Re:$1,000/year per CPU for non-Oracle hardware
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Solaris 11 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Ever since Oracle bought out Sun, they went overboard with the licensing costs for Solaris. Remember a few years back when Sun will let you run Solaris 10 for free? Well no more, if you have a non-Oracle two processor server it will cost you $2,000 per year. You don't own a license, you are basically renting the privilege to run Solaris on a server for one year. Also, you only get one flavor of support which they laughably call "premium". Their support is a joke now, and in my experience the good Sun engineers left a long time ago. For starters, you now get to talk to an overseas helpdesk which logs your call and for severity one issues, they give you a call back in an hour (if you're lucky). It used to be you will call an easy to remember number (1-800-USA-4SUN) and you will get a live transfer to a knowledgeable engineer to fix your problem. A few years ago I used to be a staunch supporter of Sun and Solaris but it seems like Oracle has done everything to drive me away from Sun's hardware and software. I am pretty sure I am not the only one either.
I don't know where people are getting this $1000/socket bullsh*t. Maybe that's some ridiculous list price, but unless you're a moron, you won't pay anywhere close to that for full HW and OS support on Sun/Oracle hardware. The last time we renewed our support, I believe it was in the realm of $400-800/yr for HW/OS support on our x86 servers [dual socket Opterons and quad-socket Xeons]. The SPARC servers were a bit more expensive, closer to $2000 for support on a T5240 [dual-socket 8-core x 8-thread/core T3+ CPUs]. Remember, that includes HW support, fans, HDs, RAM, CPUs, motherboard replacements, whatever with same-day onsite service [well, in theory, in practice it's often the next day, but most of our hw failures aren't critical to our services so we don't push them very hard].
That's not to say I love Oracle's support since the buyout. Though HW failures are typically handled fairly quickly, their support website is a nightmare, and getting an IDR [Interrum patch] on anything less than a major OS bug can be a long-term process, but I'm not sure it's significantly worse than any other vendor's support in the long-run.
Re:Why not focus on quality instead of major revs?
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Ubuntu Turns 7
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· Score: 1
Yeah the LTS is great until you hit the point of having to upgrade to a non-LTS since you can't even get the latest version of Firefox anymore. And before you say "but ppas!" if one had to install ppas on an LTS that sort of defeats the point.
So, you bitch because Ubuntu changes too much/too often. But when given a solution which remains stable for a reasonably long period of time, you bitch because it doesn't change enough? Dare I ask what it is you're actually expecting that isn't possible with Ubuntu? You can have a stable [from release changes] OS and pick the pieces you want to be newer/bleeding edge, or not as you like. What's the problem there?
Well, my sister is fairly intelligent but is by no means a geek or 'computer scientist'. She's lucky she can turn on a computer and use facebook. Despite her minimal computer knowledge and abilities, she's had no issues using and loving her Droid Incredible android phone over the last couple years. She loves it, and has no desire to move to an iPhone, and probably hasn't even ever heard of a Windows phone; though I'm pretty sure she's smart enough to avoid any phone that runs 'Windows'...
Balmer is an idiot and MS would do well to get rid of him.
Yup, 11 years later and he's still true to his name.
Also, do you think Taco was pretty annoyed that Jobs had to go and preemptively one-up him?
Actually I was wondering if maybe there was some standing bet or ultimatum that CmdrTaco would have to retire from Slashdot when Steve Jobs retired from Apple.
At any rate, I have to add my voice to the chorus of "Thank You CmdrTaco!" Slashdot is by far the site I have been regularly visiting for the longest time and I wouldn't have it any other way.
sound like a shill cover up the deaths in the crash and try to spin it. The US has a good rail freight system. China's high speed rail system is made of a cheap copy of japan ones with out the safety systems.
That sounds like just about every other product the Chinese make these days, so yeah, most likely it is.
