I worked for a company out of Reno, NV (yeh, a hotpot of corrupt companies, I know) and when I found out they were trying to bilk millionaires out of VC capital, I just turned in my laptop and said that was my final day.
The company refused to pay me for my last two weeks of service or any vacation time I had built up.
When I attempted to get the money from them, they produced a list of dates I was not in the office (exceeding my vacation pay plus 10 days for the last two weeks of service). These were days I worked from home (and I actually WORKed from home).
I tried to appeal to the legal system, but got a big runaround. This same company sued other ex-employees for frivolous things, and the courts took this company (that had a history of this sort of thing) quite seriously for years.
The courts have it in their best interest to make sure lawsuits keep happening and go on for extended periods of time. It's job security for them, and they just don't care that it's a drain on the rest of society.
Lordy. I notice that the page claims quicksort has n^2 complexity when input is ordered. That is only true of naive quicksort implementations. Textbook quicksort implementations from when I was in college (about 10 years ago) already took care of cases where input was ordered.
As for the choice of Quicksort - Most likely, they chose it because just about every C library out there has an implementation of quicksort. And while personally I prefer heapsort (in the worst case, quicksort has Q*O(n^2) behavior, while heapsort always takes only P*O(n log n), But P >> Q), I'll admit that for almost all unstructured input sets, quicksort finishes quite a lot faster than anything else.
I humbly suggest you do not understand quicksort vs. heap sort. Layman's terms: Quicksort is better. It takes less RAM. The O(xyz) notation only takes into account computational complexity, and sorta ignores that whole messy "RAM vs. disk" issue that reality imposes on us.
Quicksort finishes just fine in nlogn time for all input sets EXCEPT those specially-crafted to work badly on quicksort. For any data set of more than about 20 elements, the odds of getting a data set specially ordered to take n^2 time in quicksort are infitesimally small (unless someone has specially set the data up in that "takes a long time" order).
The advantage of the quicksort is that it can do the sort with Q memory. Why don't you go back and review how much memory a heap sort does with P elements? Here. I'll help you get started. a little page with comparisons of sorts
So, travelling back in time, you cannot reflect light, and, by the same token, you cannot absorbe light. And it just moves up from there for all other physical effects. Nothing touched, no air breathed, no light disturbed, nothing. So, how would you even know you were in the past?
Hey! Trust me here! This big box with glitter and a coin-accepter on the outside is a time machine. Just step inside, put in your cash, wait two hours, and come back out. We'll give you a great video of all the places you visited!
Rails: It's great! (but doesn't work)
on
Ajax On Rails
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· Score: 1
The little demo they have on ONLamp has a tiny little mention of unchecking a particular checkbox on your MySQL install. You know. To turn off authentication of username/password to login to the database. They claim that MySQL broke authentication in 4.1.9.
Whatever.
My DBD::DBI applications are able to athenticate against MySQL just fine, but this app throws large gaudy errors when trying to connect to my (non-crippled) MySQL instance. (Yes, I ran through the tutorial in the hopes that the bug would have already been fixed)
Rails is a great toy for running on your Windows-only development server. When it comes time to actually point it to a database, you're screwed. I might recommend to the developers to use an existing DB abstraction layer.
I have this problem with every "streaming" video site. You click the link, and download it. It's a XML file with a URL for the actual content. You wget that, and you end up with a 4k file with lots of ASCII-encoded binary garbage. You have no way to watch the video.
I've got mplayer set up with all the right plugins to watch just about any sort of media file, but I can never figure out how to get the file *OFF* their servers and *ONTO* my desktop.
Is this just one of those ways I'm being punished for choosing Linux as my desktop operating system?
Reporter: "Do you get viruses?" Intel Guy: "Yes, yes." Reporter: "If I want to solve the virus problem tomorrow, should I buy Apple?" Intel Guy: "If you want to solve it tomorrow, you should buy something else." Reporter: "Headline: Intel says to buy Apple!" Intel Guy: "Uh. What part of 'buy something else' did you not understand?"
