The quote in this article and half the responses have damn near given me a headache! I don't know who those researchers examined, but it sure wasn't anyone who reads the same way I do. I'm ordinarily a pretty fast reader, but my reading speed is cut way, way down by misspelled words. I have to pause and unscramble them mentally. They usually pull me out of whatever train of thought I was getting from the text. A lot of the time I notice them even when I'm not particularly looking at a piece of text; they stand out like they're the wrong color. This is a great skill for proofreading, but a not so pleasant handicap just at the moment.
So, while it's apparently true that bad spelling makes no difference to some people, nobody will complain about good spelling -- and people with all sorts of reading styles will be able to easily see what you have to say.
I bet they did it because there are people out there who don't notice that "news.com" already ends with ".com" and thus add a.com themselves out of habit.
I used to work for an online entertainment company whose gaming service was called Mplayer.com. We found that consistently, one of the top two or three referring URLs for first-time visitors to our web site was a Yahoo search for the keyword "mplayer.com". (Google was just getting started then.) We found it a bit baffling, but it held true for a long time. People's browsing habits are tough to break.
Why do you want clustering? Do you need to scale up transactions per second? If so, are these primarily reads or writes? The answer to that question can make a huge difference in your clustering and replication strategy.
Clustering read-mostly data for performance reasons is relatively easy; for many applications, where a second or two of staleness on the replicated databases is acceptable, you can make do with a bunch of independent copies of the database, with all updates going to an authoritative database and getting replicated out from there asynchronously.
If your data can be partitioned cleanly -- that is, if you have groups of tables that are never joined with tables in other groups -- then you can perhaps get some benefit from putting different data on different servers, with no replication required. Obviously that's only worthwhile if the query load is comparable between groups.
If, on the other hand, you require ACID-compliant updates of all the replicants as a unit, you're entering difficult territory and you might have no choice but to go with a commercial solution depending on the specifics of your needs.
At just about all of the places where I've done database programming where this has come up, we ended up buying a much beefier database server (lots of processors and memory, good I/O bandwidth, redundant networking and power supplies) with disk mirroring, rather than get into the headaches of replication. A big Sun or HP server is certainly more expensive than some mid-range Dell or no-name PC, but it may end up being cheaper than the engineering time you'd spend getting anything nearly as robust and high-performance on less expensive hardware.
I've also found that very often when there's a database bottleneck that looks like it requires bigger hardware, the problem is the data model or the queries (unnecessary joins, no indexes where they're needed, poorly-thought-out normalization, etc.) or the physical layout of the data (indexes competing with data for access to the same disk, fragmentation in indexes/data, frequently-used tables spaced far apart on disk.)
If I'm dealing with Oracle, sometimes the solution is as simple as adding an optimizer hint to make the query do its joins in a sensible way. Sometimes denormalization is helpful, though you want to be careful with that. Sometimes a small amount of data caching in the application can mean a tremendous decrease in database load. And so on.
If you can tell us more about the specifics of your situation, there are lots of people here who can offer more specific advice.
If you can get from New York to California supersonically, people will want to do it and will pay for the above mentioned development and building.
And if we can build planes that go fast enough, the average flier will spend less time in the air than waiting in line for pointless intrusive security checks. Now that's progress!
I've had a similar experience. With all the shuffling of stuff between bags we did before a recent trip, my girlfriend and I ended up packing my Leatherman (Swiss army knife sort of tool) into my carry-on bag, and didn't even realize we'd done it until two plane flights later when we got to our destination. This after I was pulled aside by security and made to take off my shoes and coat!
What's more, we had packed a canister of camping-stove fuel in one of our checked bags, and not until the fourth flight of our trip did we find out that it was a forbidden item and that we'd have to leave it behind. (Which, I should add, I don't have much of a problem with, since I can see the potential for disaster if the canister were punctured accidentally during baggage handling.)
Gotta agree with you about the perfume, BTW. Almost as obnoxious as sitting in front of a screaming baby on a red-eye flight.
Better desktop integration with images and sound files (browse a picture directory as a bunch of thumbnails, etc.)
