I did exactly what you described with google voice on Tmobile's $30 prepaid plan for 3 months. It was unacceptable, and I do not recommend it to anyone. Here are the pitfalls:
1) If you just use native google voice in android, tmobile still charges you minutes for it. 2) To avoid the minutes issue, you need to get an app that forwards through gtalk (grooveIP or sipdroid). 3) Under all of these options, call quality is unacceptable (static, and much more importantly, lag. A couple seconds of lag).
It's a great idea, but the quality is too low to be usable at this time.
I disagree. I've got a $30/month prepaid plan, about 1/2 the cost of when I was on a 2yr contract tied plan. I did buy my phone (a used phone), so my phone subsidy cost is about $5-10/month (based on how long I use phones and how much I will pay for my next phone). In my opinion the contract in fact brings a *higher* monthly cost, in exchange for the lock in and phone subsidy.
+1
Right on. These are about accessing services, and the data they pump through more than functionality they provide. Open source is still the king of encapsulated functionality.
This is not worth going after, because the ore grades are too low to pull out in an economically viable way. This is a common problem in mining for precious metals and rare earths. For a find to be viable, you need a higher material density or a second valuable mineral (iron, copper, phosphate, etc).
Also, regarding the regulations, those are probably good. Many chemicals used in mining are pretty nasty (arsenic for example). Keeping them controlled is just part of the price the public puts on anyone who wants to develop the resource.
I set up shop for myself, and found myself in the same position. My wife assists me in my business, which gives us two employees (actually general partners the way the business is setup). As a two employee company, we could apply for group insurance. The insurance broker I work with handles alot of the interactions for me. I was able to get a good price compared to an individual plan (about 30% cheaper) and with better benefits. I would suggest doing the same. Some insurers (Aetna) may make you put money upfront to get underwritten, but a good broker should be able to let you know if that's worth doing.
I think rules like this from the FCC are the least of comcast's worries. After a year of crappy quality service from Comcast, I switched to FiOS from Verizon (it wasn't available where I live when I first signed up for Comcast). For the same price, I now get dramatically better internet service (5/2 Mbps down/up). What I was really surprised by was how much better the television service is. The channels are much clearer, and I get a ton of good channels in the base package. The guide works much better as well.
If AT&T's uverse is on the same level, then I would expect the cable companies are facing real competition from the traditional telcos.
For me, the pricing of Blu-ray has kept me away. Blu-ray discs and players are still priced for early adopters. Most decent movies are priced at $25+ for Blu-ray. I've gotten used to movies being half that price, and I'm just not willing to pay the extra for the HD video (especially for older movies). I also haven't bought any new DVDs in probably two years, because I don't want to buy something twice when Blu-ray actually gets priced reasonably.
So, until the pricing comes in line with what DVDs are priced at, I'm not buying any more movies. I'll just keep using Netflix and VOD. There is just no compelling reason to buy Blu-ray until the prices comes down.
I agree completely on the debt and spending points. The US budget has debt service taking up about the same amount of money as the military (~20%, http://www.federalbudget.com/, http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=9957&type=1). And that debt service is just the interest on the debt. There is no principal being retired. That needs to get fixed.
Most of the R&D spending happens from the private industry though. There are tons of DARPA/DoD/etc grants out there to be had, but there are even more from private industry (Which counts, because we aren't socialists yet). I would be shocked if the US is not in fact already spending 3% of GDP on R&D.
I've hired quite a few people for developer jobs (which I would assume is your goal). When I'm interviewing a candidate I want to hear them say that "programming is programming". Syntaxt changes, but the fundamentals remain. You need to be able to adapt to the languages used in your projects, and adopt the new ones that evolve.
I used to do admin work for a group at NCSU. While there was quite a bit of bureaucracy in it, these seemed to work well overall. Essentially, you told the accountants/etc that you were replacing equipment X. They would then make it available for request from other departments first. Sometimes there were takers, but usually not. After that, there was a public sale. Fun stuff like old sparc stations and DEC alpha boxes was available for geeks for cheap (often $10 or less). Also other stuff like old office furniture, etc. After that, if it didn't sell then it was disappeared in whatever manner appropriate (often recycled, sometimes trashed).
It seemed to work pretty well overall. You could skirt the whole thing if the equipment was paid for with grant money instead of university funds. Would seem like it would be made better if you added in something like craigslist/freecycle. I would check and see if your university system has anything like that, and if not, suggest it.