Isn't the definition of terrorism being constantly expanded as we get more and more fearful? The USA PATRIOT Act managed a lot of this expansion as I recall. I don't think kidnapping was terrorism before that.
Of course. Which is why this is not a good thing that Anonymous is threatening to do. The government will expand their definition of terrorism again, and do some more expanding of whatever trumped-up, PATRIOT Act style rules they want.
The difference is that Anonymous isn't saving you by telling you what to do. They're saving you by (in their mind) killing a parasite.
Al qaeda gave the executive branch(es) cover to grab a lot more surveillance power. Maybe, had it not been al qaeda, it would have been something else. But that's not the case it was them and not something else. Erosion of civil liberties and rapid expansion of surveillance and associated bureaucracies is more destructive to America than killing its people. Bin Laden said that spreading fear was his intent in recorded videos. One need look no farther than Congress to hear people expressing fear for their personal safety and why basic tenets of freedom (press, speech, 4th amendment) need to be struck down to protect it.
From the government's point of view, what LulzSec and Anonymous are doing is digital terrorism. Perhaps it doesn't take actual lives [yet], but it makes the masses fearful. So eventually our fine Congress is going to decide that something must be done. A digital war will be declared [or not, as it were], and our freedoms online will be taken from us in the name of security, just as our personal freedoms have been taken from us in pieces over the last 10 years.
Of course, a conspiracy theorist might decide that it was the government itself performing these acts of digital terrorism, as an excuse to put into place more control over the internet. I don't quite go that far, in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure the government hates the openness of the internet.
Either way it saddens me. While I wouldn't mourn the loss of Facebook, I think Anonymous is just providing good excuses for the further loss of freedom and anonymity online.
So why don't they just build better foundations? I'm sure large commercial buildings don't have this problem.
They do try in some cases [rebar-reinforced foundations], and certainly on the more expensive homes they tend to have better, thicker foundations. Unfortunately the developers look at the cost and it just doesn't make sense for them to spend a fortune on a nice foundation for the cheap McMansions they've been building for the last decade . But still, even 'better foundations' can be susceptible to the huge soil movements that are possible here. It's also largely the reason that *nobody* has a basement here.
I don't know about large commercial buildings. They tend to have landscaping and constant irrigation anyway, so that probably prevents a lot of issues right there.
First I've ever heard of *wanting* water against a foundation. I suppose down south you guys have different problems than us up north. Here we do everything and anything to get water as far away as fast as possible.
It's not so much that we want 'standing water' at the foundation. The issue is the soil. Down here [I'm in the DFW area] the soil is mostly clay. So when it gets wet it expands, and when it dries out, it contracts considerably. As an example, within the space of about 2 months, I watched a sidewalk slab move a good 1.5" away from a driveway slab because the ground dried out.
A constant cycle of expanding and contracting is hell on a concrete foundation, which is standard in these parts. So many people set up a trickle hose around the house and attempt to keep the soil around the foundation at some constant level of wetness to prevent their foundation from cracking.
Or you stop considering 2.6 litre engines to be the smallest anyone should put up with.
My car's got a 1.8 litre engine and by UK standards, that's pretty big. The average is more like 1.6; 1.3 and 1.0 engines are commonplace.
I had a 1997 Nissan 200SX [2-door version of a Nissan Sentra] that had a 2.0 liter engine and a 5-speed manual. I flogged the hell out of that little car and averaged 33mpg. On my many long road-trips [1500 miles, Silicon Valley to West Texas and back], I'd peg the cruise control at 89mph [as high as the cruise control worked], and would get 40+ mpg.
I miss that little thing, and wish dearly that I hadn't sold it. My current 2008 Jetta [also a 5-speed] is only averaging 22.5mpg:(
The double price comes from those of us who were on a lower-tier plan. I was originally on the 1 DVD for $7.99 plan. Then they added unlimited streaming and I thought it was great. Then they raised the price in November to $9.99 [25% increase]. Now they're making it $7.99 for streaming only, and an additional $7.99, for a grand total of $15.98/mo. So that's almost a 60% increase from my current rate, and a 100% increase from what my rate was this time last year.
