fanboys, Microsoft SQL server is surprisingly decent if you're restricted to a Win32 platform, and should offer an easy migration path.
As far as handling your access databases goes, if you're looking for functionalilty not provided by access, you shoud be able to whip up a Php,Perl, or Python script that does what you're looking for. I'll also commit heresy again in this post by suggesting you learn a little VBA. It integrates nicely with access, and it's possible to do things with a few lines of code that would otherwise require fairly complex scripts. Of course, again, it's a great rapid-prototyping tool. If you've got 200 tables, you *SEROUSLY* need to look at either moving to a new DB System, or cleaning up your DB schema (30 databases with 200 tables is just ASKING for trouble)
He's right. For *ALL* computing tasks, using the right tool for the job can increase performance exponentially. Slashdotters should know this -- A 400mhz GPU can outperform a 3ghz CPU on vector and matrix operations by huge leaps and bounds
Clusters are just another tool that work very well for very specific jobs, and very poorly for others. These jobs are mainly those that can be massively parallelized (ie. brute-forcing a math equation -- Computer A should try these values, Computer B should try these values, etc...). Anything more complex than that puts a huge strain on the system being used to interconnect the machines. Once you start incorporating a fast interconnect system, the cluster begins to resemble an extremely inefficent supercomputer with multiple points of failure. At this point, it makes more sense to just use a Cray.
Over the past few years, for the first time, it's been possible to use the same chips in supercomputers as in desktops -- specifically the Opteron and the PPC970. As a result, consumers got more powerful chips, and supercomputers got a lot cheaper due to economies of scale. As an added bonus, now that the R&D is combined into one architecture, we're getting faster chips on a more regular basis.
AMD did a lot of things right with the Opteron. They made a series of consumer chips that were inexpensive, and blazing fast. They then took the same architecture, and made enterprise-grade chips that were rock solid, equally fast, energy-efficent, and still pretty cheap. HyperTransport is also an incredible technology, in that it's suitable for inexpensive machines and supercomputers alike. Itanium was none of these things.
I for one, am glad to see supercomputing coming back into fashion. The DOE's working on a lot of good science that will be essential for our survival in the long run, and the government seems to be providing them ample funding. Sure, NASA may do some cool science, but it's the DOE that's working on more meaningful things that can be put to use here on earth for the betterment of mankind. Perhaps the only positive thing to come out of the political mess right now is that the world is quickly realizing how desparately we need to move away from an oil-based society.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Google is in the information-retrieval business, and not the power-generating business.
Why doesn't GM make Starbucks Coffee? It's much more profitable than their cars.....
It's been my experience that hard drives will either fail within a year or two, or will last quite a long time.
Although I know from an engineering standpoint, that old drives would appear to be more prone to failure, I've observed that drive failures tend to be randomly distributed events. In other words, a new drive may be just as likely to fail as an old drive -- it's just a matter of odds and time.
Swapping out an old drive for a new one does not even necessarily reduce the risk of failure. Many drives fail in their first months of operation. QA certainly isn't what it used to be.
If you're this concerned about the integrity of your data, you should be making frequent backups and/or using a mirrored RAID setup. With RAID you don't need to worry about drives aging and swapping them in and out, because you lose nothing when a drive fails, allowing you to wait until it does so, eliminating any guesswork. When a drive fails, you replace it, and in the meantime the spare picks up the slack. As long as you've got a clean power source, and replace the dead drive in a timely manner, the odds of the other drive failing in the interim are miniscule. (If you're *really* worried, you can jump up to a 3 or 4 drive configuration, although at that point, you should probably be considering some sort of tape backup solution instead to cut out the power supply as a variable)
In other words, don't sweat it. Keep an eye on the SMART data, and use RAID, and for all intents and purposes, you can sleep soundly at night.
Target has a few of those -- I believe there's another one in Chicago on the landing approach to O'Hare.
This one's on the approach to LaGuardia in NYC (on a completely unrelated note, if you look on the map, it's surrounded almost entirely by water, making it a rather unnerving landing as a passenger)
I'm sorry, but your comparisons just don't make any sense.
If you're going to compare riding in an Amtrak train to driving, then you'd better be driving a 1970s Ford Pinto on an unmaintained dirt road. Given the sad state of funding for rail transit at the national level, any comparisons are simply invalid.
Truck transportation also strikes me as by far the least efficent method you could possibly have for moving goods from one place to another over long distances. You don't need interstates for the "last-mile" delivery from a rail hub to the final recipient.