I would be really glad to see these sort of devices become more widespread. We have a few solid state devices at work for our critical, high performance apps. For what we bought when we bought them, the price was through the roof. But the performance can't be beat. It's like having a persistent ramdisk to store your DB to. It really gave a huge performance boost to us, because the DB concurrency controls force it to wait alot for any I/O, including other transactions doing I/O.
This is a bit different than what we have, but it's still better than many of the disk options out there. And the price difference is negligible when you consider it next to 15k RPM disks.
This almost seems like the same comparisons we've been hearing for years. 1) Postgresql is more full featured than MySQL 2) MySQL is faster in a read-mostly environment That's pretty much the same as the anecdotal arguments have been for years.
In my job, we moved from mysql to postgres several years ago (around PG 7.0). At the time, we needed to make the move for performance reasons. We are in a read-write system, and MySQL's locking was killing us (this was before InnoDB was well established). The features are better too, as our developers were used to having data integrity features, server side programming, and all of the SQL92 constructs available. We also learned a bit about PG performance, which I'll share.
1) Run EXPLAIN ANALYZE on everything. Postgresql is touchier about query performance than MySQL was. This just needs to be a habit if you're using PG. (You really should do performance analysis no matter your DB. It's just a good practice). The biggest gain will be making sure you're using index scans rather than sequential scans.
2) Use persistent connections. Everyone likes to point out the forking issue with PG vs. MySQL's threaded. PG's connection handling is slow, there's no doubt about it. But there's an easy answer. Just limit how often you connect. If you can keep a connection pool, and just reuse those connections, you'll save this big hit.
3) Full vacuum and reindex regularly. We've found the docs to be a bit off on this. It indicates that you should run these occasionally. If you're in a read-write system, a full vacuum on a regular basis is very important. It really doesn't take that long if you do it regularly. Also, we've had trouble with indexes getting unbalanced (we see 50->90% tuple turnover daily). This has gotten better, but it doesn't hurt to let your maintenance scripts make things ideal for you. So, we run a full vacuum and reindex of our tables nightly through cron.
4) Get your shared memory right. PG's shared buffers is probably the most important config attribute. It controls how much of your DB is memory resident vs disk resident. Avoiding disk hits is a big deal for any DB, so get this right. If you can fit your whole DB in memory, then do it. If not, make sure your primary tables will fit. The more you use the shared memory, and the less you have to page data in/out, the better your overall performance will be.
Most DB systems seem to be read-mostly, so I can understand the performance comparisons focusing on that. In our read-write system though, the locking was the biggest issue and it tilted the performance comparison toward PG.
I work for a small company, and I am in the convenient position of being in charge of both ops and dev. I came up in very much of a slash role (admin/developer), and I know both sides very well. In my experience, the real answer is neither operations nor development "owns" the deployment. The company "owns" the deployment. Usually there are several groups that have a part to play in making a deployment successful (dev, QA, training, ops, marketing, etc). The main thing is cooperation. We have a process that lays out the things that need to be done in a deployment along with the group responsible. This lets everyone do what they're best at. It takes a bit of work to get this, but it's much more important to have a successful deployment than to get an ego boost for "winning" the argument.
Many of the mechanical parts have broken over time. I had to replace the touchpad, keyboard. and screen hinges. You also shouldn't judge the quality of the laptop by the parts that broke on me. I was not delicate with this laptop, and this all happened after 6-7 years of use.
Smokers vs. anti-smokers and freedom
on
Safe Cigarettes?
·
· Score: 1
I am an ex-smoker. I smoked for about 8 years and quit just about two years ago. To me, most smokers are fairly courteous to non-smokers. Most are used to go outside, stand out of the way, and don't go blowing smoke into the path of anyone walking past.
Anti-smokers seem to think that they have a right to tell other people what to do, primarily based on dislike. The EPA's environmental tobacco smoke study (the basis for most claims that secondhand smoke causes cancer) was tossed from court in the tobacco trials, because the work was shoddy (http://www.davehitt.com/facts/epa.html).
So, if smoke doesn't hurt anyone but the smoker, then the premise of controlling smokers is about personal taste. That's not cool. You don't have a right to have people only say nice things to you and make nice smells around you. You have a right to live, but other people get to make decisions, like driving cars, whether or not to wear deodorant, eating food loaded with fat and cholesterol, etc. Smokers don't want you to smoke, and there's nothing wrong with telling kids that smoking is bad for them. But when an adult makes a decision about how they want to live, it should be respected.
I work for a website that does alot of traffic (it's a specialized industy, and no it's not pr0n). The site pushes about 10Mbit/s from 9-5 during the week through 6 webservers. There are a couple things you need to look at as far as making a site like that work.
