Feature parity? THat's being generous. Linux has nothing that compares with those features (or containers) in and of itself. (And this coming from someone who loves linux and has used it for almost 15 years.) Particularly, (Open)Solaris ZFS is light years ahead of any other filesystem - and yes, I'm excluding the other ZFS implementations from being awesome, because they really aren't yet.
OpenSolaris has also done some work integrating VirtualBox into Containers; it supposedly works very well.
If nothing else, SOlaris provides (or rather, Sun provided) a single, clean, understandable interfacing tool (or set of tools) for their architectures (ZFS, zones, DTrace, VirtualBox) which is something Linux tends to lack. BSDs do it, too (well, mainly NetBSD), but Solaris's is very nice.
I'm not attributing it to malice, though. Sociopathy, maybe, but not malice.
Like I said, this is how a bureaucracy works. You've got a lot of sociopaths, and they like power. That's why they're in government at the higher ranks.
The Wikimedia/Wikileaks thing might be possible, but anyone as typically thorough as a lawyer filing a suit/making a threat is typically thorough enough to see the lack of association between those organizations, short of the syllable phonetic similarity.
It seems simpler and more likely that it was just one or two FBI personnel who took it upon themselves to exert their power.
Seriously? That seems simpler?
This is not only government, it's the United States Federal Government. We're talking about an organization which thrives on bureaucratic meandering, hand folding, hand folding, triple-agency coordinated efforts, redundant efforts, oversight infighting, and top-down management.
There is likely not a person, never mind a lawyer, within the FBI who doesn't have to clear the use of extra toilet paper in the restrooms, never mind a legal threat against a (very) visible US organization. Whoever got this thing pushed likely had to go very, very high within the FBI to do this, and how often is it that a peon's requests actually have any action taken upon them by the higher-ups?
More likely is that it was pushed from higher up within the organization after being cleared, reviewed, sent back to a review board, and then OK'd by someone who's only several steps of authority from the President. After some pretty severe fuck-ups in the past, people at the FBI are very, very careful about showing a "police state" face. Considering the organization is mostly bureaucrats now, shuffling papers comes easy. Hell, they go out of their way to not do things which are required of them by law due to political hot buttons.
I agree that it's possible it's a "rogue" FBI agent, but it's also highly unlikely. It becomes all the less unlikely when you consider the pattern of encroachment of civil liberties, the expansion of federal authority and domain, and the increasing sense of superiority the Federal government is demonstrating.
This is just the Executive branch pushing - probing, if you will - to see how receptive the populace is becoming towards the encroachment of thoughtcrime and various other totalitarian abuses. I doubt it's serious, but if they can smooth this over (in the courts) and not have massive public outcry, they know they can push more restrictions and governmental control.
IMO, this is the wrong government for Wikimedia to fight with, in this fashion. But I guess you've got to stand somewhere...
I remember the 2.0 kernel days just fine. I don't remember those "features" getting back ported making things unstable.
I do remember there being a lot of custom patchlevel kernels, though. Lots of people did it, myself included. It was quite straightforward, because the base kernel didn't typically have configuration failures like it does now, and the patches were relatively simple. THese days, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to build a kernel due to the odds and sods not building (a rare but workable scenario in a point release, back then), and somewhat more complex, making the task more effort than it's worth. Now, if you need something not there, you'll be somewhat hard pressed to do it yourself.
For all of the whining kernel releases are a lot less buggy with fewer distro deviations from mainline. And as a bonus features actually get better testing now because fewer changes need to be tested at a time.
Have you looked at many of the distros out there right now? Many are way back on 2.6.18 as of recently, with custom patchlevels and backported drivers. THe ONLY reason there were significant backport issues with 2.5->2.4 was because the backports were occasionally poorly done, and there's a significant driver architecture difference. The latest 2.6 stuff is still considered "heavy development" and isn't all that stable. So we get the 'heavy development' model, to some degree, while not benefiting from having the true 'cutting edge'/redesign. We're just getting a more bloated kernel with the same basic architecture (nevermind the several-times-wrought architecture changes we've seen in 2.6 in firewire, USB, schedulers, etc.).
You have to admit, it's somewhat disconcerting that there's nobody in his coattails to take over.
Unlike Microsoft or some other big softare company/project, Linux really has one controlling hand. If Linus goes kaput tomorrow, face in his wheaties, it would take a non-trivial period of time to get someone up to speed and filling his shoes.
Sure, there are other "non-current" linux developers/maintainers, and there are many others who have been doing the job in the past. But that's an entirely different development model than the 2.6 tree has been, and there's nobody who "fills in" for Torvalds when he wants to take a break. The man is 40; he's going to have to slow down sooner than later. He's certainly not keeping up his percentage of code commits, nevermind the level of code (though the quality, quite possibly). He's got 3 daughters and a wife; the man has to sleep at SOME point.