Slashdot guy: "Why RTFM? Making fun of the summary vs. the headline is more fun."
A decision by German ISPs not to keep logs on IP addresses would be extremely controversial as the entertainment industry is increasingly demanding that ISPs disclose the names of suspected file sharers.
It is quite a sad state of affairs when a company does something that is popular with the people, and yet there is controversy because another company doesn't want it to be done.
This is the most artificial sense of the word "controversy," because it is completely artificial.
This story has been sitting here for HOURS already, and no-one's made any good lawyer joke postings rated +5 funny, yet? Come on people? Where are your priorities?!?!
It's Friday night in California! The weather's beautiful! Get in front of your terminals and start making those lawyer jokes. Slashdot was built for my entertainment, and you're not coming through.
I think you're thinking of the PR lady who was quoted in a Wired article as saying our policy is we don't have a security problem, or something like that. It's pretty clear that she mixed up two sentences, or the Wired journalist mixed up the sentences for her. Whatever.
Some hackers claimed they could view your full profile or something even though you'd specified not to show your full profile. The Wired writeup didn't give any details. If you have details, you can figure out how to email me from the URLs and domains I make available through my Slashdot profile, so feel free to let me know how it's done. I'll look into it myself.
I personally doubt the hackers had actually figured out anything of any real value, since the news of it pretty much died out immediately thereafter.
Meantime, go to digpeople.com, type in your name, and notice your full Orkut profile will come up but, mysteriously, your Friendster one won't.
The results speak for themselves.
Others in this thread (not you) mentioned that Friendster has had bad performance in the past. Yeh, that's true. We had bad performance. In the past. Almost entirely having nothing to do with the DBs, but whatever. The point being, go to Friendster now. Yeh, that's what I thought. Easy to shut up detractors like that.
Friendster is an extremely high-volume shop, and we're serving up MANY THOUSANDS OF COMPLEX QUERIES PER SECOND using a cluster of about 40 MySQL instances. We have a lot of replication, a lot of DW, and a lot of data throughput. Our costs would be bare minimum 10x more with Oracle.
Finally, an AC said that JWZ said that Troutgirl said that she was fired for blogging, and that I should tremble in fear for having the same happen to me. The AC is right. JWZ did say that Troutgirl said that she was fired for blogging. Yet I'm still not posting AC. Hmmm. Draw your own conclusions.
I can back up this story with a similarish one, but I don't need to post AC, because we're proud of what we've done.
I work at Friendster, and we have... ah... a really big database cluster. It runs MySQL. Not that Oracle didn't try. They sent out sales people to convince us to convert over. After we looked at the dollar signs, we laughed them out of the office.
I was interviewing a candidate for one of our sysadmin positions. He said something along the lines of: "Well, now you're running MySQL. Once you start making money, do you think you'll start using Oracle or something else that scales better?"
I laughed and said exactly what parent AC said: "Oracle scales in theory. But in practice, 99% of businesses can't afford to scale with Oracle. I can build another couple terabytes of DB storage in a redundant replicated cluster tomorrow for $10k with MySQL. With Oracle it'd be 10x that much, if I were so lucky." That's not to mention the overhead of calling their sales guys, licensing hassle, and other crap. With MySQL, you install and go.
There are other huge advantages MySQL has over Oracle and their ilk. Take this for example... Right now MySQL AB tech support is stellar. Front line support knows when to escalate to the proper engineer (InnoDB problems? Two hours later, Heikki Tuuri is emailing you!). I remember talking to a PHB a year or two ago, and he said: "Well, MySQL support may be good now, but that'll change. It'll get bad."
My response? So what? Then I'll find a MySQL support shop that has good support and use them. They can support MySQL just as well as MySQL AB can.
Try that with Oracle. "No, Oracle, I hate your tech support. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to have Sybase support our Oracle installation." Oracle will laugh at you, then double your support costs for your insolence.
