It costs the cable companies crazy money to lay the cable, because of construction costs, etc. Your business plan would have to have a 5-10 year return on that cable. But, at that point, why lay cable when you can run fibre?
I would say that wireless is your best bet, if your not deep pocketed. In an industry where there is intense compitition I would guess it would be hard to pitch yourself to a VC for money. Wifi you can almost throw something together for under 30-40k dollars. Problem is, WIFI service is sub-par to what you get with cable. And where you can get cable modem for 39 dollars a month, will you see a return on your investment?
I have thought a lot about it.. the US has everything to gain from having a US based software company in a GLOBAL monopoly situation. The GNP is high as ever , like printing money into other countries really. US government isn't going to do anything to stop that , even at the cost of small US business.
Sucks, and unfortuantely it's not going to change until the WORLD learns to kick it's MS addiction. Until that happens, unfortunately, I don't think anything is going to change. Now, when it's more a domestic issue than a global issue, maybe we will see some justice.. but I doubt it.
>Further, I've heard of nothing but trouble in the form of memory leaks running apache/tomcat on linux. Of course, I've never seen anything resembling java work well on a linux box.
Hmm.. JAVA can be slow, as anything else. I don't know where you would be seeing memory leaks, in java? Have you profiled the code? I actually hate Tomcat (think it's a POS), but I have had it running a corp website of a company I worked at for almost 2 years with CRAZY uptime. It's running on sun's jdk 1.3.1 and gets a fair amount traffic. I have had MUCH better success with Caucho's Resin product than with tomcat both in performance and less tempermantal, but thats my opinon. The corp site hasn't had enough problems running on tomcat to even justify upgrading that system though. If I remember right it's running on a low-spec PIII too, not a 'blazing penguin' by any means.
Not to poke at you, but 99.9% of the JAVA websites that suck suck for a couple reaons...
VERY poor java programming, ie poor use of the database , etc.
VERY poor JSP implimentation of JAVA Beans that where written as Objects.
Also, if your using things like a database pool, and not handling the connections properly, it can cause problems.
As for the performance, with JAVA in the right hands, it can definately do quite well. Especially if you can get a grip on the session managment, caching, application scope beans.
I have used a product called OSCache (opensource), which is a tag-lib library for JSP level caching.. it gives an INSANE level of granularity. We have a server that has gone from producing 2 pages per second to almost 10 pages+ per second, VERY fast for a multiple-language/multiple-skin based system.
We cluster these across about 10 machines, and have had tremendous success. The system is almost 2 years old, but we have very very very few problems with it. It runs on a cluster of Linux Debian servers too. (IBM JDK 1.3.1).
Don't discount JAVA as being rotten on linux, I have found GREAT success in deploying my java apps on linux.
Re:Seems like a silly move...
on
Yahoo Moving to PHP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
All the slow EJB installs I have seen have the following problems:
Use of remote classes where local ones would make sense. Use a session bean to aggrigate the results of a few beans and send out the result you need.
Bad database design or just poor JAVA programming.
I have studied EJB extensivly , and can usually get near database-query speed if I think hard enough about what I need. I have read that remote objects should only access session beans, and this is a pretty good idea for the most part.. Your calls should be fewer and pull down the data it needs rather than make LOTS and LOTS of calls...
Anyway, it's a pretty elegent solution and really forces you to think about design. Solutions such as Caucho's Resin CMP makes it even easier to use an EJB solution for object-relational managment and , with resin imparticuarly is easier than using a roll-your-own JDBC based code.
Re:You forgot about Java...
on
Yahoo Moving to PHP
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Some of the larger projects I have worked on , where integration is important and a key to the success of the product, JAVA seems to be the best bet.
Not to say that things couldn't be done in PHP, probably can... but I have had a lot of luck in writing all my business logic and middleware in JAVA and then using JSP or Servlets + Velocity for presentation. The thing is, it's not something that someone can do without a middleware engineer and a implimentation engineer.
