* Support forward-thinking projects like Wayland instead of putting another car on the fail-train that is X. X is architecturally inferior to WindowServer and Windows' display layer for desktop-oriented tasks. A simplified windowing system that puts graphics first and drops the cruft would go a long way in making linux seem modern and easy to maintain.
X is superior in one critical way. It has a butt-load more apps (especially commercial apps) than Wayland does. You might not care about this, but a heck of a lot of users and businesses do.
(Which isn't to say that X isn't bloaty. It just happens to win in the area where 99% of everyone gives a shit.)
Oh, crazy right wingers... One wonders if you ever even talked to someone who is a member of the working poor.
Oh, of course they have! When they were telling their illegal Mexican immigrant house staff that they didn't merit a living wage and that they should be glad they aren't forced to wear chains!
It's assholes like that which make me wonder if the commies had a point after all.
The problem, of course, is that some old geezer isn't going to want to move out of the old neighborhood and will end up being the only one in the middle of nowhere but still expect his mail to be delivered to his door.
If there's just one in the area, the city can just deincorporate that area (I assume there is, or at least can be, a procedure for that) and then the geezer can enjoy the benefits of rural living. Problem solved.
Of course, who are we kidding, nothing is going to change because they probably own half of the senate.
I think that's unlikely. Big Oil won't put up with not being #1. (And the senators know that doing stuff that pleases their constituents at least some of the time is a good move, so helping constituents get "ooh! new shiny!" would seem to be to the advantage of those seeking reelection.)
Or all forms of parallel traffic. I've got a nice star on my windscreen from a semi that was diagonal to me.
You should get that filled before the whole screen cracks. I believe there's a clear plastic with about the same refractive index as glass that's used, and which is pretty cheap; don't know the details though. You might even be able to persuade your insurer to pay for doing it, since it is a proactive step to prevent a bigger claim.
I have no idea why you think a PhD is a formal requirement for being a professor.
It varies by subject and field. In physics, it's really hard to be a professor without a PhD. In much of computer science it's much easier. OTOH, to be a (full) professor in any field you do need to be able to publish loads (or at least very significantly; quality counts) and draw in money. Everything else flows from those.
How should students treat code written as part of assignments or as part of their course-work in terms of licensing?
Simple. Treat the coursework like it is property of the institution. And stop kidding yourself that coursework is valuable outside that context; it's vanishingly unlikely to be anything like that. After all, just about anything that you'd do in a course is something that a real programmer would just use a library for (and get a better tested and documented version in the process).
Which isn't to say anything about anything else done while you happen to be a student. If you write programs on your own time then that's your own business, even if they happen to include techniques that you've learned from class. In fact, that's actually a better way of learning what you're being taught; it's not formally part of the curriculum at undergraduate level because it's very hard to scale up the marking. (Postgraduate is different.)
I'm more curious as to why the servers were centralized enough to be vulnerable to this. Kinda defeats the purpose of redundancy, no? OTOH, it does sound like they had enough backups in place to get everything up and running again in short order, so maybe it's unfair to second-guess them.
Because with Amazon, if you really care about being resilient you need put your instances in more than one "availability zone" (i.e., datacenter). That's how they do it, they're open about this being the case, and there's really no magic, just competent hosting.
Admittedly, Betelgeuse is somewhat further away than Jupiter, and the only neutrino effects are likely to be a lot of very excited astrophysicists.
So... what is the excitation energy of an astrophysicist and how do they manage to couple so strongly with neutrinos?
I suppose the leading theory might be to have them somehow emanate a variant Weak Force, which would make them be not really of this universe. Going by the few I've met - who were tending to be at least not of this world - the evidence seems to be stacking up...
IMO universities should be teaching core principles and methods, not attempting to impart up-to-date job skills.
So you advocate teaching full-on computer science to physics, chemistry and engineering students? Why? Shouldn't they be learning about the fundamentals of their own fields instead?
I don't see Pixar being in trouble at all, this is very solid business and seems to me very predictable above $500mil. per movie business.
Except for Cars that is, which suffered from the fact that kids outside North America just weren't quite as thoroughly sold on the concept (motor vehicles aren't cuddly). Still made a good amount; just not as much as the others.