Adobe paid so much for Macromedia so they could inflate the already-overinflated ego of the Incredibly Annoying Marc Cantor, and to get the already-rock-bottom-stupid opinion of the Incredibly Annoying John Dvorak and stick them together into an unholy reaction that will power the world's Mac computers for another century, freeing up all that cash for Adobe.
Government agency tells Microsoft "You've been bad. Here is your punishment." Microsoft tells government agency "Your punishment is bad, yes. But we do not accept your punishment. Instead, here is what we'd rather the punishment be." Government agency tells Microsoft "No, you will comply." Microsoft gives some money to the government agency. Government agency says "Aaah. We've reconsidered. Microsoft has actually chosen a very reasonable punishment for itself."
And if you're the one that's penned your signature to a $5million system that is using software that may not be supported (or worse) then you can pretty much kiss your ass goodbye. Long gone are the days where "nobody got fired for buying IBM".... So you guys will probably mod this down to a sub terrarian level.
Wow. Those moderators are sure susceptible to reverse psychology today.
I've worked at multiple corporations that used Linux extensively. Ones with CIOs even. You go ahead and keep working at companies that spend more money for less, and I'll work for the ones who spend less money for more.
We'll see whose company is in business next year. Oh. And keep your resume up-to-date. No reason. Just a friendly piece of advice.
There are many varied reasons that Slashdotters hate Microsoft. But this brings up one of my pet peeves about the corporation, the perception that it's on the forefront of computing technology.
I remember as a young lad downloading a copy of Slackware on 12 diskettes, installing it, and having a revelation as I realised that there was something better than DOS on top of which we could build a GUI and desktop system.
It was a thing of beauty, to see this brand new thing called Linux which came with source code (gasp) and made DOS and Win3.11 look like the crap it was.
Imagine my devastation when I started reading history and found out that Linux was just continuing a then 20-year tradition of open source, stability, and multiprocessing. Then I had to watch the slow decline and shittification (to coin a word) of the industry as Microsoft became more and more powerful.
It was depressing to me to watch as person after person suffered through BSODs, memory mismanagement, corrupted data, etc. whilst I knew that sitting right there on my HDD, with no marketing clout, sat the answer.
Microsoft is navigated by some brilliant captains. But they're brilliant sociopaths, consistently destroying everything that is Right and Good about our industry.
I found myself apologising to users for the lameness of the software they were using, and unable to really provide them with any alternative.
It makes me a really happy person to look at Linux these days. Thanks to RMS, IBM, Novell, SuSE, RedHat, and others (the non-sociopathic brilliant people (fuck you, SCO)), Linux is looking really, really good today.
I'm actually finally considering migrating my wife off of Win32 (she types Chinese, and Chinese input under Linux was pretty useless up until this month) and onto Mandrake 10.2b3! Milestone.
Linux rightfully deserves the title of being on the forefront of technology. Microsoft? They were holding us back.
Nobody except embedded programmers. My biggest project of late runs on an 8-bit, 8 MHz CPU with about 7k of Flash and 192 BYTES of RAM. Not megs, not kilobytes, but bytes.....
I think all programming students should have to code for a system like this. It gives you a MUCH greater appreciation for what the compiler is doing for you, and what the consequences of simple changes can be.
Heheh. Nobody except embedded. How little you know. Let me tell another story with the exact same moral.
I work at Friendster. We have one of the largest MySQL installations in the world. We have thousands of transactions per second running through our systems. We have tuned the OS down to the exact library, compiler version, and, well... uh. Everything.
We have Opteron 64-bit machines with GIGABYTES of RAM, dual processors, and literally terabytes of disk. So. We can just be inefficient and do whatever we want, right?
Wrong.
If I create a database table and make it "int" instead of "smallint" when smallint will suffice, I lose hundreds of megabytes of space in RAM and suddenly everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
It turns out that with gigabytes and terabytes and gigahertz, all this doesn't mean anything when you throw tens of millions of anxious people with web browsers at the system. You need to tune. You need to pay close attention to every detail of the system. If you upgrade a single library, suddenly the whole site can become unavailable.