That said, I'm really pleased to see the decrease in regressions. I was starting to think that it was all open source OSes that were going down the shitter of late, but I am pleased Linux is still improving (though I do still consider the removal of the anticipatory scheduler a regression).
It just makes me uneasy that anything as big as Linux has such a small point of failure. It's possible I'm overlooking the importance of the distro kernel teams and other people who contribute, or overlooking something else, but as it stands now, his continued pivotal position makes me uneasy.
The lack of a unified "stable" kernel for distros to pull from (given 2.6s continued march) and at the same time the lack of a "real" development/next-generation kernel makes me likewise uneasy.
You mention the zfs github and kFreeBSD, but are you aware of Nexenta?
Honestly, I'm not sure why it's not as well acknowledged as kFreeBSD. The myopia involved there seems to be similar to what you make light of with your joke.
In the event that you really haven't heard of it, Nexenta is basically OpenSolaris kernel with Ubuntu userland.
You get apt. No, it's not debian, but if we're looking at ZFS implementations, it's a far cry better than the alternatives (FreeBSD = buggy crap and you've got to use ports; OpenSolaris = you've got to use Solaris/shoehorn useable modern tools in).
I'm not sure why we need to stick with Linux, per se, and what's wrong with OpenSolaris kernel/CDDL. Serious question here: is there something wrong I'm missing?
From where I'm sitting - user and admin of Linux for close to a decade, now - there's really not much of an advantage to using (or developing for) Linux over, say, FreeBSD other than the community of developers (including the install base, financial backing, etc.) and what that provides for you. I'm not sure if a BSD compatible license could ever get the financial support (from the likes of RedHat, IBM, Intel, etc.) Linux does because it could be 'turned against them', but for most people (administrators, developers, etc.) there's no inherent reason, one way or the other.
Phone platform aside, I wonder if they included or included the bandwidth re-transmitted due to errors on the line? My experience has been that Verizon has significantly higher failure rates per packet than other superior (GSM) networks. You're out in the boonies with Verizon 3G, and you're taking 2-3 times as much bandwidth to actually transmit/receive. In contrast, with t-mobile you either have a connection or you don't.
A few years back I was browsing through job listings for perl positions and not surprisingly there weren't many.
Did you look for 'shell scripting'? Because many managers don't know the difference, equating them with each other. Sysadmin work is the domain of perl.
Sysadmin here: and yes, a bit late to the game. Perl is, absolutely, a sysadmin thing.
For me, it's replaced bash and other 'common' shell scripting. Why? Simply: it's better and cross-platform, whereas "shell" is not.
With shell, I've got to contend with competing and contrary system binaries, which for any reasonably complex task, I'm going to use: grep, find, ls, sed, and so on. That makes things frustratingly difficult when you use multiple systems.
With perl, I don't worry about that because the problem doesn't exist. Not only that, but my script can be a third (or less) in length, do more, and be reasonably less complex. Perl is on pretty damn near every UNIX system made these days by default (much more likely than a common sh), and is trivial to add to a Windows machine (which is, sadly, the only place where your assumptions fall through with perl).
Contrarily, are you using ash, bash, sh, ksh, csh, zsh, etc. for your shell scripting? GNU, BSD, Solaris, AIX, etc. binaries for complex functionality? Some of this can be mitigated by throwing GNU utilities and a common shell on every system you use, but then you're stuck doing that, and there's significant maintenance overhead in doing so.
I'm frankly not looking forward to perl 6: I think that, if it gets any adoption, it'll fragment the perl community. It's divergent enough from perl that it should not be called perl, at this point.
THough, there are a couple (ok, one I'm aware of) MVC frameworks written in perl which is reportedly very good - catalyst. But for my time and money, I'd rather use something else at this point.
Well, for starters, consider the knowledge such programmers need to have in order to write this software:
* financial systems * frequency trading * surpassing existing frequency trading * high speed interconnects and the understanding of both mathematical programming and SMP utilization * intimate knowledge of "intelligent systems" and how to improve them using predictive math. * the ability to solve complex problems and adapt to the changing landscape, quickly, due to the rate of change in the ecosystem
In short, we're not talking about bread and butter programming - this kind of stuff is likely much more difficult than any game programming out there, likely on par with game engine development in many ways. It's not easy, and slouches won't cut it.