I have been coding java middleware code ware for almost 3 years now, some of it integrates into web based services, some of it ties into legacy workflow systems and even tied into a IBM mainframe, I just can't IMAGINE doing all of that in PHP... I would of been laughed out the door of my company as a matter of fact with a pink slip in my hand.
The strength of being able to pull in other 3rd party libraries for various tasks that come up, JAVA is first rate.
I worked for a company that had a pretty complex logistics based system that integrated with a German logistics ocmpany.. was ALL done in PHP.. I couldn't believe it when I saw it to be honest, but to say the least... was VERY dificult to manage the application as it grew to many hundreds of classes and pages. The company ended moving to an EJB/JSP solution on websphere I think, and eventually was able to cut out about 1/2 of their engineers because the API became quite manageable by fewer people.
You can't call JAVA hype any more than you can call COBOL, FORTRAN c/C++ hype, because the level of profound impact JAVA is having on the industry at the moment is to those levels IMHO.
NOW.. if the project doesn't really reach beyond basic web applications, yes, even very large companies have such projects.. I see nothing wrong with PHP. It's actually a breath of fresh air when I need to hack something out quick and simple. I use HORDE+IMP for my own personal email and the email server for my wife on my linux box.
Must say, with the SQL Server 7.0 release... about the same thing happened. I still believe that SQL Server is ms's finest product, but I can't run it on my Favorite OS... and up until the days of FreeTDS interfaces, nothing could talk to it.. including java. (unless you used that rediculous ODBC bridge)...
Anyway, after only one installation, never really had the chance to play with it since.. Great DB, too bad it's caged to one OS.. I would choose it ANY day over oracle if it ran on linux.
Hmm... i think there has to be a happy medium... not every RedHat release hits that, *cough 7.0*, but they have had fantastic releases that are still in production in our server farm, 6.2.
I have found 8.0 to be a fantastic release, and have had 0 problems thus far.
I agree. I worked at a company with 14 debian boxes and a huge debian based database server. They where quite easy to manage. It is nice and easy when you need a library to compile someting, or don't to compile something because it's just an apt-get away.
I guess I can't imagine running anything but debian on the server side.
The desktop, for me at least, is another story. I guess that I found debian fell short. I do like Gentoo, I get the very latest and greatest.. but, when I am doing a JAVA or Web based product, I find myself using a combination of my (tiBook).. windows XP and Cygwin using XFree86 X-screening my RedHat server. (Gawd, I know.. it's a sell out from all angles...) Over the years my server/desktop (99% of the time I use remote X server for my work... especially now that I have discovered that -GEM- Eclipse...)
Now, Redhat hasn't been really a choice for mine since the 6.2 days.... but, now with the BlueCurve interface... I must say.. it's just the level of boring I was praying for. The fonts look great after getting them installed, etc. Now, I know I could do all this on Debian.. Admitantly , some of my issues with debian are not debians fault but my own short-commings on knowledge off things like XFree86 Configuration files (biggest ones), seems I remember having a hard time getting certain things to work, like scroll mouse, sound card, etc. I know it's a geek OS, as is most/all linux os's.. but.. I believe that right now, redhat has the desktop figured out... for me.
I would -LOVE- if Debians desktop distro can be everything that to me that Redhats is. For the first time ever, using redhat, I have actually used a file manager.. Never before have I bothered.. just drop to the bash prompt for generally everything. After sitting on OS X for about 1 1/2 years call me spoiled.. I want my GUI.
anyway, sorry for the rant. I do think you have interesting insight into debian. I am glad you have had such great experiences with it. Your perspective actually inspires me to give it another try... (I have a unused box in the closet).
Maybe give redhat 8 a try, it might raise your bar with what a linux desktop could be. I haven't tried Lycoris or the other 'desktop' offerings, but Redhat seems to have done things right in my book w/8.0.
Cheers
Re:HOWTO violate microsoft and apple patents
on
Font HOWTO For Linux
·
· Score: 2
Why pay for a product thats protected by a pattent and a company if it can be had for free? I think that is what they are worried about.