Let me quote someone you know closely, and see if it sounds applicable outside embedded programming: "I think all programming students should have to code for a system like this. It gives you a MUCH greater appreciation for what the compiler is doing for you, and what the consequences of simple changes can be."
Absolutely. Every programming student should have to program for an actual high-volume environment. Then they'll truly appreciate what 8GB of RAM on a dual 3GHz 64-bit system with 500GB disk space can do.
In a recent terrorism trial the suspect could not contact anyone on a weekend to report a bomb plot - in 2002.
Those Aussie terrorist suspects are a lot more polite than the Muslim and American ones. If all terrorist suspects would call in bomb plots, the authorities' jobs would be a lot easier.
"Yes officer, if you cut the red wire directly after the green one, you should have the bomb defused and be home by tea time."
Technorati is one of the coolest companies in the valley (and they're in the city!) I actually interviewed with them for a database position. They have a truly gigantic database server cluster (well, okay, not if you compare to Google, but everyone's small compared to Google) and a very interesting data mining problem.
Right now their search engine is a little rusty, but it won't take much for them to tune this into something very cool.
The first question that I asked them when interviewing was: "Why you instead of Google." Their answer was intriguing.
They are interested in what people are talking about on the internet right now. One thing they noted: Google actually dings you on pagerank if people are linking to you currently. On Technorati's engine, you get extra bonus points if people are linking to you right now.
Also, whereas Google crawls the web every couple of weeks, Technorati crawls the whole blogosphere almost real-time. How they do that is a trick I would probably get sued to tell you, so figure it out yourself.:)
In the first case you're taking the present advantages offered by the hardware and leveraging them to improve the consumer experience. In the second case you're taking advantages offered by your hardware and eliminating them....
The difference between these two situations may be a little bit subtle and a larger bit subjective, but do you see the distinction here? Because given the curve of resource usage their OSes have followed in the past, I kind of doubt Microsoft does...
Here's a third possibility: Microsoft sees the distinction, knows the distinction, but doesn't care because:
They know they're a monopoly that has bought off the DoJ and hence,
Know they can make deals with hardware vendors to leverage this monopoly to take more money from the customer against the customer's will.
We need more organisations using other unique identifiers for people than Social Security numbers. This will seem radical to you if you're a politician, but I recommend Social Security numbers should only ever be used for Social Security.
My mother a few years back pointed out that once upon a time, our politicians actually said, boldly, in front of the entire nation, that in Soviet Russia, the government numbered the citizens. They said this was proof that the soviets were an evil dictatorship sort of country, and not a democracy, where we can vote for naked petrified persons (so long as they are American-born).
She challenged me to imagine a beowulf cluster of Social Security numbers, and how easily such a cluster could be abused (a near-limitless supply of identities to steal).
Now, sadly, all our base are belong to the myriad entities that have our Social Security number (along with mother's maiden name, date of birth, income, and all the other things identity thieves might want). You'd expect us, as a society, to be smarter than that.
Hopefully others will follow the example of this school, and migrate away from using social security numbers for illegitimate purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked for a company out of Reno, NV (yeh, a hotpot of corrupt companies, I know) and when I found out they were trying to bilk millionaires out of VC capital, I just turned in my laptop and said that was my final day.
The company refused to pay me for my last two weeks of service or any vacation time I had built up.
When I attempted to get the money from them, they produced a list of dates I was not in the office (exceeding my vacation pay plus 10 days for the last two weeks of service). These were days I worked from home (and I actually WORKed from home).
I tried to appeal to the legal system, but got a big runaround. This same company sued other ex-employees for frivolous things, and the courts took this company (that had a history of this sort of thing) quite seriously for years.
The courts have it in their best interest to make sure lawsuits keep happening and go on for extended periods of time. It's job security for them, and they just don't care that it's a drain on the rest of society.