Not only that, but they're living in New York. I can live relatively comfortably on less than a third of what it'd take for me to "scrape by" in NY (note, I'm married with children, so I'm not your stereotypical geek): if it's not the high cost of living, it's the taxes on "not welfare receivers" and the constant fees for things like parking, vehicle registration, utilities, etc. A construction worker in NYC makes as much as $80k a year, for crying out loud (slightly over twice what I'm making).
Even if renting a 2-bedroom "Economy" apartment in NYC, I'd likely end up spending more than my entire current salary - just on rent. That place is expensive. Similarly, I'm sure there's someone in Sudan or Somolia or wherever is pissed that those wingers in the US make $7.25/hour (or whatever minimum wage is now) to do food service. What extravagance! That must be why they hate us.
That said, everything about frequency trading makes me ill. I'd be really happy if the so-called traders just fired them all, and the so-called "industry" went tits up. They are using the rough equivalent of ad-clicking bots.
There is a road in my town that is about 3 miles long with 8 stoplights on it. It's the same regardless of which direction you're coming from. You will hit every single light at "red" unless:
* You speed at least 8mph over the limit * There is no traffic/you weave in and out of slower traffic * You get to the first light just as it's turning green or right before it turns red/as it's changing.
This turns a 5 minute drive into a 20 minute drive, regardless of traffic. It's infuriating. However, you can "short circuit" it if you run the first red light.
These systems are designed to bring in ticket revenue. It's sadly the way it is.
Additionally, it's a bit more than "saving 5 seconds". It's about saving gas, reducing wear/tear on your vehicle, and improving your life. Think it's silly to save 5 seconds? Then don't hesitate to do things like not upgrade your computer, ever (it's only 5 seconds here and there), maintain your vehicle (sure it accelerates slower over time if not maintained, but it's only 5 seconds), let your steak sear for 5 seconds more than you thought it should, and so on. That's time you could be using, and it aggregates quickly. Five seconds per stop sign, 30 seconds per day, half an hour a year. By the time you're 50, you've spent hours of your life stopping at stop signs when there's no reasonable cause for it. Wonderful!
It costs $167 to contest one of these tickets. Due process, anyone? Remember the golden rule, "the guy with the gold gets to make the rules."
How, exactly, would having more money make it so you could "make the rules" in this case? Sure, you could contest it, but short of having enough money to buy city hall or the people in it outright, you're not going to be able to "make the rules".
Seems to me you're being disingenuous and applying your political views to an outside case. If you're just trying to say "the system is corrupt" then fine - but it seems to me that it's the people with power who get to make the rules, not those with money. (The money they have is often, if not usually, the result of having power, not the cause.)
Here here! I love those countdown timers. They help a LOT when navigating an unfamiliar city, with light timing you're not familiar with (as it seems to vary from intersection to intersection at times). You can avoid paying as much attention to the lights and instead pay closer attention to what's important: the traffic and people who may jump out into the street at any time.
For instance, if I see a countdown of 5 and I'm almost to the light, I know I can go through and will miss the red. If it's 1 or 2, I'll be able to anticipate it a bit better. If it's 8+ I can just ignore the light all together and pay attention to the traffic, knowing it's not going to suddenly switch to yellow on me.
Online schooling doesn't intend to be a scam. It is simply due to it's nature and mechanisms - I don't think you can actually make online schooling effective without some sort of face time.
I went to a school which was largely online - though only one or two of my courses were, and I had the option of taking some of the courses online. It's suitable for some course types as an auxiliary form for the course, but not the primary.
I also took some "online" and "distance learning" courses at a private college with a good reputation. For whatever reason, educators are smitten by "online courses" even though it's seemingly impossible to convey anything worth a damn through them. (I think it's similar to/related to the driving-and-talking-on-phone phenomenon). Hopefully, after over 10 years of this nonsense, the online courses will die out in institutions genuinely interested in educating.
That said, I went to college to get a diploma and to give me time to learn. I didn't expect much - I just didn't want a school that pretended to be something it wasn't, ending up being more of a time sink than anything.
The machines in question were IBM x335 and x336 1U rackmount machines.
That is really, really damn interesting. We've got two machines that are very similar (x335) running FreeBSD still - one is at 6.2 (runs our management VLAN services - SNMP trap, log analysis, etc.). It's got a low CPU/RAM utilization, yet it has locked up numerous times - sometimes as often as twice a day, but usually somewhere in the 2-3 month range. I've been unable to trace the problem to anything, though it's my suspicion that it may be the single channel SATA controller. It very well may be, but at this point I'm hesitant to rule out FreeBSD as the (at least partial) culprit on account of what you're saying.
As far as "production code in data centers" I'd say half the problem in this area is ports. It's a huge burden and responsibility to test everything thoroughly for a sysadmin before deploying it, much more so than it is on Linux due to the lack of a shared user base (eg. "I'm using package version xyz that comes with debian release y" vs. some ungodly combination of versions of everything).
