Hrishikesh Vijay Karambelkar, haswritten an extremely useful guide to one of the most popular open-source search platforms, Apache Solr.
It's so popular that I never heard of it before today.
That's the fun part about the IT world. That even products as popular as Lucene/Solr backed by companies with Billion dollars investment (e.g. Cloudera) may not be known by everybody.
The good thing is that when you actually need to build a search for something, we have a solution for you. Built, tested and iterated on by the hundreds of full-time and hobby-time developers working on it while you are doing other - I am sure exciting - things in your own corner of the software universe.
P.s. This is not a comment on the book itself. I reserve my opinion on that.
I am not a virus writer, but some 5 years ago there were ideas much more advanced than this (except for P2P bit). If in doubt, search for polymorphic multi-partite self-encrypting virus engines.
What really happened to all that was Outlook email and Visual Basic. It suddenly became so easy to write a basic virus that the next stage of the evolution got lost in all the noise.
Basically, the server that is used to handle X number of customers making a request every 2-3 minutes, will get a multiple of that because the requests are coming in much more frequent.
You will need to tune the server for much higher throughput value (more listeners/threads/workers) to deal with AJAX.
Ebooks are good for very specific niches, usually at the end of the usage spectrum.
At one end, we have reference books. Doctors LOVE the ebooks because they can put many of them onto a tiny device and have access to the information whenever, wherever without breaking their backs with paper equivalence.
On the other hand, you have read-once material. FictionWise seems to be making a nice business of it.
On the other hand DRM'd ebooks make it so annoying to read them, that the progress is slow.
I think that this approach may cause speciation of the developers and their skills.
You may also find that serious bugfixing may require feature changes and, bugfixing developers, may make different (possibly less informed) decisions then a core developer would do.
In the same way, if the core developers do not have to fix bugs as much, they may not realise what decisions will cause a lot of pain and chose interesting, but not practical solutions.
Finally, how many people would you expect to want choosing bug fixing over developing. In software companies, you can force this and dangle a carrot of becoming developer in front of the bug fixer. In the Open Source, it might be a bit harder.
There is another aspect of the open content that you seem to have missed that is very interesting in my point of view.
To quote from the proposed DVD shipping list: - All the digital files (Open Content) and software (GPL) as used for the animation production
This means a budding animator/rigger/director can take this and examine exactly how everything fits together and what happens if/when it is modified.
The educational aspect of this (if they do release everything) will be unbelievable.
And of course the fact that in production of that movie they will drive Blender's development to add the missing/confusing features is a great side-benefits.
I believe America has been blatanly violating Russian's copyright for a very large product category for many many years.
What's the product you ask? Machine guns. Specifically, Kalashnikov design that had a world copyright (AK-47). US even resold unlicensed AK-47s to other countries.
I think there was even an article on slashdot about it.
At my section (technical support for a J2EE product), we are using YahooMessenger with good results.
We have several tiers (frontline vs backline) and a frontline person may ask for help from backline while still talking to the customer on the phone. And as I can even hear them talking:-), I can feed suggestions without waiting for them to type.
It is also good for asking opinions on a case (by sending a case number), for sending URLs and for backreference (for those who enable history). For me as a backline specifically, it allows to multiplex multiple conversations and/or something else I am doing at the same time.
Finally, as it allows to discuss simple issues quietly, it does not disturb other people. Of course, if the issue is complex, we would usually resort to talking (f2f) anyway, but even that is shortened by the preliminary chat.
The negatives are mostly those of the YM program itself. Some of them (auto float) were fixed, some are still there. I have tried other programs however (trillian, etc) and came back to YM.
P.s. Something I should probably not mention is that we also have some people with not very strong speaking English. They are however easily understandable in chats due to the technical nature of the issues.
About half a year ago, there was a story in Russian News about nice, intelligent boy serving in Navy on nuclear submarine somewhere in Norilsk (or even more close to North Poll), methodically shooting 4 of his fellow soldiers. After couple of hours of attempts to negotiate with officials, he shot himself.
The media had interviews with the Navy officials, young (22?) man's mother and family friends and they all talked about how nice and educated he was and how he did not have any psychological problems. (and navy even pulled his psychological tests results for that too).
Nothing was said or checked about those killed, except that they were 'good guys'. No profiles, no questions about previous violent behaviour, nothing.
It was obvious to me that we had another case of a good guy being pushed to his limits by ****heads. In this case, however, he had no escape, but an obvious way to settle the score.
In Russia, it does not happen as often as in US due to the higher respect for knowledge, at least AFAIK. But it happens nevertheless. My period of being abused lasted until the last 2 years at high school.
Slashdot Mirror
It's so popular that I never heard of it before today.
That's the fun part about the IT world. That even products as popular as Lucene/Solr backed by companies with Billion dollars investment (e.g. Cloudera) may not be known by everybody.
The good thing is that when you actually need to build a search for something, we have a solution for you. Built, tested and iterated on by the hundreds of full-time and hobby-time developers working on it while you are doing other - I am sure exciting - things in your own corner of the software universe.
P.s. This is not a comment on the book itself. I reserve my opinion on that.
Librivox's recording are continuous speech. VoxForge is looking for Command and Control phrases (short and snappy).