I don't see too much Bazzar on the Kernel, it's doing fantastic.
MS isn't going to feel the least bit fear from the desktop inititive until we have a benevolent dictator on the desktop and frankly something geared towards something other than geeks is standarized on. Frankly, RedHat has made the only real stride I have seen towards a threat to MS on the desktop.
Apple is great, but critical mass isn't going to buy MS hardware. (I have a tiBook and a G4, love em both.. but trying to stay real).
But, if redhat can keep it up, we will be doing great. For the first time since WindowMaker have I have used a desktop I am quite happy with on Linux (refering to the Redhat default desktop on version 8.0).
Anyway, take a look at it.. it's nice. Once they get the blasted resolution resizing tools in it, re-organize the menus a bit more cleanly, look out. I am quite impressed. Maybe boring, but boring is ok for me.
Quicktime has a lot of useful libraries for development. I have seen a lot of people using the built in XML parser as a high level interface in Objective C (from lurking on the newsgroups and looking for my own parser).
Quicktime is installed on all OS X system, it would make sense for apple to use common components.
Maybe it wasn't just quicktime that was updated but also other libs that support quicktime and other things. Who knows.
I just moved back to the states from the Uk, having lived there for 3 years and 1 year in Switzerland.
I found the health care in switzerland to be excelent, even though it was private. You had to have healthcare, to be registered in a city.. which you had to be to legally rent an apartment. The taxes where I was living was about 14% total, not including taxes on things like Garbage (yes,a stamp had to be put on every bag you take out.. at 1 dollar per bag, it encourages you to recycle everything you can).
My wife went to the doctor a few times, for this and that, and was quite happy with the modern clinic. The doctors seemed progressive and would offer medicine that was both herbal and western in nature. (No robotusin for a cold, but a herbal concoction you get at the pharmacy).
Anyway, I loved the swiss method of handling things, and at 1% un-employement, and guarding their borders in a way that would make the queen of england prooud, they don't seem to have a lot of the problems that other EU countries have with the poor and destitute.
Now, england is a complete flip-side. I have spent more hours sitting in a clinic waiting for the bloody doctor to just show up for work. (No appointment at my local surgery). When the doctor does show up, they seem to not give a damn about what the problem is. My wife sat waiting to be seen for almost 6 hours. No joke. A co-worker waited 7 months for status on a testicular lump that he was worried might be cancer. Yada yada.
When we found out we where having a baby, our first, we decided to pack our stuff up and move back to the states. Pretty scarry stuff. I can't speak for the rest of the EU, I am sure that they are in better shape than Uk. I was watching a debate on Brittish TV, and there is a statistic that if you get stomach cancer, your chance of survival is 6%. In the US your chance of survival is 61%. Fricken nuts.
And as for shoving people out the door. When we came back the US, we didn't have a job or much money. We immediately qualified for medicade and even after I got my new job, the state took care of the child birth and all the expenses including 6 months of birth control after the child birth for my wife and 3 follow up visits. Now we are back on private health care with my job, but to say that the hospital kicked me out is plain false.
I don't think that my case is special. I don't think that a lot of people realize is that in the US, there is help if you really need it. I am not a bum out on the street, but when we moved back to the US.. we did need some help, and I am glad we had it.
Private sector will always be better off than public, even in healthcare. What they need to do is put legislation in to keep the mall-practive law-suits under control and help keep the costs down so insurance isn't expensive for everyone. Look at the mortality rates across the board, you will be surprised what america's health care is churning out. It was a big enough difference for me to move across the world to have our baby.
I don't really get your point. I get blue screens on windows with shitty drivers. I get kernel panics on Linux with shitty drivers *cough nVidia*. I get system freezes on openbsd with bad ram.
Lets face it, the whole point of getting the whole widget, the stuff should just work. This is whole reason that MS is doing the certified hardware crap, that doesn't seem to really be helping much, is to gain stability in the OS.