Tropicana's Juice Trains are a great example of freight done right.
I'm with the parent poster on this one.
:-)
A 50mm/1.8 lens is a *requirement* for anybody who wants to take photography remotely seriously.
Canon's 50mm/1.8 is their cheapest lens ($80), is among the 'sharpest' lenses they offer, and has one the widest maximum apertures offered. All at a very useful focal length. The lens itself is tiny (easily fits in a jacket pocket), which makes it great for travel.
Although I don't have direct experience with it, I've heard the same things about Nikon's 50mm prime.
The main caveat, however, is that you do get what you pay for in a few respecsts. 50mm primes are cheap to make, because geometrically speaking, producing an image from a 50mm lens requires very little glass, and few moving (focus) elements, so the optical quality is guarunteed to be excellent as above. Unfortunately, to drive the lens down to the insanely low price point, corners get cut in terms of the lens housing and the AF motor. You can drop a few hundred bucks for a version with an ultrasonic motor and metal housing (and likely an additional f-stop). If these things matter to you *that* much, you shouldn't mind the extra cost
DSLRs don't shoot video for the very same reasons film SLRs don't shoot video onto 35mm film. Use the right tool for the job.
'nuff said.
Although I'm going to agree with you on all of those points, I am going to chime in and say that T-Max is one of the biggest things I miss about film photography.
For one, shooting at ISO 3200 gives you razor-sharp results in almost any light conditions. Shooting digital at ISO 1600 in low-light produces noisy images, of which 3/4 are normally unusable. Film grain is preferable over sensor noise any day.
As far as films go, T-Max is pretty odd stuff. The range of light frequencies it responds to is quite different than most other B&W films, and it even responds well into the IR range. The dynamic range is excellent, and yet the photos are sharp and contrast-y.
Dynamic range (the range between the brightest and darkest portions of an image) is the biggest problem currently plaguing DSLRs, and I think we can look forward to the next generation of sensors offering far greater dynamic range, hopefully comprable to film.
That said, I shoot entirely digital these days. I don't miss paying for film, and certainly don't miss paying for processing.
Uhm. I think the whole point of this article is that it doesn't do it perfectly.
That said, I'll agree that NASA's software is certainly a heck of a lot more stable than Debian. After all, this is rocket science.
This, in turn, isn't entirely true.
Certain shoes (not necessarily [in]expensive ones) can cause you to over/under-pronate, which in turn can lead to knee/ankle/shin problems down the road. If your feet are hitting the ground at a bad angle, you're going to get injured. If you're able to run barefoot, your feet are likely more suited to it than the average person is.
Any experienced runner can relate to a particularly bad pair of shoes they've owned. I know my worst pair definitely wasn't the cheapest.
You just have to buy whatever fits you the best. For some people, this is inexpensive, and for others, it can cost quite a bit.
You're right that the RBMK reactor design that Chernobyl was based around is inherently dangerous (ie. if the coolant is removed, the reaction will continue to occur unless drastic countermeasures are implemented).
You are wrong, however, in assuming that the design's been phased out. According to Wikipedia, 13 RBMK reactors were built. Four have been shut down, and another is scheduled to be retired in 2010 (one of the other reactors at Chernobyl actually operated until 2000). The scary bit is that another's still being built. It's going to be awhile before they're all gone.
Personally, I feel that every country has to go through a period of unsustainable development, else it will never reach the phase of sustainable development.
The US, I confidently feel, is taking (baby) steps in the right direction. China will hopefully begin to do so soon as well, with others soon to follow.
Hard-core environmentalists scare me, because I feel that if they had their way, no further economic development would ever take place in the third-world. They tend to have a very jaded worldview (ie. their objection to the use of DDT in third-world countries, where it reduces deaths due to malaria by at least one order of magnitude)
Don't confuse Aqua with the Finder.
Apple users and Windows users alike agree that the Finder is a huge steaming pile of crap that should have been completely overhauled a few versions back. It's not multithreaded, it isn't particularly elegant, and hasn't really evolved much since the OS 7 days (yikes!).
If you're performing an operation within the Finder that hits some sort of bottleneck (ie. a slow network link, unresponsive storage device, etc.), the entire system grinds to a halt. Likewise, the Finder performs comprably on my 450mhz G4 from 7 years ago as it does on my Core Duo Mini.