I can understand some of their reasons for raising prices [Studios, postage], but I think they are doing it badly, and handling the PR for it rather poorly.
Of course, I'd be much more understanding of a price increase if Netflix were also announcing a significant increase in the videos available for streaming...
Oh you think that's the hard way? Why, in my day, if we wanted to see a good Monty Python skit, we had to form our own dirt out of the elements found in the universe, and evolve our own life forms until they were advanced enough to do Monty Python skits! Set Construction? Pfft! A luxury!
Because we pay every year for support on that old hardware. Because unlike disposable x86/X64 hardware, when you drop $20-50k [or more] on a good SPARC server, you expect it to be fully supported for more than 3 years.
Just 2 years ago we completed a hardware refresh, coming off of SPARC hardware which had first gone into service 8-10 years prior. We still have one server in service, though not supported, which is 11.5 years old. One of the other servers had a 6.5 year uptime when we finally powered it down [internal caching nameserver]. The last person who had logged into the box hadn't worked here in 4 years... [NOTE: These servers were all from before my time here. I don't let my servers go that long without being patched].
While I think a 10 year service cycle is a bit excessive [we aim for 5 years now], it's not that uncommon when you pay for premium hardware, and that hardware has historically been fully supported for well more than the 2-3 years common with x86 hardware.
The really strange thing is that the annual support costs on our Sun hardware are cheaper with Oracle than they were with Sun.
I consider BASIC the primary reason why I'm a sysadmin now, instead of a programmer. The problem I had with BASIC is that after years of tinkering with it as a kid [TI 99/4A, C64, GWBASIC on PC], I had a horrible time learning to get away from the 'GOTO' way of thinking. In high school, I took the "Computer Math" class, which was basically learning how to do algebra in BASIC. I took that class because I had experience with BASIC at home, and thought it would help bring me to the next level. It was only years later that I realized that I should have taken the "Computer Science" class, which taught Pascal.
As a result of only being exposed to BASIC, when I tried to learn other languages or do anything more complicated than drawing circles randomly around the screen, I could never get the hang of functions and pointers and passing variables or whatever. So I decided I was too dumb to be a programmer, and wasted all my time playing games instead. I think if I had taken the Pascal class early on, I'd have had a much better foundation on which to build.
In the years since, I've become somewhat proficient with bash scripting (with functions and everything) as a sysadmin. I can sorta-kinda read some perl if it's not too obfuscated. I keep trying to learn Python, but I don't do it often enough for it to stick in my head.
While I have no desire to push my daughter to be a programmer [or do anything computer-centric] I do expect to ensure that she's at least exposed to some sort of programming, so that she has at least a reasonable idea of what makes all her computers and gadgets actually work. I have no desire for BASIC to be the thing that I use for showing her programming. Perhaps LOGO [how can you beat moving a turtle around for a kid?], and maybe Python.
I like the idea of python because, much like BASIC back in the day, you can very easily start a command line interface, and get action immediately.
BASIC: 10 print"Hello" RUN
Python
>>> print "Hello"
Quick and simple, but without the danger of getting stuck in the rut of GOTOs.
this is such a waste of energy and resources... for what? so that people can post pictures about their cat? and what happens when facebook goes the way of friendster? does this datacenter become a wasteland? how do you properly dispose of so much junk?
No. Then some other lucky company gets the deal of the century on a lightly used, modern datacenter.
A lab full of scientists claiming Antihydrogen will have some evidence to support their claims. More importantly, they will continue to replicate the results.
There's a difference between blind faith and having faith in the experts.
And a whole host of religious leaders will tell you that they see miracles and evidence of God's existence daily. I personally have never seen evidence of God's existence. I've also personally never seen evidence of the existence of Anti-hydrogen.