UI improvements like most-frequently-used programs instantly available in the start menu, auto hiding of inactive system tray icons, stacking of similar windows in the taskbar when there are lots of windows open
Built-in VNC-style remote access
Fast user switching
To name a few more. It's pretty disingenuous to say they didn't change anything. It's not like the radical architectural change between ME and 2K, but there's some worthwhile stuff in XP and I run it rather than 2K by choice on both my home Windows boxes.
This idea is way too much work and won't even solve the spam problem. A better approach would be widespread deployment of something like HashCash that makes sending large amounts of unexpected E-mail prohibitively expensive, but doesn't do the same to mailing lists or to individual unexpected messages.
It'll make a dent in DVD sales, no doubt, but I doubt it'll kill them. Even with broadband, downloading a decent-quality TV show won't be instantaneous, so you won't get the "Hey, we have a half-hour to kill, let's watch X" effect.
And decent picture quality isn't a given -- they may encode everything at 256kbps or somesuch, in which case it'll be less than pleasant to watch on a large monitor/TV. DVDs will also presumably continue to include commentary tracks, making-of documentaries, and all the other stuff you don't get when they broadcast these shows on TV.
However, I think the folks at A&E and Bravo may be in for some sleepless nights; their rebroadcasts of BBC stuff don't include any extras and on many cable systems the picture quality isn't all that hot either.
Also, I assume the BBC won't put brand-new shows on the archive until some time has passed, so as not to cannibalize their foreign syndication.
All that said, this is fantastic news. Three cheers to the BBC for opening up its great treasure vault to the world.
What about moonlight? On a clear night the moon can light up the countryside pretty brightly; if our eyes are so sensitive to light at night, wouldn't moonlight be hugely disruptive?
My guess is that it's not a cost issue, so much as an availability one: I have DVDs in my collection that have gone out of print and were never popular to begin with, so if they go bad, I can't replace them no matter how much I'm willing to spend. Probably no point backing up "Home Alone 2."
Yeah, okay, so you won't buy one... but other people are making other choices. I know two people who've bought them (one is a student planning to take it to grad school, the other is a roving sysadmin at a government agency who needs to be able to jot down notes on the go.) The company I work for is considering outfitting a couple hundred field-service technicians with tablets to replace the clipboards and printouts they use now.
I borrowed one for a few days and it sure was convenient to have access to a computer in meetings without blocking my view of the person across from me, and take notes without being the annoying guy in the corner clacking away on a laptop keyboard. If I buy a portable at some point I'll strongly consider a Tablet PC even with the price premium.
Yes, they may flop... but I think it's far from a done deal. You pay more money and you get capabilities you don't have in other portables, even if some other portables do things the tablets don't. Raw CPU power isn't the #1 item on everyone's priority list.
There isn't enough detail in the article to say whether "running Microsoft Windows" is actually a requirement, or just cluelessness on the part of the article's author. If it's a Web-based system (which, again, the article doesn't say one way or the other) then it shouldn't matter.
Or take up a hobby that gets you out of the house and around women who're interested in the same thing. Take up a hobby, meaning try something new -- if you already have hobbies that don't involve meeting other people of both sexes, they don't count.
For example: swimming at the local community pool a few times a week, studying a foreign language, ballroom dance (I met my current and previous girlfriends that way), going on or organizing nature or history walks, organizing a weekly eat-out-and-see-a-play event... there's all sorts of stuff you can do.
As a general rule, the women I know tend to respond well to men who they see taking some initiative and trying new things, so going out and organizing something can't help but work in your favor above and beyond its potential for introducing you to new people.
The trap that otherwise smart people seem to fall into a lot is reading too much into failures -- if you're used to succeeding at everything, then it's a bit bewildering to fall flat on your face trying to attract someone, especially since you constantly see lots of less-capable people apparently doing just fine at it.
Further, if you're used to succeeding at everything, you'll probably have an unconscious attitude of, "I just need to keep working at this person and eventually I'll win them over." That attitude invests you way too much into something that, more often than not, won't work out no matter what you do. Which isn't a sign of failure or incompetence, it's a sign that most pairs of people aren't mutually compatible, and you need to spread your energy wider rather than concentrate it more narrowly.