Indeed. I regularly 'compete' with friends to find the best bargains.
If you've got a case and a decent PSU that hasn't been damaged yet, it's quite feasible to get a similar system for under $100. Newegg had a special on an AM2 board with an Athlon II x2 CPU for something like $65 shipped last week. $20 for 1GB RAM and $25 for a small SATA disk and you've got quite the useable system - yes, I realize that's not going to cut it for most geeks, and it won't store much porn, but it's one hell of a lot of system for $110, and quite doable on a fairly regular basis if the person has a pre-existing monitor/keyboard/mouse (as almost everyone does).
Absolutely - the Athlon II X2 is, aside from a horribly confusing name (IMO), an incredible value proposition when paired with a cheap board. You get not only increased speed, but 64 bit processing and VT extensions enabling you to do quite a bit more.
The only real downsides are power use (relative to the Atom options) and the need for a fan - thus allowing the Atom boards to retain their largest benefit.
In the last 3 months, I've had 3 opensolaris related FreeBSD system crashes on multiple systems. I've had two OOM related system locks. Yes, this is on 8.0 RELEASE, on very common 3-year-old to current hardware from SuperMicro, with controllers, etc. specifically picked due to their "good support" under FreeBSD. It's the case both with and without special "tuning", and the system load is light (ie multicore systems with a load average around/under.5). The hardware has all been verified to be error-free.
Sure, maybe it's me - maybe I'm not massaging it correctly. However, I've never seen such systemic issues in a non-beta OS before.
It's nice to see they've got zfsloader in there by default, now. It was otherwise a huge pain to get ZFS to be booted from - you basically had to build your own installer and set up everything manually. Quite the time consuming task.
Unfortunately, I don't see any mention of these changes:
* "improved stability for ZFS". Sure, it supports pool version 14! What the fuck does that mean, really, when "bare minimum 4GB RAM" was a requirement for 8.0 to get it even remotely stable (some tuning required)? I don't care if it runs for months without locking the system. It's still locking the system. * "decreased memory use for ZFS". It's not even doing deduplication in 8.0 RELEASE yet using 3GB of RAM at an idle load is not unheard of. * Why so quiet on the USB front? Nice to see they got ralink devices added, but that does little for the fact that USB is almost completely unreliable in 8.x. Just take a look at the USB mailing list - problem after problem that's the same (USB has many, many timing/boot/detection issues in 8.x), with the seeming consensus being "we don't care, it works for me".
FreeBSD needs to fix those things or forever be relegated to amateur hour. Seems "quality things that work" gets relegated to "superior design". That's all fine and good, but if you've got to rape an ape just to get the damn thing to work as designed due to implementation flaws, it's essentially worthless.
A hell of a lot has changed since then. Sure, it wasn't as awesome as Palm or Qtopia back then, but that was a decade ago.
There are a lot of truly useful apps on WinMo which are not available on the App Store. The phones work better (longer battery life, typically better signal, better hands free, etc.) and typically, they're able to interface with your desktop tasks better (file/media sharing/copying, tethering, mail, browsing, GPS). With the HTC frontend (can't recall what it's called - SenseUI?) you can't readily even tell it's a WinCE derived device.
And no, I don't own a modern WinCE (6.x) device, but I have handled a couple which are superior examples. Not only are the 6.5 phones difficult to find, but I don't have GSM coverage here. Microsoft is largely to blame for the lack of availability.
Indeed. In fact, using similar qualifiers of "dead", the following projects are "dead" as well:
* Samba (minor/bug releases in 3.5 last month; samba 4, which has been in development since the beginning of time, is still "alpha") * Apache (we've been at 2.2 for how long now? 2.4 is nowhere in sight). * Linux (2.6 is something like 6 years old now; the architecture is old and dated despite evolutionary changes. No plans for a 2.8 or 3.0. ) * gnome2/gtk2 (THese haven't seen any significant change in probably close to 5+ years now) * probably 100+ other popular projects which see nothing much more than semi-frequent updates and fixes but are still used by many, many people. vim, Xorg, emacs, latex, cacti, etc.
But, guess what - in all of these projects, change is occurring. THey're still being patched and updated. With snort, there are 3rd party definition repositories which likewise get updated often.
Slashdot Mirror
Feature parity? THat's being generous. Linux has nothing that compares with those features (or containers) in and of itself. (And this coming from someone who loves linux and has used it for almost 15 years.) Particularly, (Open)Solaris ZFS is light years ahead of any other filesystem - and yes, I'm excluding the other ZFS implementations from being awesome, because they really aren't yet.