Sully was a very experienced glider pilot( Including a CFI instrutor rating, as was the captain of the Gimli glider.
I wonder whether landing on water will form part of future pilot training and computer control scenarios. After all, they've now got some good data on how to do it right...
Apparently landing in water is far more dangerous than landing on land
We can file this sentence under "things that probably shouldn't need to be written down"
But it isn't as dangerous as landing a plane in downtown Manhattan, which is what the pilot's alternative was. AIUI, a good stretch of flat water is way better than bumpy ground, no matter how much a runway is better than water...
[bad idea]We could use hydrogen instead...[/bad idea]
It's not as bad an idea as all that; hydrogen is much lighter than helium and is far, far more plentiful. The only real issue is that it is flammable, and that's not really a show-stopper. After all, a lot of the fuels used in current rockets are far worse when it comes to handling (concentrated hydrogen peroxide and hydrazine are both really nasty) and we don't want to mix lots of oxygen with it...
MediaMonkey is a far far better piece of software [than iTunes] for managing your media.
But does it integrate with an online music store and the iPod to provide an overall non-sucky experience? Nobody would use iTunes - well, except perhaps on a Mac - without those other components; it's the whole package that's key.
In general, it just goes to show that a vertically-integrated system can, when done well overall, stand to have some parts that are only so-so when viewed in isolation. This general insight applies in many other areas as well (e.g., MS are masters of it with Office and Exchange...)
Except that when you joined the Apple Developer Program in the first place you agreed to the blatant censorship and approval process in full. Do you honestly think a behemoth company like Apple could really be tricked that easily?? Even people with real legitimate reasons to sue have no chance!
So? Just sue them anyway. You just need to remember as part of that to persuade the court that the "no sue" clause(s) is/are unconscionable and so void. Courts tend to be fairly heavily down on big companies that make the little guy bend over and take it with pseudo-legal stuff, and they tend to be so precisely because so few of the little guys fight it.
But don't think that Apple will be your special friend afterwards...
I'm waiting for the realisation that merely combining images onto one physical machine does not do much to lower costs. For a directly-administered Windows OS the sysadmin's time was costing you more than the hardware. Now that the hardware is gone can you really justify maybe $50kpa/5 = $10pa per image for sysadmin overhead? This is particularly a problem for point (2) above, as they are exactly the people likely to resist the rigorous automation needed to get sysamdin per image overhead to an acceptable point (the best practice point is about $100 per image -- the marginal cost of centrally-administered Linux servers. You'll notice that's some hundreds of times less than worst-practice sysadmin overhead).
I'll also be a bit controversial and note that many sysadmins aren't doing themselves any favours here. How often do you read on Slashdot of time-consuming activities just to get a 5% improvement. If that 5% less runtime costs you 5% more sysadmin time then you've already increased costs by a factor of ten.
You shouldn't be hiring worst-practice sysadmins. Utter false economy.
The big savings with virtualization are in improving utilization of machine rooms; it's much better to have one physical machine hosting 5 VMs than 5 separate machines. The savings are in terms of floor-space, electricity and cooling, all of which can really stack up over time.
I'm going to be very interested in what he does for long term planning.
That is especially true when you consider that it is likely that a GOP administration would immediately follow his, which would also, knowing the Republicans, do their darnedest to undo whatever good he might have managed to achieve.
That'll only happen if the GOP remember that the only way to electoral success in a two-party system is to hold the electoral center-ground. Right now, they appear to prefer letting their hard-liners call the shots; ideologically pure sure, but not a way to win as they'll focus on candidates that are in their own comfort zone and not that of the electorate. All the Dems have to do is stay approximately put and they'll do well; if they get lucky and have a few successes, they'll be sitting pretty.
(Yes, the reverse situation has been true in the past; the tension between pleasing party activists and the electorate is a constant of politics whenever there is a broad-based electorate.)
Open source cloud services exist, but they're missing an interoperable standard API and the sheer amount of server space.
I think you'll see an interoperable API being standardized over the next few years, especially for the lower-level parts of the Cloud; the higher-level parts have much less need because they're much more variable in specifics, but will benefit from lower-level standards. (It's a bit like with the internet specs; it's vastly more important that there are standards for TCP/IP than there are for instant messaging.) It's definitely an evolving situation; watch this space.