What chronically single people don't tend to see about their constantly paired-up counterparts is that the people who never seem to go too long between relationships are out there playing the field a lot. For the most part they aren't zeroing in on one new person and pounding away at the target until they get a surrender; they're flirting and talking to tons of potential mates and through sheer volume, succeeding pretty quickly even though their success rate isn't that much higher than average. They're even flirting (though less so) while they're seeing someone, so they've already primed the pump when the time comes to move on.
Sure, you can do things to improve your percentage, but a lot of it is a numbers game: the more people you meet, the more chance your success rate, regardless of how low it is, will net you good results.
everybody complains about how it assumes the wrong stuff all the time.
Funny, I don't remember complaining about that. TiVo's suggestions have turned up several interesting shows I wouldn't have noticed on my own. And the ones I'm not interested in, well, it's not like they do anything but eat up disk space that would otherwise be empty, so no harm done.
I've had decent luck with automated recommendation services, e.g. Netflix's movie suggestions. I wouldn't necessarily be nuts about Netflix sticking movies into my queue without asking (and I wouldn't want my cellphone spending my money without asking, which frankly I doubt would be the default anyway) but well-founded recommendations based on cross-referencing my habits with those of a large sample group of other people? Sure, I'm all for it.
Oh? I thought that only applied to phone numbers rather than phone hardware.
Does that mean all cell carriers will be required to support both GSM and CDMA? (Since you might have a phone that only does one, and want to switch to a provider that only does the other right now.) I have a hard time believing that's true, but if it is, I can see why carriers tried to block it -- it'll cost them millions (maybe billions) to deploy all that infrastructure by November.
Of course this won't stop programs from sending directly to your number.
Which is where all my spam comes from. I already have my forwarding address set to go through the spam filter, but no spam ever goes through that address anyway since I've only given it out to a few trusted people.
A few months back I wrote to my cell provider (SprintPCS) asking them if they could block E-mail to my cellphone that didn't come from a short list of valid senders. For me, that would completely solve the problem, since I'd set the only valid sender to a forwarding address behind my mail server's spam filter. But no, they said, the only way to block any text messages was to turn off the Internet access feature entirely; text messaging is a component of that product in their lineup. The level of spam hasn't gotten bad enough to drive me to do that yet, but if it grows by 2x or 3x, it'll no longer be worth it to get the messages I do want.
It can't be that hard to put a simple whitelist filter and a simple web-based management UI in place.
If they don't do that or something else to stem the tide of spam, they'll find themselves minus one customer; the reason I'm with them now is because they're the only provider for the phone I like to use (Samsung SPH-I300) but the major reason I like the phone is because I can use it to ssh to my server from the road -- and if I have to turn off Internet access to kill the spam, I may as well shop for a new phone and a new provider.
And yes, I think the policy of tying phones to providers is part of the problem, but I don't see that changing in the US any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
So, while it's apparently true that bad spelling makes no difference to some people, nobody will complain about good spelling -- and people with all sorts of reading styles will be able to easily see what you have to say.
I used to work for an online entertainment company whose gaming service was called Mplayer.com. We found that consistently, one of the top two or three referring URLs for first-time visitors to our web site was a Yahoo search for the keyword "mplayer.com". (Google was just getting started then.) We found it a bit baffling, but it held true for a long time. People's browsing habits are tough to break.
Clustering read-mostly data for performance reasons is relatively easy; for many applications, where a second or two of staleness on the replicated databases is acceptable, you can make do with a bunch of independent copies of the database, with all updates going to an authoritative database and getting replicated out from there asynchronously.
If your data can be partitioned cleanly -- that is, if you have groups of tables that are never joined with tables in other groups -- then you can perhaps get some benefit from putting different data on different servers, with no replication required. Obviously that's only worthwhile if the query load is comparable between groups.
If, on the other hand, you require ACID-compliant updates of all the replicants as a unit, you're entering difficult territory and you might have no choice but to go with a commercial solution depending on the specifics of your needs.