The first thing you should do is look at your system and determine what your resource drains are. Do you have a database? Is it read-write or read-only? What are your replication and growth options for that app? That affects your scalability at that point and similarly applies to applications like EJB or other app servers. Do you use sessions? Do you have some sort of session aggregator available so sessions could be accessibly from multiple webservers? There are lots of things like this you need to find. I for example, setup seperate webservers (tux & apache) to handle static and dynamic content so that my DB connections would not be held by processes not using them.
The next thing you need to do, is know how your system is used. You should be able to statistically break this out from your logs by looking at a small set of users during testing. I found that 60% of my hits were to one page, and I knew I had to really optimize that (someone mentioned apache bench, which can work very well for testing single pages). Also, you need to know how parts of your site use your resources. If you have a single DB server and multiple webservers, you don't want anything slowing your DB because that cascades back to your webservers. We have pretty strict performance testing guidelines whenever a part of the site is updated, and I recommend doing your performance testing as you go.
The final thing you need to do, is have a growth plan. Do you know how to setup load balancing for your webservers? Can your DB/app servers be replicated, or do you just need to buy faster hardware as you grow? Do you know your capacity thresholds from your performance testing? If your system is going to grow, you're going to need to be able to answer these questions.
If you make sure you've got your scalability issues known, and you don't lock your self into something that can't grow, you should be ok. Beyond that test for speed under load, and track how your performance changes over time. That will help you know when you need to grow your hardware. HTH.
I thought the "mini-series" definitely showed potential.
First thing, is there is no room for breaking the first rule of good sci-fi. That rule: stay off earth! Earth is boring. We've seen it before. Good sci-fi shows quickly become boring when they focus on earth (Lexx, X-files, etc). Space and other planets! That's where the action is!
Second, the story has more potential than most, because there is no impressive army at home backing them up. Galactica is in an all or nothing situation. While Star Trek was very popular, there was always the prospect of "the rest of the fleet" in case things really got dicey.
These are the two biggest things to me. I can't think of any good shows that really combined these two concepts. Makes it enough for me to watch it.
Slashdot Mirror
I did exactly what you described with google voice on Tmobile's $30 prepaid plan for 3 months. It was unacceptable, and I do not recommend it to anyone. Here are the pitfalls:
1) If you just use native google voice in android, tmobile still charges you minutes for it.
2) To avoid the minutes issue, you need to get an app that forwards through gtalk (grooveIP or sipdroid).
3) Under all of these options, call quality is unacceptable (static, and much more importantly, lag. A couple seconds of lag).
It's a great idea, but the quality is too low to be usable at this time.
Clearly the work of a Sith.
+1
I have used PostGIS and Postgresql extensively for spatial systems. It has rich functionality and can perform very well.
Where are the flying cars?! We were promised flying cars!
I disagree. I've got a $30/month prepaid plan, about 1/2 the cost of when I was on a 2yr contract tied plan. I did buy my phone (a used phone), so my phone subsidy cost is about $5-10/month (based on how long I use phones and how much I will pay for my next phone). In my opinion the contract in fact brings a *higher* monthly cost, in exchange for the lock in and phone subsidy.
+1 Right on. These are about accessing services, and the data they pump through more than functionality they provide. Open source is still the king of encapsulated functionality.
How long until he can grow bacon?
-1 flame
This is not worth going after, because the ore grades are too low to pull out in an economically viable way. This is a common problem in mining for precious metals and rare earths. For a find to be viable, you need a higher material density or a second valuable mineral (iron, copper, phosphate, etc).
Also, regarding the regulations, those are probably good. Many chemicals used in mining are pretty nasty (arsenic for example). Keeping them controlled is just part of the price the public puts on anyone who wants to develop the resource.
It's like Viagra for your brain!
I set up shop for myself, and found myself in the same position. My wife assists me in my business, which gives us two employees (actually general partners the way the business is setup). As a two employee company, we could apply for group insurance. The insurance broker I work with handles alot of the interactions for me. I was able to get a good price compared to an individual plan (about 30% cheaper) and with better benefits. I would suggest doing the same. Some insurers (Aetna) may make you put money upfront to get underwritten, but a good broker should be able to let you know if that's worth doing.
I think rules like this from the FCC are the least of comcast's worries. After a year of crappy quality service from Comcast, I switched to FiOS from Verizon (it wasn't available where I live when I first signed up for Comcast). For the same price, I now get dramatically better internet service (5/2 Mbps down/up). What I was really surprised by was how much better the television service is. The channels are much clearer, and I get a ton of good channels in the base package. The guide works much better as well.