A cloud of peers (like Wuala, but between web servers) could be the solution to the second problem - give resources to the cloud, get cloudspace back.
Color me highly suspicious of that utopian vision, especially as most people with capacity they could theoretically donate will use it to reduce the amount of public Cloud that they use (they've got some very strong incentives to do this; if you have your own datacenter, you want to squeeze it until its pips squeak in order to maximize RoI). Because hosting servers with a reasonable level of quality-of-service incurs real costs, there has to be a way to have payments flow from customers to providers or it simply won't get very far. The genius of the likes of Amazon is that they've got that side of things sorted out; it allows them to operate a business model that's essentially about outsourcing running a datacenter.
The best part of this? It's not that it is perfect; it's that it is explicit up-front about the imperfections. You can take your own steps to counteract them to the extent that your budget will support. Some steps are technical (back your data up if you care about it, folks!) and some aren't, but the decisions are in your hands.
That's wrong. Terrorism is a threat. It's just not a very significant one for most people so long as a few simple steps are taken (like not taking random parcels onto planes for strangers) most of which are just plain old common sense anyway.
Yes, have specialist police units watch suspected terrorists. After all we do the same to suspected mobsters and spies too. Also yes to keeping guns and knives out of the cabin (I don't want anyone going postal near to me, and planes are stressful places). But cutting out a bunch of the useless security theater would be a good thing too. In particular, the universal shoe checks and the liquid ban just make people real grouchy. If we could come up with a reliable way of scanning luggage without having to take laptops out of our bags, that'd be even better since then going through security would be a breeze.
(FWIW, the US probably wasn't applying enough security checks before 9/11. But now they've gone the other way...)
Slashdot Mirror
* Support forward-thinking projects like Wayland instead of putting another car on the fail-train that is X. X is architecturally inferior to WindowServer and Windows' display layer for desktop-oriented tasks. A simplified windowing system that puts graphics first and drops the cruft would go a long way in making linux seem modern and easy to maintain.
X is superior in one critical way. It has a butt-load more apps (especially commercial apps) than Wayland does. You might not care about this, but a heck of a lot of users and businesses do.
(Which isn't to say that X isn't bloaty. It just happens to win in the area where 99% of everyone gives a shit.)
Oh, crazy right wingers... One wonders if you ever even talked to someone who is a member of the working poor.
Oh, of course they have! When they were telling their illegal Mexican immigrant house staff that they didn't merit a living wage and that they should be glad they aren't forced to wear chains!
It's assholes like that which make me wonder if the commies had a point after all.
If there's one thing the insurance companies would never be stupid enough to do, and that's screw with someone from Congress.
Never underestimate the power of sheer bloody stupidity!
The problem, of course, is that some old geezer isn't going to want to move out of the old neighborhood and will end up being the only one in the middle of nowhere but still expect his mail to be delivered to his door.
If there's just one in the area, the city can just deincorporate that area (I assume there is, or at least can be, a procedure for that) and then the geezer can enjoy the benefits of rural living. Problem solved.
Of course, who are we kidding, nothing is going to change because they probably own half of the senate.
I think that's unlikely. Big Oil won't put up with not being #1. (And the senators know that doing stuff that pleases their constituents at least some of the time is a good move, so helping constituents get "ooh! new shiny!" would seem to be to the advantage of those seeking reelection.)
Or all forms of parallel traffic. I've got a nice star on my windscreen from a semi that was diagonal to me.
You should get that filled before the whole screen cracks. I believe there's a clear plastic with about the same refractive index as glass that's used, and which is pretty cheap; don't know the details though. You might even be able to persuade your insurer to pay for doing it, since it is a proactive step to prevent a bigger claim.
I have no idea why you think a PhD is a formal requirement for being a professor.
It varies by subject and field. In physics, it's really hard to be a professor without a PhD. In much of computer science it's much easier. OTOH, to be a (full) professor in any field you do need to be able to publish loads (or at least very significantly; quality counts) and draw in money. Everything else flows from those.
How should students treat code written as part of assignments or as part of their course-work in terms of licensing?