I don't believe you can properly protect the system from the hardware and bad drivers and maintain good performance. Maybe some modern mach kernels will do it, but I don't see anything mainstream in the CONSUMERS hands that do it.
But honest to god, what evidence have you seen of the effort picking up other than a few trivial updates. Last time I lurked on the mailing list, the most exciting update for that month was f'n keyboard drivers. YEs, keybaords are important.. but cummon'.
Now I can't speak for Latin, as I don't know it, but I learned more about my own language (English) learning a foreign language than studying it through high school and college. Professionally or scientifically learning a new language does nothing more than help you learn how to learn, at least in my own field of software.
I believe having learned another language, I have a better grasp on getting ideas across and even communicate technical issues. Also, I know how it feels to not be understood and probably even more so the frustration of not understanding. What someone else is saying.
It's a pretty humbling experience being 22 years old and talking at a 3-year-old level with adults.
I would say a 4 gig database is pretty disk intensive.
I would say that working with 4-500+ constnantly changing files + servlets is disk intensive.
I have written a distributed locking system for doing VoiceXML->WAVE SPEECH then convrsion to VOIP data using HFS+ is fairly fucking disk intensive. And test MANY instances of it on my machine. And yes, it uses HFS+.
Photoshop, which I do use, doesn't cause corruptions in the file system.
iPhoto which I have 3 gigs of image data, doesn't corrupt the file system.
I am glad I only played for 4-5 months of everquest beta beore I realized what was going on with my life. It's short, and in my opinion no better than sitting mindlessly behind a TV and wasting your life away. Now that my wife and I have a 2 month old baby, the urgency of spending more quality time with loved ones and self/family improving activity is more impressionable to me.
I use my tiBook as my unix dev server for our server platform. though, we deploy onto unix, I can do 99.9% of the operations on my tiBook and as I work 50% from my home office, it's a perfect fit.. I always have my dev server with me.
I have managed thus far to achieve a few crashes, mainly due to a resource leak with file handles and also a strange bug in Java. I have had my software crash litterally thousands of times in development cycles. I have had to hard-reset because of a hard lock w/the quartz engine....
Anyway, I -abuse- this laptop (which I am typing on right now). It's has been an absolute champ. I haven't had anything go corrupt, and never had an error i couldn't recover from.
Note, that I did re-partition my drive and stuck/usr/local/ mounted with a 3 gig UFS partition, but not problems with that in the last 3 weeks.
My G4 tower (466) has been a mysql and pgsql database server and a host of my personal webserver for almost 2 years now. It survived moving over-seas twice and my abusive MP3 harvesting tools to newsgroups *gasp, I know*.
Anyway, to say that a 'real user' will experience problems is utter bullshit. I don't know what's going on with your stations but we have 5 people on the team using G4's (some laptop+tower) and we never have problems.
I see your point, but you must admit. How often have you bought an expensive consumer electronic device and found it a hair short of flawed. I wish I had a single dollar for ever 100 I have spent on poorly engineered devices. Often (not always) it seems though that after 3 or 4 tries , manufacturers can get it right.
Archose didn't innovate anything. They put a bigger storage medium onto mp3 players.
Apple brought functionality and un-matched system integration with a first class application (iTunes). They have managed to turn the device into a personal organizer as well. The only thing out there that I have seen that comes close to this is the PocketPC devices, but the storage and battery is dismal on those devices.
I would say that Apple delivered the full widget where other manufacturers have failed. I consider that strongly innovative and even more progressive.
From what I understand, it's pretty much transparent. A guy at SGI once explained to me why the MIPS 64 chips run 32-bit software as fast as 64-bit software, but I am not knowledgeable enough to regurgitate it. Basically it came down too, unless your application is accessing a HUGE disk volume, or a HUGE amount of memory, it's all going to perform identical. From what I have read, the same will apply to apple's architecture so there shouldn't be any major burden on the developers at all, unless it's a special application.
Slashdot Mirror
Serious.. like nobody falls for this one.