OpenSolaris has also done some work integrating VirtualBox into Containers; it supposedly works very well.
If nothing else, SOlaris provides (or rather, Sun provided) a single, clean, understandable interfacing tool (or set of tools) for their architectures (ZFS, zones, DTrace, VirtualBox) which is something Linux tends to lack. BSDs do it, too (well, mainly NetBSD), but Solaris's is very nice.
I'm not attributing it to malice, though. Sociopathy, maybe, but not malice.
Like I said, this is how a bureaucracy works. You've got a lot of sociopaths, and they like power. That's why they're in government at the higher ranks.
The Wikimedia/Wikileaks thing might be possible, but anyone as typically thorough as a lawyer filing a suit/making a threat is typically thorough enough to see the lack of association between those organizations, short of the syllable phonetic similarity.
It seems simpler and more likely that it was just one or two FBI personnel who took it upon themselves to exert their power.
Seriously? That seems simpler?
This is not only government, it's the United States Federal Government. We're talking about an organization which thrives on bureaucratic meandering, hand folding, hand folding, triple-agency coordinated efforts, redundant efforts, oversight infighting, and top-down management.
There is likely not a person, never mind a lawyer, within the FBI who doesn't have to clear the use of extra toilet paper in the restrooms, never mind a legal threat against a (very) visible US organization. Whoever got this thing pushed likely had to go very, very high within the FBI to do this, and how often is it that a peon's requests actually have any action taken upon them by the higher-ups?
More likely is that it was pushed from higher up within the organization after being cleared, reviewed, sent back to a review board, and then OK'd by someone who's only several steps of authority from the President. After some pretty severe fuck-ups in the past, people at the FBI are very, very careful about showing a "police state" face. Considering the organization is mostly bureaucrats now, shuffling papers comes easy. Hell, they go out of their way to not do things which are required of them by law due to political hot buttons.
I agree that it's possible it's a "rogue" FBI agent, but it's also highly unlikely. It becomes all the less unlikely when you consider the pattern of encroachment of civil liberties, the expansion of federal authority and domain, and the increasing sense of superiority the Federal government is demonstrating.
This is just the Executive branch pushing - probing, if you will - to see how receptive the populace is becoming towards the encroachment of thoughtcrime and various other totalitarian abuses. I doubt it's serious, but if they can smooth this over (in the courts) and not have massive public outcry, they know they can push more restrictions and governmental control.
IMO, this is the wrong government for Wikimedia to fight with, in this fashion. But I guess you've got to stand somewhere...
I remember the 2.0 kernel days just fine. I don't remember those "features" getting back ported making things unstable.
I do remember there being a lot of custom patchlevel kernels, though. Lots of people did it, myself included. It was quite straightforward, because the base kernel didn't typically have configuration failures like it does now, and the patches were relatively simple. THese days, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to build a kernel due to the odds and sods not building (a rare but workable scenario in a point release, back then), and somewhat more complex, making the task more effort than it's worth. Now, if you need something not there, you'll be somewhat hard pressed to do it yourself.
For all of the whining kernel releases are a lot less buggy with fewer distro deviations from mainline. And as a bonus features actually get better testing now because fewer changes need to be tested at a time.
Have you looked at many of the distros out there right now? Many are way back on 2.6.18 as of recently, with custom patchlevels and backported drivers. THe ONLY reason there were significant backport issues with 2.5->2.4 was because the backports were occasionally poorly done, and there's a significant driver architecture difference. The latest 2.6 stuff is still considered "heavy development" and isn't all that stable. So we get the 'heavy development' model, to some degree, while not benefiting from having the true 'cutting edge'/redesign. We're just getting a more bloated kernel with the same basic architecture (nevermind the several-times-wrought architecture changes we've seen in 2.6 in firewire, USB, schedulers, etc.).
You have to admit, it's somewhat disconcerting that there's nobody in his coattails to take over.
Unlike Microsoft or some other big softare company/project, Linux really has one controlling hand. If Linus goes kaput tomorrow, face in his wheaties, it would take a non-trivial period of time to get someone up to speed and filling his shoes.
Sure, there are other "non-current" linux developers/maintainers, and there are many others who have been doing the job in the past. But that's an entirely different development model than the 2.6 tree has been, and there's nobody who "fills in" for Torvalds when he wants to take a break. The man is 40; he's going to have to slow down sooner than later. He's certainly not keeping up his percentage of code commits, nevermind the level of code (though the quality, quite possibly). He's got 3 daughters and a wife; the man has to sleep at SOME point.
That said, I'm really pleased to see the decrease in regressions. I was starting to think that it was all open source OSes that were going down the shitter of late, but I am pleased Linux is still improving (though I do still consider the removal of the anticipatory scheduler a regression).