Don't get me wrong, I think that what the scientists are saying is more likely true, but that doesn't change the fact that it requires me to believe [have faith in] a bunch of people who make claims based on things I [or the general population] do not understand. I don't know those scientists personally. They could be lying, young-boy-sexual-abusing bastards, just like the religious leaders. Why do I trust the scientists more? Why do other people trust the religious leaders more. Either way, it's faith to some degree.
The actual Vericode post says it's both the iPhone and Android versions. I'm not sure why the article linked in the summary [and thus the summary] only mentions the Android version.
I wonder then, does the web browser interface do something similar, minus the GPS info of course? What about the Pandora One desktop app?
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss what you call baby-bonics. Words are made up of simple sounds and this is what babies are trying to do. We encourage them by making those sounds back. From mastering those little things, they move on to bigger and better things.
The baby-bonics is important for the baby to use though, not for the parents. When the baby starts using 'baba' [we were thrilled!], it seems to me that if as a parent you use 'baba', it would reinforce that 'baba' is the right word. Because at that stage *MOST* of what the baby actually understands is tone and inflection, it makes more sense to say something with a positive inflection/tone like, "That's right, bottle" or "Oh, do you want your bottle?", as you hand them the bottle. I think that might give them the positive feedback that they've started saying it while letting them hear what it should eventually end up sounding like. This should have the baby thinking [in non-verbal terms of course], "Well, I said 'baba' and that got the point across, and they were happy, but they keep saying 'bottle' so that must be what it should sound like once I gain full control of my vocal ability."
Obviously my one child anecdote != data. I'd love to see a long-term wide-spread study done on stuff like this.
It is very interesting that she did that, but not exactly justifiable. In a lot of cases, like this one, those words are pretty much interchangeable (a class - especially in kindergarten - requires attention to proceed smoothly, therefore distraction is disturbance). I find it curious that she phrased it as a correction instead of a question, like "do you mean 'distracting'?". I hope it's not the case, but I've seen my share of obnoxious kids with a certain excess of self-confidence and such behaviour is quite typical. Soon enough she might be commenting on/.
You know, that's a good point. We do try to get her to be gracious in things, and not be a 'know it all', but sometimes I miss things. I'm going to make a point to suggest she put something like that in a less 'corrective' tone in the future. She's also a very cute kid, to the point where we constantly have people going out of their way to come over and comment on it. It's a bit embarrassing really for me at least, as an introverted geek. For awhile her response would be "Yeah, I know". We've had to explain that that is a bit of a rude response, and to just be gracious and say, "Thank you". Guess we need to do the same thing with her 'need to be right' corrective attitude. There's a reason we call her "The enforcer":)
Granted, it's hard to tell how much of her current ability involved her natural abilities versus the way we've treated and interacted with her. The old 'nature vs. nurture' argument. It's entirely likely that she just has a natural predilection for language. But I'm fairly certain that given her natural abilities, she's further along now because we spoke in complete sentences and explained in detail everything that we did, than she would have been had we not done so.
And though she's not as strong in math, because we've always worked with her in as natural a way as possible (explaining money, having her help pull change, and count things), she's probably further along now than she would have been had we not done that as well.
As I said though, I'm hardly an expert on child development, so I could be wrong.:)
And there's certainly the chance that she might reach a given level of ability in either of those things, then progress no further, allowing her classmates to catch up. I suspect not though as both my wife and I are fairly intelligent. [Relative to the general population anyway. I think I hang around in the wrong circles where I sometimes feel inadequate in my intelligence.]
Well, we used to be, before we had a kid. We do have a pool so we do swim, but many of the physical activities we used to do, we haven't done for some time.
However I am aiming to change that. As a matter of fact, just this past weekend I finally bought a new bike. I used to ride [bmx/freestyle] EVERYWHERE when I was young, but had gotten out of the habit. I plan to ride frequently now, and hopefully that will motivate her to want to learn to ride so she can ride with us.