Simple. Treat the coursework like it is property of the institution. And stop kidding yourself that coursework is valuable outside that context; it's vanishingly unlikely to be anything like that. After all, just about anything that you'd do in a course is something that a real programmer would just use a library for (and get a better tested and documented version in the process).
Which isn't to say anything about anything else done while you happen to be a student. If you write programs on your own time then that's your own business, even if they happen to include techniques that you've learned from class. In fact, that's actually a better way of learning what you're being taught; it's not formally part of the curriculum at undergraduate level because it's very hard to scale up the marking. (Postgraduate is different.)
"a virus with every movie. for no extra charge."
Of course. How else are you supposed to know that it was Sony who developed it?
I'm more curious as to why the servers were centralized enough to be vulnerable to this. Kinda defeats the purpose of redundancy, no? OTOH, it does sound like they had enough backups in place to get everything up and running again in short order, so maybe it's unfair to second-guess them.
Because with Amazon, if you really care about being resilient you need put your instances in more than one "availability zone" (i.e., datacenter). That's how they do it, they're open about this being the case, and there's really no magic, just competent hosting.
Admittedly, Betelgeuse is somewhat further away than Jupiter, and the only neutrino effects are likely to be a lot of very excited astrophysicists.
So... what is the excitation energy of an astrophysicist and how do they manage to couple so strongly with neutrinos?
I suppose the leading theory might be to have them somehow emanate a variant Weak Force, which would make them be not really of this universe. Going by the few I've met - who were tending to be at least not of this world - the evidence seems to be stacking up...
IMO universities should be teaching core principles and methods, not attempting to impart up-to-date job skills.
So you advocate teaching full-on computer science to physics, chemistry and engineering students? Why? Shouldn't they be learning about the fundamentals of their own fields instead?
I don't see Pixar being in trouble at all, this is very solid business and seems to me very predictable above $500mil. per movie business.
Except for Cars that is, which suffered from the fact that kids outside North America just weren't quite as thoroughly sold on the concept (motor vehicles aren't cuddly). Still made a good amount; just not as much as the others.
Highly unlikely that it could work in a way acceptable for viewing movies. Cardboard cutouts instead of actual 3D at best...
Works great for movies with Roger Moore.
Sully was a very experienced glider pilot( Including a CFI instrutor rating, as was the captain of the Gimli glider.
I wonder whether landing on water will form part of future pilot training and computer control scenarios. After all, they've now got some good data on how to do it right...
Apparently landing in water is far more dangerous than landing on land
We can file this sentence under "things that probably shouldn't need to be written down"
But it isn't as dangerous as landing a plane in downtown Manhattan, which is what the pilot's alternative was. AIUI, a good stretch of flat water is way better than bumpy ground, no matter how much a runway is better than water...
[bad idea]We could use hydrogen instead...[/bad idea]
It's not as bad an idea as all that; hydrogen is much lighter than helium and is far, far more plentiful. The only real issue is that it is flammable, and that's not really a show-stopper. After all, a lot of the fuels used in current rockets are far worse when it comes to handling (concentrated hydrogen peroxide and hydrazine are both really nasty) and we don't want to mix lots of oxygen with it...
MediaMonkey is a far far better piece of software [than iTunes] for managing your media.
But does it integrate with an online music store and the iPod to provide an overall non-sucky experience? Nobody would use iTunes - well, except perhaps on a Mac - without those other components; it's the whole package that's key.
In general, it just goes to show that a vertically-integrated system can, when done well overall, stand to have some parts that are only so-so when viewed in isolation. This general insight applies in many other areas as well (e.g., MS are masters of it with Office and Exchange...)
Except that when you joined the Apple Developer Program in the first place you agreed to the blatant censorship and approval process in full. Do you honestly think a behemoth company like Apple could really be tricked that easily?? Even people with real legitimate reasons to sue have no chance!
So? Just sue them anyway. You just need to remember as part of that to persuade the court that the "no sue" clause(s) is/are unconscionable and so void. Courts tend to be fairly heavily down on big companies that make the little guy bend over and take it with pseudo-legal stuff, and they tend to be so precisely because so few of the little guys fight it.
But don't think that Apple will be your special friend afterwards...