It just makes me uneasy that anything as big as Linux has such a small point of failure. It's possible I'm overlooking the importance of the distro kernel teams and other people who contribute, or overlooking something else, but as it stands now, his continued pivotal position makes me uneasy.
The lack of a unified "stable" kernel for distros to pull from (given 2.6s continued march) and at the same time the lack of a "real" development/next-generation kernel makes me likewise uneasy.
You mention the zfs github and kFreeBSD, but are you aware of Nexenta?
Honestly, I'm not sure why it's not as well acknowledged as kFreeBSD. The myopia involved there seems to be similar to what you make light of with your joke.
In the event that you really haven't heard of it, Nexenta is basically OpenSolaris kernel with Ubuntu userland.
You get apt. No, it's not debian, but if we're looking at ZFS implementations, it's a far cry better than the alternatives (FreeBSD = buggy crap and you've got to use ports; OpenSolaris = you've got to use Solaris/shoehorn useable modern tools in).
I'm not sure why we need to stick with Linux, per se, and what's wrong with OpenSolaris kernel/CDDL. Serious question here: is there something wrong I'm missing?
From where I'm sitting - user and admin of Linux for close to a decade, now - there's really not much of an advantage to using (or developing for) Linux over, say, FreeBSD other than the community of developers (including the install base, financial backing, etc.) and what that provides for you. I'm not sure if a BSD compatible license could ever get the financial support (from the likes of RedHat, IBM, Intel, etc.) Linux does because it could be 'turned against them', but for most people (administrators, developers, etc.) there's no inherent reason, one way or the other.
It just comes down to dogma.
Phone platform aside, I wonder if they included or included the bandwidth re-transmitted due to errors on the line? My experience has been that Verizon has significantly higher failure rates per packet than other superior (GSM) networks. You're out in the boonies with Verizon 3G, and you're taking 2-3 times as much bandwidth to actually transmit/receive. In contrast, with t-mobile you either have a connection or you don't.
A few years back I was browsing through job listings for perl positions and not surprisingly there weren't many.
Did you look for 'shell scripting'? Because many managers don't know the difference, equating them with each other. Sysadmin work is the domain of perl.
Sysadmin here: and yes, a bit late to the game. Perl is, absolutely, a sysadmin thing.
For me, it's replaced bash and other 'common' shell scripting. Why? Simply: it's better and cross-platform, whereas "shell" is not.
With shell, I've got to contend with competing and contrary system binaries, which for any reasonably complex task, I'm going to use: grep, find, ls, sed, and so on. That makes things frustratingly difficult when you use multiple systems.
With perl, I don't worry about that because the problem doesn't exist. Not only that, but my script can be a third (or less) in length, do more, and be reasonably less complex. Perl is on pretty damn near every UNIX system made these days by default (much more likely than a common sh), and is trivial to add to a Windows machine (which is, sadly, the only place where your assumptions fall through with perl).
Contrarily, are you using ash, bash, sh, ksh, csh, zsh, etc. for your shell scripting? GNU, BSD, Solaris, AIX, etc. binaries for complex functionality? Some of this can be mitigated by throwing GNU utilities and a common shell on every system you use, but then you're stuck doing that, and there's significant maintenance overhead in doing so.
I'm frankly not looking forward to perl 6: I think that, if it gets any adoption, it'll fragment the perl community. It's divergent enough from perl that it should not be called perl, at this point.
THough, there are a couple (ok, one I'm aware of) MVC frameworks written in perl which is reportedly very good - catalyst. But for my time and money, I'd rather use something else at this point.
Well, for starters, consider the knowledge such programmers need to have in order to write this software:
* financial systems
* frequency trading
* surpassing existing frequency trading
* high speed interconnects and the understanding of both mathematical programming and SMP utilization
* intimate knowledge of "intelligent systems" and how to improve them using predictive math.
* the ability to solve complex problems and adapt to the changing landscape, quickly, due to the rate of change in the ecosystem
In short, we're not talking about bread and butter programming - this kind of stuff is likely much more difficult than any game programming out there, likely on par with game engine development in many ways. It's not easy, and slouches won't cut it.
Not only that, but they're living in New York. I can live relatively comfortably on less than a third of what it'd take for me to "scrape by" in NY (note, I'm married with children, so I'm not your stereotypical geek): if it's not the high cost of living, it's the taxes on "not welfare receivers" and the constant fees for things like parking, vehicle registration, utilities, etc. A construction worker in NYC makes as much as $80k a year, for crying out loud (slightly over twice what I'm making).