We didn't really aim to cultivate precocity. We just wanted her to grow up hearing proper speech so she learned that first instead of the 'baby-bonics' of 'baba' and 'wawa'. As for her math, I was basically being facetious. She's not as advanced in her math as she is with her speech/reading, but she's still a bit ahead of most of her class. She just is picking up the reading more quickly.
If my wife and I were total asses, we probably could have pushed her day-in and day-out to advance academically at the expense of everything else and she could probably have been one of those poor kids who graduate HS at 12 and get their PhD at 19 or whatever. But that's not the kind of [sad] life we want for our kid. We read to her at bed time (or have her read to us), we guide her to do things for herself when possible. She actually enjoys doing vocabulary and math workbooks, so I'm not exactly going to tell her no. But on the flip side, she likes watching cartoons and playing computer games, so she spends as much of her spare time watching mindless pap as she does working her brain.
I think the only way I've failed her thus far is her physical fitness. She's not fat [she usually makes healthy eating choices] but she has no strength at all. I'm working on getting her outside more and strong enough to actually pedal her little bike, but it's a slow process. I figure all of her calories are going to her brain...
Or you can teach them basic sign language, which the baby is able to do well before they are capable of speech. It's great having a baby who rarely cries because they can make their needs known instead of just screaming until you manage to figure out the problem through trial and error.
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Ever since Oracle bought out Sun, they went overboard with the licensing costs for Solaris. Remember a few years back when Sun will let you run Solaris 10 for free? Well no more, if you have a non-Oracle two processor server it will cost you $2,000 per year. You don't own a license, you are basically renting the privilege to run Solaris on a server for one year. Also, you only get one flavor of support which they laughably call "premium". Their support is a joke now, and in my experience the good Sun engineers left a long time ago. For starters, you now get to talk to an overseas helpdesk which logs your call and for severity one issues, they give you a call back in an hour (if you're lucky). It used to be you will call an easy to remember number (1-800-USA-4SUN) and you will get a live transfer to a knowledgeable engineer to fix your problem. A few years ago I used to be a staunch supporter of Sun and Solaris but it seems like Oracle has done everything to drive me away from Sun's hardware and software. I am pretty sure I am not the only one either.
I don't know where people are getting this $1000/socket bullsh*t. Maybe that's some ridiculous list price, but unless you're a moron, you won't pay anywhere close to that for full HW and OS support on Sun/Oracle hardware. The last time we renewed our support, I believe it was in the realm of $400-800/yr for HW/OS support on our x86 servers [dual socket Opterons and quad-socket Xeons]. The SPARC servers were a bit more expensive, closer to $2000 for support on a T5240 [dual-socket 8-core x 8-thread/core T3+ CPUs]. Remember, that includes HW support, fans, HDs, RAM, CPUs, motherboard replacements, whatever with same-day onsite service [well, in theory, in practice it's often the next day, but most of our hw failures aren't critical to our services so we don't push them very hard].
That's not to say I love Oracle's support since the buyout. Though HW failures are typically handled fairly quickly, their support website is a nightmare, and getting an IDR [Interrum patch] on anything less than a major OS bug can be a long-term process, but I'm not sure it's significantly worse than any other vendor's support in the long-run.
Yeah the LTS is great until you hit the point of having to upgrade to a non-LTS since you can't even get the latest version of Firefox anymore. And before you say "but ppas!" if one had to install ppas on an LTS that sort of defeats the point.
So, you bitch because Ubuntu changes too much/too often. But when given a solution which remains stable for a reasonably long period of time, you bitch because it doesn't change enough? Dare I ask what it is you're actually expecting that isn't possible with Ubuntu? You can have a stable [from release changes] OS and pick the pieces you want to be newer/bleeding edge, or not as you like. What's the problem there?