If AT&T's uverse is on the same level, then I would expect the cable companies are facing real competition from the traditional telcos.
For me, the pricing of Blu-ray has kept me away. Blu-ray discs and players are still priced for early adopters. Most decent movies are priced at $25+ for Blu-ray. I've gotten used to movies being half that price, and I'm just not willing to pay the extra for the HD video (especially for older movies). I also haven't bought any new DVDs in probably two years, because I don't want to buy something twice when Blu-ray actually gets priced reasonably.
So, until the pricing comes in line with what DVDs are priced at, I'm not buying any more movies. I'll just keep using Netflix and VOD. There is just no compelling reason to buy Blu-ray until the prices comes down.
I agree completely on the debt and spending points. The US budget has debt service taking up about the same amount of money as the military (~20%, http://www.federalbudget.com/, http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=9957&type=1). And that debt service is just the interest on the debt. There is no principal being retired. That needs to get fixed.
Most of the R&D spending happens from the private industry though. There are tons of DARPA/DoD/etc grants out there to be had, but there are even more from private industry (Which counts, because we aren't socialists yet). I would be shocked if the US is not in fact already spending 3% of GDP on R&D.
I've hired quite a few people for developer jobs (which I would assume is your goal). When I'm interviewing a candidate I want to hear them say that "programming is programming". Syntaxt changes, but the fundamentals remain. You need to be able to adapt to the languages used in your projects, and adopt the new ones that evolve.
So, do I have to clean up the litter around it every month?
I used to do admin work for a group at NCSU. While there was quite a bit of bureaucracy in it, these seemed to work well overall. Essentially, you told the accountants/etc that you were replacing equipment X. They would then make it available for request from other departments first. Sometimes there were takers, but usually not. After that, there was a public sale. Fun stuff like old sparc stations and DEC alpha boxes was available for geeks for cheap (often $10 or less). Also other stuff like old office furniture, etc. After that, if it didn't sell then it was disappeared in whatever manner appropriate (often recycled, sometimes trashed).
It seemed to work pretty well overall. You could skirt the whole thing if the equipment was paid for with grant money instead of university funds. Would seem like it would be made better if you added in something like craigslist/freecycle. I would check and see if your university system has anything like that, and if not, suggest it.
Viva el Mexico!
I would be really glad to see these sort of devices become more widespread. We have a few solid state devices at work for our critical, high performance apps. For what we bought when we bought them, the price was through the roof. But the performance can't be beat. It's like having a persistent ramdisk to store your DB to. It really gave a huge performance boost to us, because the DB concurrency controls force it to wait alot for any I/O, including other transactions doing I/O.
This is a bit different than what we have, but it's still better than many of the disk options out there. And the price difference is negligible when you consider it next to 15k RPM disks.
This almost seems like the same comparisons we've been hearing for years.
1) Postgresql is more full featured than MySQL
2) MySQL is faster in a read-mostly environment
That's pretty much the same as the anecdotal arguments have been for years.
In my job, we moved from mysql to postgres several years ago (around PG 7.0). At the time, we needed to make the move for performance reasons. We are in a read-write system, and MySQL's locking was killing us (this was before InnoDB was well established). The features are better too, as our developers were used to having data integrity features, server side programming, and all of the SQL92 constructs available. We also learned a bit about PG performance, which I'll share.
1) Run EXPLAIN ANALYZE on everything. Postgresql is touchier about query performance than MySQL was. This just needs to be a habit if you're using PG. (You really should do performance analysis no matter your DB. It's just a good practice). The biggest gain will be making sure you're using index scans rather than sequential scans.
2) Use persistent connections. Everyone likes to point out the forking issue with PG vs. MySQL's threaded. PG's connection handling is slow, there's no doubt about it. But there's an easy answer. Just limit how often you connect. If you can keep a connection pool, and just reuse those connections, you'll save this big hit.
3) Full vacuum and reindex regularly. We've found the docs to be a bit off on this. It indicates that you should run these occasionally. If you're in a read-write system, a full vacuum on a regular basis is very important. It really doesn't take that long if you do it regularly. Also, we've had trouble with indexes getting unbalanced (we see 50->90% tuple turnover daily). This has gotten better, but it doesn't hurt to let your maintenance scripts make things ideal for you. So, we run a full vacuum and reindex of our tables nightly through cron.
4) Get your shared memory right. PG's shared buffers is probably the most important config attribute. It controls how much of your DB is memory resident vs disk resident. Avoiding disk hits is a big deal for any DB, so get this right. If you can fit your whole DB in memory, then do it. If not, make sure your primary tables will fit. The more you use the shared memory, and the less you have to page data in/out, the better your overall performance will be.