Even if renting a 2-bedroom "Economy" apartment in NYC, I'd likely end up spending more than my entire current salary - just on rent. That place is expensive. Similarly, I'm sure there's someone in Sudan or Somolia or wherever is pissed that those wingers in the US make $7.25/hour (or whatever minimum wage is now) to do food service. What extravagance! That must be why they hate us.
That said, everything about frequency trading makes me ill. I'd be really happy if the so-called traders just fired them all, and the so-called "industry" went tits up. They are using the rough equivalent of ad-clicking bots.
There is a road in my town that is about 3 miles long with 8 stoplights on it. It's the same regardless of which direction you're coming from. You will hit every single light at "red" unless:
* You speed at least 8mph over the limit
* There is no traffic/you weave in and out of slower traffic
* You get to the first light just as it's turning green or right before it turns red/as it's changing.
This turns a 5 minute drive into a 20 minute drive, regardless of traffic. It's infuriating. However, you can "short circuit" it if you run the first red light.
These systems are designed to bring in ticket revenue. It's sadly the way it is.
Additionally, it's a bit more than "saving 5 seconds". It's about saving gas, reducing wear/tear on your vehicle, and improving your life. Think it's silly to save 5 seconds? Then don't hesitate to do things like not upgrade your computer, ever (it's only 5 seconds here and there), maintain your vehicle (sure it accelerates slower over time if not maintained, but it's only 5 seconds), let your steak sear for 5 seconds more than you thought it should, and so on. That's time you could be using, and it aggregates quickly. Five seconds per stop sign, 30 seconds per day, half an hour a year. By the time you're 50, you've spent hours of your life stopping at stop signs when there's no reasonable cause for it. Wonderful!
It costs $167 to contest one of these tickets. Due process, anyone? Remember the golden rule, "the guy with the gold gets to make the rules."
How, exactly, would having more money make it so you could "make the rules" in this case? Sure, you could contest it, but short of having enough money to buy city hall or the people in it outright, you're not going to be able to "make the rules".
Seems to me you're being disingenuous and applying your political views to an outside case. If you're just trying to say "the system is corrupt" then fine - but it seems to me that it's the people with power who get to make the rules, not those with money. (The money they have is often, if not usually, the result of having power, not the cause.)
Here here! I love those countdown timers. They help a LOT when navigating an unfamiliar city, with light timing you're not familiar with (as it seems to vary from intersection to intersection at times). You can avoid paying as much attention to the lights and instead pay closer attention to what's important: the traffic and people who may jump out into the street at any time.
For instance, if I see a countdown of 5 and I'm almost to the light, I know I can go through and will miss the red. If it's 1 or 2, I'll be able to anticipate it a bit better. If it's 8+ I can just ignore the light all together and pay attention to the traffic, knowing it's not going to suddenly switch to yellow on me.
Online schooling doesn't intend to be a scam. It is simply due to it's nature and mechanisms - I don't think you can actually make online schooling effective without some sort of face time.
I went to a school which was largely online - though only one or two of my courses were, and I had the option of taking some of the courses online. It's suitable for some course types as an auxiliary form for the course, but not the primary.
I also took some "online" and "distance learning" courses at a private college with a good reputation. For whatever reason, educators are smitten by "online courses" even though it's seemingly impossible to convey anything worth a damn through them. (I think it's similar to/related to the driving-and-talking-on-phone phenomenon). Hopefully, after over 10 years of this nonsense, the online courses will die out in institutions genuinely interested in educating.
That said, I went to college to get a diploma and to give me time to learn. I didn't expect much - I just didn't want a school that pretended to be something it wasn't, ending up being more of a time sink than anything.
Now, I wonder: if they studied the political demographic distribution of iPad/iPhone users, what might they find?
Which "way" do Apple product purchasers vote?
Which is ironic, because under Balmer, MS has actually been pretty good about making its broken things work again.
Balmer should be put in charge of assuring maintenance quality, IMO.
The machines in question were IBM x335 and x336 1U rackmount machines.
That is really, really damn interesting. We've got two machines that are very similar (x335) running FreeBSD still - one is at 6.2 (runs our management VLAN services - SNMP trap, log analysis, etc.). It's got a low CPU/RAM utilization, yet it has locked up numerous times - sometimes as often as twice a day, but usually somewhere in the 2-3 month range. I've been unable to trace the problem to anything, though it's my suspicion that it may be the single channel SATA controller. It very well may be, but at this point I'm hesitant to rule out FreeBSD as the (at least partial) culprit on account of what you're saying.
As far as "production code in data centers" I'd say half the problem in this area is ports. It's a huge burden and responsibility to test everything thoroughly for a sysadmin before deploying it, much more so than it is on Linux due to the lack of a shared user base (eg. "I'm using package version xyz that comes with debian release y" vs. some ungodly combination of versions of everything).