Lordy. I notice that the page claims quicksort has n^2 complexity when input is ordered. That is only true of naive quicksort implementations. Textbook quicksort implementations from when I was in college (about 10 years ago) already took care of cases where input was ordered.
Quicksort finishes just fine in nlogn time for all input sets EXCEPT those specially-crafted to work badly on quicksort. For any data set of more than about 20 elements, the odds of getting a data set specially ordered to take n^2 time in quicksort are infitesimally small (unless someone has specially set the data up in that "takes a long time" order).
The advantage of the quicksort is that it can do the sort with Q memory. Why don't you go back and review how much memory a heap sort does with P elements? Here. I'll help you get started. a little page with comparisons of sorts
The little demo they have on ONLamp has a tiny little mention of unchecking a particular checkbox on your MySQL install. You know. To turn off authentication of username/password to login to the database. They claim that MySQL broke authentication in 4.1.9.
Whatever.
My DBD::DBI applications are able to athenticate against MySQL just fine, but this app throws large gaudy errors when trying to connect to my (non-crippled) MySQL instance. (Yes, I ran through the tutorial in the hopes that the bug would have already been fixed)
Rails is a great toy for running on your Windows-only development server. When it comes time to actually point it to a database, you're screwed. I might recommend to the developers to use an existing DB abstraction layer.
I have this problem with every "streaming" video site. You click the link, and download it. It's a XML file with a URL for the actual content. You wget that, and you end up with a 4k file with lots of ASCII-encoded binary garbage. You have no way to watch the video.
I've got mplayer set up with all the right plugins to watch just about any sort of media file, but I can never figure out how to get the file *OFF* their servers and *ONTO* my desktop.
Is this just one of those ways I'm being punished for choosing Linux as my desktop operating system?
Go to cgtalk.com. Be far more impressed.
Reporter: "Do you get viruses?"
Intel Guy: "Yes, yes."
Reporter: "If I want to solve the virus problem tomorrow, should I buy Apple?"
Intel Guy: "If you want to solve it tomorrow, you should buy something else."
Reporter: "Headline: Intel says to buy Apple!"
Intel Guy: "Uh. What part of 'buy something else' did you not understand?"
Slashdot guy: "Why RTFM? Making fun of the summary vs. the headline is more fun."
It is quite a sad state of affairs when a company does something that is popular with the people, and yet there is controversy because another company doesn't want it to be done.
This is the most artificial sense of the word "controversy," because it is completely artificial.
Sad, sad state of affairs.
This story has been sitting here for HOURS already, and no-one's made any good lawyer joke postings rated +5 funny, yet? Come on people? Where are your priorities?!?!
It's Friday night in California! The weather's beautiful! Get in front of your terminals and start making those lawyer jokes. Slashdot was built for my entertainment, and you're not coming through.
I think you're thinking of the PR lady who was quoted in a Wired article as saying our policy is we don't have a security problem, or something like that. It's pretty clear that she mixed up two sentences, or the Wired journalist mixed up the sentences for her. Whatever.
Some hackers claimed they could view your full profile or something even though you'd specified not to show your full profile. The Wired writeup didn't give any details. If you have details, you can figure out how to email me from the URLs and domains I make available through my Slashdot profile, so feel free to let me know how it's done. I'll look into it myself.
I personally doubt the hackers had actually figured out anything of any real value, since the news of it pretty much died out immediately thereafter.
Meantime, go to digpeople.com, type in your name, and notice your full Orkut profile will come up but, mysteriously, your Friendster one won't.
The results speak for themselves.
Others in this thread (not you) mentioned that Friendster has had bad performance in the past. Yeh, that's true. We had bad performance. In the past. Almost entirely having nothing to do with the DBs, but whatever. The point being, go to Friendster now. Yeh, that's what I thought. Easy to shut up detractors like that.
Friendster is an extremely high-volume shop, and we're serving up MANY THOUSANDS OF COMPLEX QUERIES PER SECOND using a cluster of about 40 MySQL instances. We have a lot of replication, a lot of DW, and a lot of data throughput. Our costs would be bare minimum 10x more with Oracle.