Well, my sister is fairly intelligent but is by no means a geek or 'computer scientist'. She's lucky she can turn on a computer and use facebook. Despite her minimal computer knowledge and abilities, she's had no issues using and loving her Droid Incredible android phone over the last couple years. She loves it, and has no desire to move to an iPhone, and probably hasn't even ever heard of a Windows phone; though I'm pretty sure she's smart enough to avoid any phone that runs 'Windows'...
Balmer is an idiot and MS would do well to get rid of him.
Yup, 11 years later and he's still true to his name.
Also, do you think Taco was pretty annoyed that Jobs had to go and preemptively one-up him?
Actually I was wondering if maybe there was some standing bet or ultimatum that CmdrTaco would have to retire from Slashdot when Steve Jobs retired from Apple.
At any rate, I have to add my voice to the chorus of "Thank You CmdrTaco!" Slashdot is by far the site I have been regularly visiting for the longest time and I wouldn't have it any other way.
sound like a shill cover up the deaths in the crash and try to spin it. The US has a good rail freight system. China's high speed rail system is made of a cheap copy of japan ones with out the safety systems.
That sounds like just about every other product the Chinese make these days, so yeah, most likely it is.
well seeing how bad the rail system is that may fail on it's own.
I'm not sure the US is in any position to criticize the rail system of any other nation. :)
Isn't the definition of terrorism being constantly expanded as we get more and more fearful? The USA PATRIOT Act managed a lot of this expansion as I recall. I don't think kidnapping was terrorism before that.
Of course. Which is why this is not a good thing that Anonymous is threatening to do. The government will expand their definition of terrorism again, and do some more expanding of whatever trumped-up, PATRIOT Act style rules they want.
The difference is that Anonymous isn't saving you by telling you what to do. They're saving you by (in their mind) killing a parasite.
Al qaeda gave the executive branch(es) cover to grab a lot more surveillance power. Maybe, had it not been al qaeda, it would have been something else. But that's not the case it was them and not something else. Erosion of civil liberties and rapid expansion of surveillance and associated bureaucracies is more destructive to America than killing its people. Bin Laden said that spreading fear was his intent in recorded videos. One need look no farther than Congress to hear people expressing fear for their personal safety and why basic tenets of freedom (press, speech, 4th amendment) need to be struck down to protect it.
From the government's point of view, what LulzSec and Anonymous are doing is digital terrorism. Perhaps it doesn't take actual lives [yet], but it makes the masses fearful. So eventually our fine Congress is going to decide that something must be done. A digital war will be declared [or not, as it were], and our freedoms online will be taken from us in the name of security, just as our personal freedoms have been taken from us in pieces over the last 10 years.
Of course, a conspiracy theorist might decide that it was the government itself performing these acts of digital terrorism, as an excuse to put into place more control over the internet. I don't quite go that far, in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure the government hates the openness of the internet.
Either way it saddens me. While I wouldn't mourn the loss of Facebook, I think Anonymous is just providing good excuses for the further loss of freedom and anonymity online.
So why don't they just build better foundations? I'm sure large commercial buildings don't have this problem.
They do try in some cases [rebar-reinforced foundations], and certainly on the more expensive homes they tend to have better, thicker foundations. Unfortunately the developers look at the cost and it just doesn't make sense for them to spend a fortune on a nice foundation for the cheap McMansions they've been building for the last decade .
But still, even 'better foundations' can be susceptible to the huge soil movements that are possible here. It's also largely the reason that *nobody* has a basement here.
I don't know about large commercial buildings. They tend to have landscaping and constant irrigation anyway, so that probably prevents a lot of issues right there.
First I've ever heard of *wanting* water against a foundation. I suppose down south you guys have different problems than us up north. Here we do everything and anything to get water as far away as fast as possible.
It's not so much that we want 'standing water' at the foundation. The issue is the soil. Down here [I'm in the DFW area] the soil is mostly clay. So when it gets wet it expands, and when it dries out, it contracts considerably. As an example, within the space of about 2 months, I watched a sidewalk slab move a good 1.5" away from a driveway slab because the ground dried out.