And you took it, hook line and sinker.
hehehe
It costs the cable companies crazy money to lay the cable, because of construction costs, etc. Your business plan would have to have a 5-10 year return on that cable. But, at that point, why lay cable when you can run fibre?
I would say that wireless is your best bet, if your not deep pocketed. In an industry where there is intense compitition I would guess it would be hard to pitch yourself to a VC for money. Wifi you can almost throw something together for under 30-40k dollars. Problem is, WIFI service is sub-par to what you get with cable. And where you can get cable modem for 39 dollars a month, will you see a return on your investment?
Cheers
I have thought a lot about it.. the US has everything to gain from having a US based software company in a GLOBAL monopoly situation. The GNP is high as ever , like printing money into other countries really. US government isn't going to do anything to stop that , even at the cost of small US business.
Sucks, and unfortuantely it's not going to change until the WORLD learns to kick it's MS addiction. Until that happens, unfortunately, I don't think anything is going to change. Now, when it's more a domestic issue than a global issue, maybe we will see some justice.. but I doubt it.
>Further, I've heard of nothing but trouble in the form of memory leaks running apache/tomcat on linux. Of course, I've never seen anything resembling java work well on a linux box.
Hmm.. JAVA can be slow, as anything else. I don't know where you would be seeing memory leaks, in java? Have you profiled the code? I actually hate Tomcat (think it's a POS), but I have had it running a corp website of a company I worked at for almost 2 years with CRAZY uptime. It's running on sun's jdk 1.3.1 and gets a fair amount traffic. I have had MUCH better success with Caucho's Resin product than with tomcat both in performance and less tempermantal, but thats my opinon. The corp site hasn't had enough problems running on tomcat to even justify upgrading that system though. If I remember right it's running on a low-spec PIII too, not a 'blazing penguin' by any means.
Not to poke at you, but 99.9% of the JAVA websites that suck suck for a couple reaons...
VERY poor java programming, ie poor use of the database , etc.
VERY poor JSP implimentation of JAVA Beans that where written as Objects.
Also, if your using things like a database pool, and not handling the connections properly, it can cause problems.
As for the performance, with JAVA in the right hands, it can definately do quite well. Especially if you can get a grip on the session managment, caching, application scope beans.
I have used a product called OSCache (opensource), which is a tag-lib library for JSP level caching.. it gives an INSANE level of granularity. We have a server that has gone from producing 2 pages per second to almost 10 pages+ per second, VERY fast for a multiple-language/multiple-skin based system.
We cluster these across about 10 machines, and have had tremendous success. The system is almost 2 years old, but we have very very very few problems with it. It runs on a cluster of Linux Debian servers too. (IBM JDK 1.3.1).
Don't discount JAVA as being rotten on linux, I have found GREAT success in deploying my java apps on linux.
All the slow EJB installs I have seen have the following problems:
Use of remote classes where local ones would make sense. Use a session bean to aggrigate the results of a few beans and send out the result you need.
Bad database design or just poor JAVA programming.
I have studied EJB extensivly , and can usually get near database-query speed if I think hard enough about what I need. I have read that remote objects should only access session beans, and this is a pretty good idea for the most part.. Your calls should be fewer and pull down the data it needs rather than make LOTS and LOTS of calls...
Anyway, it's a pretty elegent solution and really forces you to think about design. Solutions such as Caucho's Resin CMP makes it even easier to use an EJB solution for object-relational managment and , with resin imparticuarly is easier than using a roll-your-own JDBC based code.
Some of the larger projects I have worked on , where integration is important and a key to the success of the product, JAVA seems to be the best bet.
Not to say that things couldn't be done in PHP, probably can... but I have had a lot of luck in writing all my business logic and middleware in JAVA and then using JSP or Servlets + Velocity for presentation. The thing is, it's not something that someone can do without a middleware engineer and a implimentation engineer.