Finally, an AC said that JWZ said that Troutgirl said that she was fired for blogging, and that I should tremble in fear for having the same happen to me. The AC is right. JWZ did say that Troutgirl said that she was fired for blogging. Yet I'm still not posting AC. Hmmm. Draw your own conclusions.
I can back up this story with a similarish one, but I don't need to post AC, because we're proud of what we've done.
I work at Friendster, and we have... ah... a really big database cluster. It runs MySQL. Not that Oracle didn't try. They sent out sales people to convince us to convert over. After we looked at the dollar signs, we laughed them out of the office.
I was interviewing a candidate for one of our sysadmin positions. He said something along the lines of: "Well, now you're running MySQL. Once you start making money, do you think you'll start using Oracle or something else that scales better?"
I laughed and said exactly what parent AC said: "Oracle scales in theory. But in practice, 99% of businesses can't afford to scale with Oracle. I can build another couple terabytes of DB storage in a redundant replicated cluster tomorrow for $10k with MySQL. With Oracle it'd be 10x that much, if I were so lucky." That's not to mention the overhead of calling their sales guys, licensing hassle, and other crap. With MySQL, you install and go.
There are other huge advantages MySQL has over Oracle and their ilk. Take this for example... Right now MySQL AB tech support is stellar. Front line support knows when to escalate to the proper engineer (InnoDB problems? Two hours later, Heikki Tuuri is emailing you!). I remember talking to a PHB a year or two ago, and he said: "Well, MySQL support may be good now, but that'll change. It'll get bad."
My response? So what? Then I'll find a MySQL support shop that has good support and use them. They can support MySQL just as well as MySQL AB can.
Try that with Oracle. "No, Oracle, I hate your tech support. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to have Sybase support our Oracle installation." Oracle will laugh at you, then double your support costs for your insolence.
He's the only politician that makes headlines that I've liked in more than a decade.
Funded by ClearChannel and Fox?
Adobe paid so much for Macromedia so they could inflate the already-overinflated ego of the Incredibly Annoying Marc Cantor, and to get the already-rock-bottom-stupid opinion of the Incredibly Annoying John Dvorak and stick them together into an unholy reaction that will power the world's Mac computers for another century, freeing up all that cash for Adobe.
Government agency tells Microsoft "You've been bad. Here is your punishment." Microsoft tells government agency "Your punishment is bad, yes. But we do not accept your punishment. Instead, here is what we'd rather the punishment be." Government agency tells Microsoft "No, you will comply." Microsoft gives some money to the government agency. Government agency says "Aaah. We've reconsidered. Microsoft has actually chosen a very reasonable punishment for itself."
Wow. Those moderators are sure susceptible to reverse psychology today.
I've worked at multiple corporations that used Linux extensively. Ones with CIOs even. You go ahead and keep working at companies that spend more money for less, and I'll work for the ones who spend less money for more.
We'll see whose company is in business next year. Oh. And keep your resume up-to-date. No reason. Just a friendly piece of advice.
There are many varied reasons that Slashdotters hate Microsoft. But this brings up one of my pet peeves about the corporation, the perception that it's on the forefront of computing technology.
I remember as a young lad downloading a copy of Slackware on 12 diskettes, installing it, and having a revelation as I realised that there was something better than DOS on top of which we could build a GUI and desktop system.
It was a thing of beauty, to see this brand new thing called Linux which came with source code (gasp) and made DOS and Win3.11 look like the crap it was.
Imagine my devastation when I started reading history and found out that Linux was just continuing a then 20-year tradition of open source, stability, and multiprocessing. Then I had to watch the slow decline and shittification (to coin a word) of the industry as Microsoft became more and more powerful.
It was depressing to me to watch as person after person suffered through BSODs, memory mismanagement, corrupted data, etc. whilst I knew that sitting right there on my HDD, with no marketing clout, sat the answer.