Aqua itself is pretty snappy. If you're interacting with applications directly (and not the finder), the system is fast and responsive provided that there's enough RAM. The 7-year old G4 still runs all the day-to-day software I use regularly just fine. There's a bit of a lag for graphical stuff like Expose or drawing long menus, but I suppose that you could attribute that to the 7-year old graphics card. Mind you, this is a computer that shipped with MacOS 8.6 on it when it was new. The latest version of Final Cut Pro runs unbelievably fast on it, with almost no UI lag. Rendering is a different story, but of course, that's to be expected.
I'll agree that Windows is probably the "snappier" of the two operating systems when running a well-equipped system, although this would appear to be due to a single software bottleneck (the finder). Apple, however, has done an incredibly admirable job of supporting their old hardware with new software releases. Try running XP (or Vista if you're feeling masochistic) on a 500mhz Pentium.
That's really not the point.
I don't think Intel's looking for flashy. That would be like Volkswagen hiring a team ofricers to design their cars. Alienware's PCs are certainly flashy, and they certainly look like crap.
I think Intel wants something sophisticated and subdued. Apple's got this down perfectly with their aluminum enclosures, and it's pretty hard to deny the the G5, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini are damned sexy machines.
I simply don't get why dell can't just produce machines with clean lines and subdued colors. Minimalism is the easiest school of art to imitate.
When I worked in NYC, all of my coworkers commuted via mass transit. I'm pretty sure the CEO did as well.
I think the "loser" in that situation would have been the fool paying $35 for gas, and waiting for hours in traffic every day. Massive traffic jams might get mentioned breifly on the local news -- train delays however, are front page news.
When I worked in my hometown, I was never discriminated against for biking to work. My coworkers were grateful to have an extra parking spot, and routinely offered me rides during incliment weather.
No. A hardcore geek does it himself :-)
But seriously. That second system has got to be *loud*. Those Crown amps are meant for huge auditorium-sized PA systems.
And there's at least 7 of them in that system.
obligatory pointer joke
but not currently at the level that the users will see and appreciate.
This *should* have been in Tiger (experimental support for it was, and has been functional, although you're nuts to use it in a production application). It's on track to be included with Leopard, which is a very good thing. I certainly don't mind Microsoft or Apple copying each other on this. We really need higher-resolution screens.
To those of you who say that small fonts are useless because they're impossible to read, I urge you to go pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and flip through the financial section. The text in there is tiny, and yet is perfectly legible to anyone with reasonably good eyesight. If the resolution were there, we could actually *use* our screen real estate properly.
Not sure why this was modded as funny.
This could potentially become a huge problem for Americans traveling overseas, especially considering that the Government advises Americans abroad to not advertise the fact, while at the same time, they're equipping us with radio beacons that scream "HEY! OVER HERE! THAT'S RIGHT! HERE! LOOK! AMERICAN! AMERICAN!"
It's not nearly as bad as Jakob Neilsen's site.
I'm using a 1680x1050 monitor, and I personally have no problem with Tufte's website. If you've got a huge high-resolution monitor, you're pretty foolish to be browsing with your windows maximised. With the window open to about 2/3 the width of the screen, the content fits perfectly.
The absolute *worst* UI paradigm that has plagued the computing world for the past decade is the maximize button. Ever since multitasking was supported at the OS level, we've had the marvelous ability to work on more than one thing at a time. I don't spread every page of my newspaper out across the kitchen table when I read it. Why should I do the same for my web pages?
Apple was smart to have left it out of OS X, and Microsoft should have left it out of Win95, or killed it with XP. For the first week, it's annoying to drag the corners of the windows around, until you realize how much more productive you can be by having two pieces of work side-by-side. Heck, even for single-tasking, multiple windows are great. If I'm writing a research paper on Shakespeare, I can have a copy of Hamlet open right alongside the paper for quick reference and easy quotations.
Of course, those 14" 1600x1200 laptop screens *are* a problem, because they make text and images unbearably tiny. Apple's the first (mainstream) vendor to tackle this issue head-on, and the next version of OS X should be resolution-independent, which should open the door for smaller, higher-resolution screens that won't kill our eyesight.
Don't be too sure. Just because the network's future-proofed doesn't mean that the company is
Cablevision's had some *huge* financial troubles --- mainly as a result of dumping so much money into their infrastructure. During one of their financial crises, they completely pulled out of my town in the middle of one of their massive upgrades, leaving the people there high and dry with a fractured network that no sane company would want to buy.
(Un)fortunately for the town, an insane company purchased the network, devised a hodgepodge method to link the old stuff with the new stuff, and then screwed their customers with terrible service. They've the fourth cable franchise in 12 years for the town. 2 have gone bankrupt, and the other (cablevision) pulled out due to financial troubles.