At just about all of the places where I've done database programming where this has come up, we ended up buying a much beefier database server (lots of processors and memory, good I/O bandwidth, redundant networking and power supplies) with disk mirroring, rather than get into the headaches of replication. A big Sun or HP server is certainly more expensive than some mid-range Dell or no-name PC, but it may end up being cheaper than the engineering time you'd spend getting anything nearly as robust and high-performance on less expensive hardware.
I've also found that very often when there's a database bottleneck that looks like it requires bigger hardware, the problem is the data model or the queries (unnecessary joins, no indexes where they're needed, poorly-thought-out normalization, etc.) or the physical layout of the data (indexes competing with data for access to the same disk, fragmentation in indexes/data, frequently-used tables spaced far apart on disk.)
If I'm dealing with Oracle, sometimes the solution is as simple as adding an optimizer hint to make the query do its joins in a sensible way. Sometimes denormalization is helpful, though you want to be careful with that. Sometimes a small amount of data caching in the application can mean a tremendous decrease in database load. And so on.
If you can tell us more about the specifics of your situation, there are lots of people here who can offer more specific advice.
And if we can build planes that go fast enough, the average flier will spend less time in the air than waiting in line for pointless intrusive security checks. Now that's progress!
Maybe it still gets the cold shoulder because there didn't turn out to be anything to it? Nah, stilly me, must be some kind of conspiracy.
That's a pretty bold statement to make to this crowd -- would you say the same thing about software?
Not that it's true anyway, as other messages in this thread have demonstrated. I have many hours of free, legal music on my hard disk.
AtomFilms
IFilm
Where's the free music (not "pirated", but legitimate)?
MP3.com
iRATE
FreeMusic
EMusic (okay, not free, but flat-rate and dirt cheap)
Where's the *value*?
That's up to you to decide, of course. But there's plenty of legitimate big content out there.
What's more, we had packed a canister of camping-stove fuel in one of our checked bags, and not until the fourth flight of our trip did we find out that it was a forbidden item and that we'd have to leave it behind. (Which, I should add, I don't have much of a problem with, since I can see the potential for disaster if the canister were punctured accidentally during baggage handling.)
Gotta agree with you about the perfume, BTW. Almost as obnoxious as sitting in front of a screaming baby on a red-eye flight.
- Faster boot times
- Better desktop integration with images and sound files (browse a picture directory as a bunch of thumbnails, etc.)
- UI improvements like most-frequently-used programs instantly available in the start menu, auto hiding of inactive system tray icons, stacking of similar windows in the taskbar when there are lots of windows open
- Built-in VNC-style remote access
- Fast user switching
To name a few more. It's pretty disingenuous to say they didn't change anything. It's not like the radical architectural change between ME and 2K, but there's some worthwhile stuff in XP and I run it rather than 2K by choice on both my home Windows boxes.This idea is way too much work and won't even solve the spam problem. A better approach would be widespread deployment of something like HashCash that makes sending large amounts of unexpected E-mail prohibitively expensive, but doesn't do the same to mailing lists or to individual unexpected messages.
And decent picture quality isn't a given -- they may encode everything at 256kbps or somesuch, in which case it'll be less than pleasant to watch on a large monitor/TV. DVDs will also presumably continue to include commentary tracks, making-of documentaries, and all the other stuff you don't get when they broadcast these shows on TV.
However, I think the folks at A&E and Bravo may be in for some sleepless nights; their rebroadcasts of BBC stuff don't include any extras and on many cable systems the picture quality isn't all that hot either.
Also, I assume the BBC won't put brand-new shows on the archive until some time has passed, so as not to cannibalize their foreign syndication.
All that said, this is fantastic news. Three cheers to the BBC for opening up its great treasure vault to the world.
It's not like God can sue -- the guy down below keeps hogging all the lawyers.
What about moonlight? On a clear night the moon can light up the countryside pretty brightly; if our eyes are so sensitive to light at night, wouldn't moonlight be hugely disruptive?
Only if they win.
High-end video cards are pretty noisy these days, actually. One of the GeForceFX cards has a fan that many reviewers have likened to a leaf-blower.