Most DB systems seem to be read-mostly, so I can understand the performance comparisons focusing on that. In our read-write system though, the locking was the biggest issue and it tilted the performance comparison toward PG.
I work for a small company, and I am in the convenient position of being in charge of both ops and dev. I came up in very much of a slash role (admin/developer), and I know both sides very well. In my experience, the real answer is neither operations nor development "owns" the deployment. The company "owns" the deployment. Usually there are several groups that have a part to play in making a deployment successful (dev, QA, training, ops, marketing, etc). The main thing is cooperation. We have a process that lays out the things that need to be done in a deployment along with the group responsible. This lets everyone do what they're best at. It takes a bit of work to get this, but it's much more important to have a successful deployment than to get an ego boost for "winning" the argument.
I currently have a Thinkpad, but my previous laptop was a Sony Vaio. The electronics are still good, and are available through the numerous online part vendors.
http://servicesales.sel.sony.com/web/index.jsp
http://www.impactcomputers.com/
Many of the mechanical parts have broken over time. I had to replace the touchpad, keyboard. and screen hinges. You also shouldn't judge the quality of the laptop by the parts that broke on me. I was not delicate with this laptop, and this all happened after 6-7 years of use.
I am an ex-smoker. I smoked for about 8 years and quit just about two years ago. To me, most smokers are fairly courteous to non-smokers. Most are used to go outside, stand out of the way, and don't go blowing smoke into the path of anyone walking past.
Anti-smokers seem to think that they have a right to tell other people what to do, primarily based on dislike. The EPA's environmental tobacco smoke study (the basis for most claims that secondhand smoke causes cancer) was tossed from court in the tobacco trials, because the work was shoddy (http://www.davehitt.com/facts/epa.html).
So, if smoke doesn't hurt anyone but the smoker, then the premise of controlling smokers is about personal taste. That's not cool. You don't have a right to have people only say nice things to you and make nice smells around you. You have a right to live, but other people get to make decisions, like driving cars, whether or not to wear deodorant, eating food loaded with fat and cholesterol, etc. Smokers don't want you to smoke, and there's nothing wrong with telling kids that smoking is bad for them. But when an adult makes a decision about how they want to live, it should be respected.
I work for a website that does alot of traffic (it's a specialized industy, and no it's not pr0n). The site pushes about 10Mbit/s from 9-5 during the week through 6 webservers. There are a couple things you need to look at as far as making a site like that work.
The first thing you should do is look at your system and determine what your resource drains are. Do you have a database? Is it read-write or read-only? What are your replication and growth options for that app? That affects your scalability at that point and similarly applies to applications like EJB or other app servers. Do you use sessions? Do you have some sort of session aggregator available so sessions could be accessibly from multiple webservers? There are lots of things like this you need to find. I for example, setup seperate webservers (tux & apache) to handle static and dynamic content so that my DB connections would not be held by processes not using them.
The next thing you need to do, is know how your system is used. You should be able to statistically break this out from your logs by looking at a small set of users during testing. I found that 60% of my hits were to one page, and I knew I had to really optimize that (someone mentioned apache bench, which can work very well for testing single pages). Also, you need to know how parts of your site use your resources. If you have a single DB server and multiple webservers, you don't want anything slowing your DB because that cascades back to your webservers. We have pretty strict performance testing guidelines whenever a part of the site is updated, and I recommend doing your performance testing as you go.
The final thing you need to do, is have a growth plan. Do you know how to setup load balancing for your webservers? Can your DB/app servers be replicated, or do you just need to buy faster hardware as you grow? Do you know your capacity thresholds from your performance testing? If your system is going to grow, you're going to need to be able to answer these questions.
If you make sure you've got your scalability issues known, and you don't lock your self into something that can't grow, you should be ok. Beyond that test for speed under load, and track how your performance changes over time. That will help you know when you need to grow your hardware. HTH.
I thought the "mini-series" definitely showed potential.
First thing, is there is no room for breaking the first rule of good sci-fi. That rule: stay off earth! Earth is boring. We've seen it before. Good sci-fi shows quickly become boring when they focus on earth (Lexx, X-files, etc). Space and other planets! That's where the action is!
Second, the story has more potential than most, because there is no impressive army at home backing them up. Galactica is in an all or nothing situation. While Star Trek was very popular, there was always the prospect of "the rest of the fleet" in case things really got dicey.
These are the two biggest things to me. I can't think of any good shows that really combined these two concepts. Makes it enough for me to watch it.