And it's not because their rates were low. They were much higher than normal cable rates should be. Cable companies have a reputation for being poorly run, offering awful customer service, and sucking in general.
I've been happyily on DSL, (and more recently fibre) internet and satelitte TV for several years. It's a godsend compared to the troubles that my neighbors go through. It costs less, my service is more reliable, and is generally superior to cable in every way possible. I also like the idea of supporting capitalism and free-competition.
Good question. There are a few valid uses, but from the look of it, it appears that the API's crippled such to prevent most of them.
After briefly glancing at the documentation, it looks like this is only good for pulling information from facebook, but not actually being able to make changes or add information.
Granted, this makes it a bit more secure and less prone to spam, but still.... an interface that would allow me to programatically upload photos or create events would be great.
Kudos to the facebook guys for making a social networking site that's actually usable.
Java became big all of the sudden 2 or 3 years ago.
.NET/Mono is superior to Java in most areas. It's also apparent that .NET offers a significantly more pleasant experience to the end-user.
Many of the applications written around the time are now reaching the level of maturity, and are being seen more and more in the enterprise.
Today, I think it's generally agreed upon at all levels of the enterprise that
Zune - Microsoft Killer or Next Apple Victim?
What, if anything, does that have to do with the content of the article?
I doubt that Zune will kill Microsoft, although it does seem like it will be largely ignored.
Apple's too entrenched in the audio-player market. Microsoft should pick a new territory to explore, and firmly establish themeslves in if they want to compete with apple.
Well, yes, but it does have its place.
Just like VB, Access isn't meant to be used for 'Real' applications.
It's a great rapid prototyping tool, and I actually use it fairly often for small databases, or when I need to hammer out a small set of code very quickly that onl needs to run properly once.
Once you get into a large multi-user database, Access is pretty bad. But that's because it's the wrong tool for the job. If the database has grown this large, it's probably time to rewrite/modify the application anyway. Despite the cries of the OSS fanboys, Microsoft SQL server is surprisingly decent if you're restricted to a Win32 platform, and should offer an easy migration path.
As far as handling your access databases goes, if you're looking for functionalilty not provided by access, you shoud be able to whip up a Php,Perl, or Python script that does what you're looking for. I'll also commit heresy again in this post by suggesting you learn a little VBA. It integrates nicely with access, and it's possible to do things with a few lines of code that would otherwise require fairly complex scripts. Of course, again, it's a great rapid-prototyping tool. If you've got 200 tables, you *SEROUSLY* need to look at either moving to a new DB System, or cleaning up your DB schema (30 databases with 200 tables is just ASKING for trouble)
I'd say go ahead and mod him up.
He's right. For *ALL* computing tasks, using the right tool for the job can increase performance exponentially. Slashdotters should know this -- A 400mhz GPU can outperform a 3ghz CPU on vector and matrix operations by huge leaps and bounds
Clusters are just another tool that work very well for very specific jobs, and very poorly for others. These jobs are mainly those that can be massively parallelized (ie. brute-forcing a math equation -- Computer A should try these values, Computer B should try these values, etc...). Anything more complex than that puts a huge strain on the system being used to interconnect the machines. Once you start incorporating a fast interconnect system, the cluster begins to resemble an extremely inefficent supercomputer with multiple points of failure. At this point, it makes more sense to just use a Cray.
Over the past few years, for the first time, it's been possible to use the same chips in supercomputers as in desktops -- specifically the Opteron and the PPC970. As a result, consumers got more powerful chips, and supercomputers got a lot cheaper due to economies of scale. As an added bonus, now that the R&D is combined into one architecture, we're getting faster chips on a more regular basis.
AMD did a lot of things right with the Opteron. They made a series of consumer chips that were inexpensive, and blazing fast. They then took the same architecture, and made enterprise-grade chips that were rock solid, equally fast, energy-efficent, and still pretty cheap. HyperTransport is also an incredible technology, in that it's suitable for inexpensive machines and supercomputers alike. Itanium was none of these things.
I for one, am glad to see supercomputing coming back into fashion. The DOE's working on a lot of good science that will be essential for our survival in the long run, and the government seems to be providing them ample funding. Sure, NASA may do some cool science, but it's the DOE that's working on more meaningful things that can be put to use here on earth for the betterment of mankind. Perhaps the only positive thing to come out of the political mess right now is that the world is quickly realizing how desparately we need to move away from an oil-based society.