I'm waiting for the realisation that merely combining images onto one physical machine does not do much to lower costs. For a directly-administered Windows OS the sysadmin's time was costing you more than the hardware. Now that the hardware is gone can you really justify maybe $50kpa/5 = $10pa per image for sysadmin overhead? This is particularly a problem for point (2) above, as they are exactly the people likely to resist the rigorous automation needed to get sysamdin per image overhead to an acceptable point (the best practice point is about $100 per image -- the marginal cost of centrally-administered Linux servers. You'll notice that's some hundreds of times less than worst-practice sysadmin overhead).
I'll also be a bit controversial and note that many sysadmins aren't doing themselves any favours here. How often do you read on Slashdot of time-consuming activities just to get a 5% improvement. If that 5% less runtime costs you 5% more sysadmin time then you've already increased costs by a factor of ten.
You shouldn't be hiring worst-practice sysadmins. Utter false economy.
The big savings with virtualization are in improving utilization of machine rooms; it's much better to have one physical machine hosting 5 VMs than 5 separate machines. The savings are in terms of floor-space, electricity and cooling, all of which can really stack up over time.
I'm going to be very interested in what he does for long term planning.
That is especially true when you consider that it is likely that a GOP administration would immediately follow his, which would also, knowing the Republicans, do their darnedest to undo whatever good he might have managed to achieve.
That'll only happen if the GOP remember that the only way to electoral success in a two-party system is to hold the electoral center-ground. Right now, they appear to prefer letting their hard-liners call the shots; ideologically pure sure, but not a way to win as they'll focus on candidates that are in their own comfort zone and not that of the electorate. All the Dems have to do is stay approximately put and they'll do well; if they get lucky and have a few successes, they'll be sitting pretty.
(Yes, the reverse situation has been true in the past; the tension between pleasing party activists and the electorate is a constant of politics whenever there is a broad-based electorate.)
Open source cloud services exist, but they're missing an interoperable standard API and the sheer amount of server space.
I think you'll see an interoperable API being standardized over the next few years, especially for the lower-level parts of the Cloud; the higher-level parts have much less need because they're much more variable in specifics, but will benefit from lower-level standards. (It's a bit like with the internet specs; it's vastly more important that there are standards for TCP/IP than there are for instant messaging.) It's definitely an evolving situation; watch this space.
A cloud of peers (like Wuala, but between web servers) could be the solution to the second problem - give resources to the cloud, get cloudspace back.
Color me highly suspicious of that utopian vision, especially as most people with capacity they could theoretically donate will use it to reduce the amount of public Cloud that they use (they've got some very strong incentives to do this; if you have your own datacenter, you want to squeeze it until its pips squeak in order to maximize RoI). Because hosting servers with a reasonable level of quality-of-service incurs real costs, there has to be a way to have payments flow from customers to providers or it simply won't get very far. The genius of the likes of Amazon is that they've got that side of things sorted out; it allows them to operate a business model that's essentially about outsourcing running a datacenter.
The best part of this? It's not that it is perfect; it's that it is explicit up-front about the imperfections. You can take your own steps to counteract them to the extent that your budget will support. Some steps are technical (back your data up if you care about it, folks!) and some aren't, but the decisions are in your hands.
You missed Stop All Production
Seriously Annoying Programs
Terrorism is a non-threat.
That's wrong. Terrorism is a threat. It's just not a very significant one for most people so long as a few simple steps are taken (like not taking random parcels onto planes for strangers) most of which are just plain old common sense anyway.
Yes, have specialist police units watch suspected terrorists. After all we do the same to suspected mobsters and spies too. Also yes to keeping guns and knives out of the cabin (I don't want anyone going postal near to me, and planes are stressful places). But cutting out a bunch of the useless security theater would be a good thing too. In particular, the universal shoe checks and the liquid ban just make people real grouchy. If we could come up with a reliable way of scanning luggage without having to take laptops out of our bags, that'd be even better since then going through security would be a breeze.
(FWIW, the US probably wasn't applying enough security checks before 9/11. But now they've gone the other way...)
As a seminary graduate with a Doctorate in New Testament from the University of Virginia... and I never had to blow a single goat.
So... you only gave blow jobs to married goats? What about widower goats, or did that not come up?