I have been coding java middleware code ware for almost 3 years now, some of it integrates into web based services, some of it ties into legacy workflow systems and even tied into a IBM mainframe, I just can't IMAGINE doing all of that in PHP... I would of been laughed out the door of my company as a matter of fact with a pink slip in my hand.
The strength of being able to pull in other 3rd party libraries for various tasks that come up, JAVA is first rate.
I worked for a company that had a pretty complex logistics based system that integrated with a German logistics ocmpany.. was ALL done in PHP.. I couldn't believe it when I saw it to be honest, but to say the least... was VERY dificult to manage the application as it grew to many hundreds of classes and pages. The company ended moving to an EJB/JSP solution on websphere I think, and eventually was able to cut out about 1/2 of their engineers because the API became quite manageable by fewer people.
You can't call JAVA hype any more than you can call COBOL, FORTRAN c/C++ hype, because the level of profound impact JAVA is having on the industry at the moment is to those levels IMHO.
NOW.. if the project doesn't really reach beyond basic web applications, yes, even very large companies have such projects.. I see nothing wrong with PHP. It's actually a breath of fresh air when I need to hack something out quick and simple. I use HORDE+IMP for my own personal email and the email server for my wife on my linux box.
Last time I tried Debian on the desktop was Potato, maybe I should give woodie a try. thanks for the feedback.
Must say, with the SQL Server 7.0 release... about the same thing happened. I still believe that SQL Server is ms's finest product, but I can't run it on my Favorite OS... and up until the days of FreeTDS interfaces, nothing could talk to it.. including java. (unless you used that rediculous ODBC bridge)...
Anyway, after only one installation, never really had the chance to play with it since.. Great DB, too bad it's caged to one OS.. I would choose it ANY day over oracle if it ran on linux.
Hmm... i think there has to be a happy medium... not every RedHat release hits that, *cough 7.0*, but they have had fantastic releases that are still in production in our server farm, 6.2.
I have found 8.0 to be a fantastic release, and have had 0 problems thus far.
I agree. I worked at a company with 14 debian boxes and a huge debian based database server. They where quite easy to manage. It is nice and easy when you need a library to compile someting, or don't to compile something because it's just an apt-get away.
I guess I can't imagine running anything but debian on the server side.
The desktop, for me at least, is another story. I guess that I found debian fell short. I do like Gentoo, I get the very latest and greatest.. but, when I am doing a JAVA or Web based product, I find myself using a combination of my (tiBook)
Now, Redhat hasn't been really a choice for mine since the 6.2 days.... but, now with the BlueCurve interface... I must say.. it's just the level of boring I was praying for. The fonts look great after getting them installed, etc. Now, I know I could do all this on Debian.. Admitantly , some of my issues with debian are not debians fault but my own short-commings on knowledge off things like XFree86 Configuration files (biggest ones), seems I remember having a hard time getting certain things to work, like scroll mouse, sound card, etc. I know it's a geek OS, as is most/all linux os's.. but.. I believe that right now, redhat has the desktop figured out
I would -LOVE- if Debians desktop distro can be everything that to me that Redhats is. For the first time ever, using redhat, I have actually used a file manager.. Never before have I bothered.. just drop to the bash prompt for generally everything. After sitting on OS X for about 1 1/2 years call me spoiled.. I want my GUI.
anyway, sorry for the rant. I do think you have interesting insight into debian. I am glad you have had such great experiences with it. Your perspective actually inspires me to give it another try... (I have a unused box in the closet).
Maybe give redhat 8 a try, it might raise your bar with what a linux desktop could be. I haven't tried Lycoris or the other 'desktop' offerings, but Redhat seems to have done things right in my book w/8.0.
Cheers
Why pay for a product thats protected by a pattent and a company if it can be had for free? I think that is what they are worried about.
Obviously we all need to start doing more meta-moderation.
If we did, maybe some of these dorks wouldn't be getting moderation points.
Hmm.. frankly, I disagree.
I don't see too much Bazzar on the Kernel, it's doing fantastic.