Indeed. I regularly 'compete' with friends to find the best bargains.
If you've got a case and a decent PSU that hasn't been damaged yet, it's quite feasible to get a similar system for under $100. Newegg had a special on an AM2 board with an Athlon II x2 CPU for something like $65 shipped last week. $20 for 1GB RAM and $25 for a small SATA disk and you've got quite the useable system - yes, I realize that's not going to cut it for most geeks, and it won't store much porn, but it's one hell of a lot of system for $110, and quite doable on a fairly regular basis if the person has a pre-existing monitor/keyboard/mouse (as almost everyone does).
Absolutely - the Athlon II X2 is, aside from a horribly confusing name (IMO), an incredible value proposition when paired with a cheap board. You get not only increased speed, but 64 bit processing and VT extensions enabling you to do quite a bit more.
The only real downsides are power use (relative to the Atom options) and the need for a fan - thus allowing the Atom boards to retain their largest benefit.
In the last 3 months, I've had 3 opensolaris related FreeBSD system crashes on multiple systems. I've had two OOM related system locks. Yes, this is on 8.0 RELEASE, on very common 3-year-old to current hardware from SuperMicro, with controllers, etc. specifically picked due to their "good support" under FreeBSD. It's the case both with and without special "tuning", and the system load is light (ie multicore systems with a load average around/under .5). The hardware has all been verified to be error-free.
Sure, maybe it's me - maybe I'm not massaging it correctly. However, I've never seen such systemic issues in a non-beta OS before.
It's nice to see they've got zfsloader in there by default, now. It was otherwise a huge pain to get ZFS to be booted from - you basically had to build your own installer and set up everything manually. Quite the time consuming task.
Unfortunately, I don't see any mention of these changes:
* "improved stability for ZFS". Sure, it supports pool version 14! What the fuck does that mean, really, when "bare minimum 4GB RAM" was a requirement for 8.0 to get it even remotely stable (some tuning required)? I don't care if it runs for months without locking the system. It's still locking the system.
* "decreased memory use for ZFS". It's not even doing deduplication in 8.0 RELEASE yet using 3GB of RAM at an idle load is not unheard of.
* Why so quiet on the USB front? Nice to see they got ralink devices added, but that does little for the fact that USB is almost completely unreliable in 8.x. Just take a look at the USB mailing list - problem after problem that's the same (USB has many, many timing/boot/detection issues in 8.x), with the seeming consensus being "we don't care, it works for me".
FreeBSD needs to fix those things or forever be relegated to amateur hour. Seems "quality things that work" gets relegated to "superior design". That's all fine and good, but if you've got to rape an ape just to get the damn thing to work as designed due to implementation flaws, it's essentially worthless.
Office? Chromium? Exchange connectivity/Outlook? Arkon Map?
Did I mention I've only barely touched a WinMo phone and I realize these apps are available, yet not on the iPhone?
Nevermind the agitating inherent limitations of the iPhone.
When was the last time you touched WinCE? 1.0?
A hell of a lot has changed since then. Sure, it wasn't as awesome as Palm or Qtopia back then, but that was a decade ago.
There are a lot of truly useful apps on WinMo which are not available on the App Store. The phones work better (longer battery life, typically better signal, better hands free, etc.) and typically, they're able to interface with your desktop tasks better (file/media sharing/copying, tethering, mail, browsing, GPS). With the HTC frontend (can't recall what it's called - SenseUI?) you can't readily even tell it's a WinCE derived device.
And no, I don't own a modern WinCE (6.x) device, but I have handled a couple which are superior examples. Not only are the 6.5 phones difficult to find, but I don't have GSM coverage here. Microsoft is largely to blame for the lack of availability.
Indeed. In fact, using similar qualifiers of "dead", the following projects are "dead" as well:
* Samba (minor/bug releases in 3.5 last month; samba 4, which has been in development since the beginning of time, is still "alpha")
* Apache (we've been at 2.2 for how long now? 2.4 is nowhere in sight).
* Linux (2.6 is something like 6 years old now; the architecture is old and dated despite evolutionary changes. No plans for a 2.8 or 3.0. )
* gnome2/gtk2 (THese haven't seen any significant change in probably close to 5+ years now)
* probably 100+ other popular projects which see nothing much more than semi-frequent updates and fixes but are still used by many, many people. vim, Xorg, emacs, latex, cacti, etc.
But, guess what - in all of these projects, change is occurring. THey're still being patched and updated. With snort, there are 3rd party definition repositories which likewise get updated often.
In short: this article is bunk.