I would assume the phrasing patterns would be quite different.
For added impact try wearing blue and white. Just don't try this in New York - they got burned once already.(http://www.improveverywhere.com/mission_v iew.php?mission_id=57)
Boring,
I am not a virus writer, but some 5 years ago there were ideas much more advanced than this (except for P2P bit). If in doubt, search for polymorphic multi-partite self-encrypting virus engines.
What really happened to all that was Outlook email and Visual Basic. It suddenly became so easy to write a basic virus that the next stage of the evolution got lost in all the noise.
Think the September that never ended for the advanced virus writers.
Of course now with the lure of money from phishing and like, this may all be coming back. That would suck.
http://www.mortbay.com/MB/log/gregw/?permalink=Sca lingConnections.html
Basically, the server that is used to handle X number of customers making a request every 2-3 minutes, will get a multiple of that because the requests are coming in much more frequent.
You will need to tune the server for much higher throughput value (more listeners/threads/workers) to deal with AJAX.
www.earth.gov ? www.planet.gov ? www.all.gov ?
Why would aliens know that a whitehouse is something important in a first place? How can they tell a difference between a whitehouse and an outhouse ?
For that matter, can we?
Actually, you are quite wrong there.
Ebooks are good for very specific niches, usually at the end of the usage spectrum.
At one end, we have reference books. Doctors LOVE the ebooks because they can put many of them onto a tiny device and have access to the information whenever, wherever without breaking their backs with paper equivalence.
On the other hand, you have read-once material. FictionWise seems to be making a nice business of it.
On the other hand DRM'd ebooks make it so annoying to read them, that the progress is slow.
I think that this approach may cause speciation of the developers and their skills.
You may also find that serious bugfixing may require feature changes and, bugfixing developers, may make different (possibly less informed) decisions then a core developer would do.
In the same way, if the core developers do not have to fix bugs as much, they may not realise what decisions will cause a lot of pain and chose interesting, but not practical solutions.
Finally, how many people would you expect to want choosing bug fixing over developing. In software companies, you can force this and dangle a carrot of becoming developer in front of the bug fixer. In the Open Source, it might be a bit harder.
Except of course, that if you change a single character of that 'in the middle' line, it resets your position and you lose your down arrow action.
I can see engineer's reasoning behind it, but not usability one.
So, no! It is still not consistent enough.
There is another aspect of the open content that you seem to have missed that is very interesting in my point of view.
To quote from the proposed DVD shipping list:
- All the digital files (Open Content) and software (GPL) as used for the animation production
This means a budding animator/rigger/director can take this and examine exactly how everything fits together and what happens if/when it is modified.
The educational aspect of this (if they do release everything) will be unbelievable.
And of course the fact that in production of that movie they will drive Blender's development to add the missing/confusing features is a great side-benefits.
An Efficiency Expert here.
:-)
You may want to remove one level of indirection here and charge Expert Experts directly.
It is a bit more work, but much more money.
That's what we have done with the Efficiency Expert Expert Experts. Boy were they sore.
Actually, this goes both ways.
I believe America has been blatanly violating Russian's copyright for a very large product category for many many years.
What's the product you ask? Machine guns. Specifically, Kalashnikov design that had a world copyright (AK-47). US even resold unlicensed AK-47s to other countries.
I think there was even an article on slashdot about it.
Tit for tat? One Madonna for two pointy AK-47?
At my section (technical support for a J2EE product), we are using YahooMessenger with good results.
:-), I can feed suggestions without waiting for them to type.
We have several tiers (frontline vs backline) and a frontline person may ask for help from backline while still talking to the customer on the phone. And as I can even hear them talking
It is also good for asking opinions on a case (by sending a case number), for sending URLs and for backreference (for those who enable history). For me as a backline specifically, it allows to multiplex multiple conversations and/or something else I am doing at the same time.
Finally, as it allows to discuss simple issues quietly, it does not disturb other people. Of course, if the issue is complex, we would usually resort to talking (f2f) anyway, but even that is shortened by the preliminary chat.
The negatives are mostly those of the YM program itself. Some of them (auto float) were fixed, some are still there. I have tried other programs however (trillian, etc) and came back to YM.
P.s. Something I should probably not mention is that we also have some people with not very strong speaking English. They are however easily understandable in chats due to the technical nature of the issues.
About half a year ago, there was a story in Russian News about nice, intelligent boy serving in Navy on nuclear submarine somewhere in Norilsk (or even more close to North Poll), methodically shooting 4 of his fellow soldiers.
After couple of hours of attempts to negotiate with officials, he shot himself.
The media had interviews with the Navy officials, young (22?) man's mother and family friends and they all talked about how nice and educated he was and how he did not have any psychological problems. (and navy even pulled his psychological tests results for that too).
Nothing was said or checked about those killed, except that they were 'good guys'. No profiles, no questions about previous violent behaviour, nothing.
It was obvious to me that we had another case of a good guy being pushed to his limits by ****heads. In this case, however, he had no escape, but an obvious way to settle the score.
In Russia, it does not happen as often as in US due to the higher respect for knowledge, at least AFAIK. But it happens nevertheless. My period of being abused lasted until the last 2 years at high school.