MS isn't going to feel the least bit fear from the desktop inititive until we have a benevolent dictator on the desktop and frankly something geared towards something other than geeks is standarized on. Frankly, RedHat has made the only real stride I have seen towards a threat to MS on the desktop.
Apple is great, but critical mass isn't going to buy MS hardware. (I have a tiBook and a G4, love em both.. but trying to stay real).
But, if redhat can keep it up, we will be doing great. For the first time since WindowMaker have I have used a desktop I am quite happy with on Linux (refering to the Redhat default desktop on version 8.0).
Anyway, take a look at it.. it's nice. Once they get the blasted resolution resizing tools in it, re-organize the menus a bit more cleanly, look out. I am quite impressed. Maybe boring, but boring is ok for me.
Quicktime has a lot of useful libraries for development. I have seen a lot of people using the built in XML parser as a high level interface in Objective C (from lurking on the newsgroups and looking for my own parser).
Quicktime is installed on all OS X system, it would make sense for apple to use common components.
Maybe it wasn't just quicktime that was updated but also other libs that support quicktime and other things. Who knows.
Cheers
I just moved back to the states from the Uk, having lived there for 3 years and 1 year in Switzerland.
I found the health care in switzerland to be excelent, even though it was private. You had to have healthcare, to be registered in a city.. which you had to be to legally rent an apartment. The taxes where I was living was about 14% total, not including taxes on things like Garbage (yes,a stamp had to be put on every bag you take out.. at 1 dollar per bag, it encourages you to recycle everything you can).
My wife went to the doctor a few times, for this and that, and was quite happy with the modern clinic. The doctors seemed progressive and would offer medicine that was both herbal and western in nature. (No robotusin for a cold, but a herbal concoction you get at the pharmacy).
Anyway, I loved the swiss method of handling things, and at 1% un-employement, and guarding their borders in a way that would make the queen of england prooud, they don't seem to have a lot of the problems that other EU countries have with the poor and destitute.
Now, england is a complete flip-side. I have spent more hours sitting in a clinic waiting for the bloody doctor to just show up for work. (No appointment at my local surgery). When the doctor does show up, they seem to not give a damn about what the problem is. My wife sat waiting to be seen for almost 6 hours. No joke. A co-worker waited 7 months for status on a testicular lump that he was worried might be cancer. Yada yada.
When we found out we where having a baby, our first, we decided to pack our stuff up and move back to the states. Pretty scarry stuff. I can't speak for the rest of the EU, I am sure that they are in better shape than Uk. I was watching a debate on Brittish TV, and there is a statistic that if you get stomach cancer, your chance of survival is 6%. In the US your chance of survival is 61%. Fricken nuts.
And as for shoving people out the door. When we came back the US, we didn't have a job or much money. We immediately qualified for medicade and even after I got my new job, the state took care of the child birth and all the expenses including 6 months of birth control after the child birth for my wife and 3 follow up visits. Now we are back on private health care with my job, but to say that the hospital kicked me out is plain false.
I don't think that my case is special. I don't think that a lot of people realize is that in the US, there is help if you really need it. I am not a bum out on the street, but when we moved back to the US.. we did need some help, and I am glad we had it.
Private sector will always be better off than public, even in healthcare. What they need to do is put legislation in to keep the mall-practive law-suits under control and help keep the costs down so insurance isn't expensive for everyone. Look at the mortality rates across the board, you will be surprised what america's health care is churning out. It was a big enough difference for me to move across the world to have our baby.
Cheers
I don't really get your point. I get blue screens on windows with shitty drivers. I get kernel panics on Linux with shitty drivers *cough nVidia*. I get system freezes on openbsd with bad ram.
Lets face it, the whole point of getting the whole widget, the stuff should just work. This is whole reason that MS is doing the certified hardware crap, that doesn't seem to really be helping much, is to gain stability in the OS.
I don't believe you can properly protect the system from the hardware and bad drivers and maintain good performance. Maybe some modern mach kernels will do it, but I don't see anything mainstream in the CONSUMERS hands that do it.