My guess is that it's not a cost issue, so much as an availability one: I have DVDs in my collection that have gone out of print and were never popular to begin with, so if they go bad, I can't replace them no matter how much I'm willing to spend. Probably no point backing up "Home Alone 2."
I borrowed one for a few days and it sure was convenient to have access to a computer in meetings without blocking my view of the person across from me, and take notes without being the annoying guy in the corner clacking away on a laptop keyboard. If I buy a portable at some point I'll strongly consider a Tablet PC even with the price premium.
Yes, they may flop... but I think it's far from a done deal. You pay more money and you get capabilities you don't have in other portables, even if some other portables do things the tablets don't. Raw CPU power isn't the #1 item on everyone's priority list.
There isn't enough detail in the article to say whether "running Microsoft Windows" is actually a requirement, or just cluelessness on the part of the article's author. If it's a Web-based system (which, again, the article doesn't say one way or the other) then it shouldn't matter.
For example: swimming at the local community pool a few times a week, studying a foreign language, ballroom dance (I met my current and previous girlfriends that way), going on or organizing nature or history walks, organizing a weekly eat-out-and-see-a-play event... there's all sorts of stuff you can do.
As a general rule, the women I know tend to respond well to men who they see taking some initiative and trying new things, so going out and organizing something can't help but work in your favor above and beyond its potential for introducing you to new people.
The trap that otherwise smart people seem to fall into a lot is reading too much into failures -- if you're used to succeeding at everything, then it's a bit bewildering to fall flat on your face trying to attract someone, especially since you constantly see lots of less-capable people apparently doing just fine at it.
Further, if you're used to succeeding at everything, you'll probably have an unconscious attitude of, "I just need to keep working at this person and eventually I'll win them over." That attitude invests you way too much into something that, more often than not, won't work out no matter what you do. Which isn't a sign of failure or incompetence, it's a sign that most pairs of people aren't mutually compatible, and you need to spread your energy wider rather than concentrate it more narrowly.
What chronically single people don't tend to see about their constantly paired-up counterparts is that the people who never seem to go too long between relationships are out there playing the field a lot. For the most part they aren't zeroing in on one new person and pounding away at the target until they get a surrender; they're flirting and talking to tons of potential mates and through sheer volume, succeeding pretty quickly even though their success rate isn't that much higher than average. They're even flirting (though less so) while they're seeing someone, so they've already primed the pump when the time comes to move on.
Sure, you can do things to improve your percentage, but a lot of it is a numbers game: the more people you meet, the more chance your success rate, regardless of how low it is, will net you good results.
Funny, I don't remember complaining about that. TiVo's suggestions have turned up several interesting shows I wouldn't have noticed on my own. And the ones I'm not interested in, well, it's not like they do anything but eat up disk space that would otherwise be empty, so no harm done.
I've had decent luck with automated recommendation services, e.g. Netflix's movie suggestions. I wouldn't necessarily be nuts about Netflix sticking movies into my queue without asking (and I wouldn't want my cellphone spending my money without asking, which frankly I doubt would be the default anyway) but well-founded recommendations based on cross-referencing my habits with those of a large sample group of other people? Sure, I'm all for it.
I bet you can get the Windows source code with one command:
mail -s "My resume" jobs@microsoft.com
Does that mean all cell carriers will be required to support both GSM and CDMA? (Since you might have a phone that only does one, and want to switch to a provider that only does the other right now.) I have a hard time believing that's true, but if it is, I can see why carriers tried to block it -- it'll cost them millions (maybe billions) to deploy all that infrastructure by November.
It can't be that hard to put a simple whitelist filter and a simple web-based management UI in place.
If they don't do that or something else to stem the tide of spam, they'll find themselves minus one customer; the reason I'm with them now is because they're the only provider for the phone I like to use (Samsung SPH-I300) but the major reason I like the phone is because I can use it to ssh to my server from the road -- and if I have to turn off Internet access to kill the spam, I may as well shop for a new phone and a new provider.
And yes, I think the policy of tying phones to providers is part of the problem, but I don't see that changing in the US any time soon.
Since the main one seems to be down, I've put up a tracker on my server. Here's the .torrent file.