Microsoft is navigated by some brilliant captains. But they're brilliant sociopaths, consistently destroying everything that is Right and Good about our industry.
I found myself apologising to users for the lameness of the software they were using, and unable to really provide them with any alternative.
It makes me a really happy person to look at Linux these days. Thanks to RMS, IBM, Novell, SuSE, RedHat, and others (the non-sociopathic brilliant people (fuck you, SCO)), Linux is looking really, really good today.
I'm actually finally considering migrating my wife off of Win32 (she types Chinese, and Chinese input under Linux was pretty useless up until this month) and onto Mandrake 10.2b3! Milestone.
Linux rightfully deserves the title of being on the forefront of technology. Microsoft? They were holding us back.
How *DO* you write a Linux device driver in C#?
I work at Friendster. We have one of the largest MySQL installations in the world. We have thousands of transactions per second running through our systems. We have tuned the OS down to the exact library, compiler version, and, well... uh. Everything.
We have Opteron 64-bit machines with GIGABYTES of RAM, dual processors, and literally terabytes of disk. So. We can just be inefficient and do whatever we want, right?
Wrong.
If I create a database table and make it "int" instead of "smallint" when smallint will suffice, I lose hundreds of megabytes of space in RAM and suddenly everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
It turns out that with gigabytes and terabytes and gigahertz, all this doesn't mean anything when you throw tens of millions of anxious people with web browsers at the system. You need to tune. You need to pay close attention to every detail of the system. If you upgrade a single library, suddenly the whole site can become unavailable.
Let me quote someone you know closely, and see if it sounds applicable outside embedded programming: "I think all programming students should have to code for a system like this. It gives you a MUCH greater appreciation for what the compiler is doing for you, and what the consequences of simple changes can be."
Absolutely. Every programming student should have to program for an actual high-volume environment. Then they'll truly appreciate what 8GB of RAM on a dual 3GHz 64-bit system with 500GB disk space can do.
Those Aussie terrorist suspects are a lot more polite than the Muslim and American ones. If all terrorist suspects would call in bomb plots, the authorities' jobs would be a lot easier.
"Yes officer, if you cut the red wire directly after the green one, you should have the bomb defused and be home by tea time."
Technorati is one of the coolest companies in the valley (and they're in the city!) I actually interviewed with them for a database position. They have a truly gigantic database server cluster (well, okay, not if you compare to Google, but everyone's small compared to Google) and a very interesting data mining problem.
:)
Right now their search engine is a little rusty, but it won't take much for them to tune this into something very cool.
The first question that I asked them when interviewing was: "Why you instead of Google." Their answer was intriguing.
They are interested in what people are talking about on the internet right now. One thing they noted: Google actually dings you on pagerank if people are linking to you currently. On Technorati's engine, you get extra bonus points if people are linking to you right now.
Also, whereas Google crawls the web every couple of weeks, Technorati crawls the whole blogosphere almost real-time. How they do that is a trick I would probably get sued to tell you, so figure it out yourself.
Here's a third possibility: Microsoft sees the distinction, knows the distinction, but doesn't care because:
We need more organisations using other unique identifiers for people than Social Security numbers. This will seem radical to you if you're a politician, but I recommend Social Security numbers should only ever be used for Social Security.
My mother a few years back pointed out that once upon a time, our politicians actually said, boldly, in front of the entire nation, that in Soviet Russia, the government numbered the citizens. They said this was proof that the soviets were an evil dictatorship sort of country, and not a democracy, where we can vote for naked petrified persons (so long as they are American-born).
She challenged me to imagine a beowulf cluster of Social Security numbers, and how easily such a cluster could be abused (a near-limitless supply of identities to steal).
Now, sadly, all our base are belong to the myriad entities that have our Social Security number (along with mother's maiden name, date of birth, income, and all the other things identity thieves might want). You'd expect us, as a society, to be smarter than that.
Hopefully others will follow the example of this school, and migrate away from using social security numbers for illegitimate purposes.