Are you serious? Not to be a troll...
But honest to god, what evidence have you seen of the effort picking up other than a few trivial updates. Last time I lurked on the mailing list, the most exciting update for that month was f'n keyboard drivers. YEs, keybaords are important.. but cummon'.
Cheers
Now I can't speak for Latin, as I don't know it, but I learned more about my own language (English) learning a foreign language than studying it through high school and college. Professionally or scientifically learning a new language does nothing more than help you learn how to learn, at least in my own field of software.
I believe having learned another language, I have a better grasp on getting ideas across and even communicate technical issues. Also, I know how it feels to not be understood and probably even more so the frustration of not understanding. What someone else is saying.
It's a pretty humbling experience being 22 years old and talking at a 3-year-old level with adults.
I never said TV was great way to spend time.
I think it's the biggest waste of time actually.
omg, give me a break.
I would say a 4 gig database is pretty disk intensive.
I would say that working with 4-500+ constnantly changing files + servlets is disk intensive.
I have written a distributed locking system for doing VoiceXML->WAVE SPEECH then convrsion to VOIP data using HFS+ is fairly fucking disk intensive. And test MANY instances of it on my machine. And yes, it uses HFS+.
Photoshop, which I do use, doesn't cause corruptions in the file system.
iPhoto which I have 3 gigs of image data, doesn't corrupt the file system.
Frankly, I think your just full of shit.
No kidding,
I am glad I only played for 4-5 months of everquest beta beore I realized what was going on with my life. It's short, and in my opinion no better than sitting mindlessly behind a TV and wasting your life away. Now that my wife and I have a 2 month old baby, the urgency of spending more quality time with loved ones and self/family improving activity is more impressionable to me.
Hmm... I disagree.
/usr/local/ mounted with a 3 gig UFS partition, but not problems with that in the last 3 weeks.
I use my tiBook as my unix dev server for our server platform. though, we deploy onto unix, I can do 99.9% of the operations on my tiBook and as I work 50% from my home office, it's a perfect fit.. I always have my dev server with me.
I have managed thus far to achieve a few crashes, mainly due to a resource leak with file handles and also a strange bug in Java. I have had my software crash litterally thousands of times in development cycles. I have had to hard-reset because of a hard lock w/the quartz engine....
Anyway, I -abuse- this laptop (which I am typing on right now). It's has been an absolute champ. I haven't had anything go corrupt, and never had an error i couldn't recover from.
Note, that I did re-partition my drive and stuck
My G4 tower (466) has been a mysql and pgsql database server and a host of my personal webserver for almost 2 years now. It survived moving over-seas twice and my abusive MP3 harvesting tools to newsgroups *gasp, I know*.
Anyway, to say that a 'real user' will experience problems is utter bullshit. I don't know what's going on with your stations but we have 5 people on the team using G4's (some laptop+tower) and we never have problems.
I see your point, but you must admit. How often have you bought an expensive consumer electronic device and found it a hair short of flawed. I wish I had a single dollar for ever 100 I have spent on poorly engineered devices. Often (not always) it seems though that after 3 or 4 tries , manufacturers can get it right.
Archose didn't innovate anything. They put a bigger storage medium onto mp3 players.
Apple brought functionality and un-matched system integration with a first class application (iTunes). They have managed to turn the device into a personal organizer as well. The only thing out there that I have seen that comes close to this is the PocketPC devices, but the storage and battery is dismal on those devices.
I would say that Apple delivered the full widget where other manufacturers have failed. I consider that strongly innovative and even more progressive.
From what I understand, it's pretty much transparent. A guy at SGI once explained to me why the MIPS 64 chips run 32-bit software as fast as 64-bit software, but I am not knowledgeable enough to regurgitate it. Basically it came down too, unless your application is accessing a HUGE disk volume, or a HUGE amount of memory, it's all going to perform identical. From what I have read, the same will apply to apple's architecture so there shouldn't be any major burden on the developers at all, unless it's a special application.