A constant cycle of expanding and contracting is hell on a concrete foundation, which is standard in these parts. So many people set up a trickle hose around the house and attempt to keep the soil around the foundation at some constant level of wetness to prevent their foundation from cracking.
Or you stop considering 2.6 litre engines to be the smallest anyone should put up with.
My car's got a 1.8 litre engine and by UK standards, that's pretty big. The average is more like 1.6; 1.3 and 1.0 engines are commonplace.
I had a 1997 Nissan 200SX [2-door version of a Nissan Sentra] that had a 2.0 liter engine and a 5-speed manual. I flogged the hell out of that little car and averaged 33mpg. On my many long road-trips [1500 miles, Silicon Valley to West Texas and back], I'd peg the cruise control at 89mph [as high as the cruise control worked], and would get 40+ mpg.
I miss that little thing, and wish dearly that I hadn't sold it. My current 2008 Jetta [also a 5-speed] is only averaging 22.5mpg :(
The double price comes from those of us who were on a lower-tier plan. I was originally on the 1 DVD for $7.99 plan. Then they added unlimited streaming and I thought it was great. Then they raised the price in November to $9.99 [25% increase]. Now they're making it $7.99 for streaming only, and an additional $7.99, for a grand total of $15.98/mo. So that's almost a 60% increase from my current rate, and a 100% increase from what my rate was this time last year.
I can understand some of their reasons for raising prices [Studios, postage], but I think they are doing it badly, and handling the PR for it rather poorly.
Of course, I'd be much more understanding of a price increase if Netflix were also announcing a significant increase in the videos available for streaming...
At the same time, drawing up the blueprint doesn't do you any good if you don't know how to nail two boards together properly...
Oh you think that's the hard way? Why, in my day, if we wanted to see a good Monty Python skit, we had to form our own dirt out of the elements found in the universe, and evolve our own life forms until they were advanced enough to do Monty Python skits! Set Construction? Pfft! A luxury!
Because we pay every year for support on that old hardware.
Because unlike disposable x86/X64 hardware, when you drop $20-50k [or more] on a good SPARC server, you expect it to be fully supported for more than 3 years.
Just 2 years ago we completed a hardware refresh, coming off of SPARC hardware which had first gone into service 8-10 years prior. We still have one server in service, though not supported, which is 11.5 years old. One of the other servers had a 6.5 year uptime when we finally powered it down [internal caching nameserver]. The last person who had logged into the box hadn't worked here in 4 years... [NOTE: These servers were all from before my time here. I don't let my servers go that long without being patched].
While I think a 10 year service cycle is a bit excessive [we aim for 5 years now], it's not that uncommon when you pay for premium hardware, and that hardware has historically been fully supported for well more than the 2-3 years common with x86 hardware.
The really strange thing is that the annual support costs on our Sun hardware are cheaper with Oracle than they were with Sun.
I consider BASIC the primary reason why I'm a sysadmin now, instead of a programmer. The problem I had with BASIC is that after years of tinkering with it as a kid [TI 99/4A, C64, GWBASIC on PC], I had a horrible time learning to get away from the 'GOTO' way of thinking.
In high school, I took the "Computer Math" class, which was basically learning how to do algebra in BASIC. I took that class because I had experience with BASIC at home, and thought it would help bring me to the next level. It was only years later that I realized that I should have taken the "Computer Science" class, which taught Pascal.
As a result of only being exposed to BASIC, when I tried to learn other languages or do anything more complicated than drawing circles randomly around the screen, I could never get the hang of functions and pointers and passing variables or whatever. So I decided I was too dumb to be a programmer, and wasted all my time playing games instead. I think if I had taken the Pascal class early on, I'd have had a much better foundation on which to build.
In the years since, I've become somewhat proficient with bash scripting (with functions and everything) as a sysadmin. I can sorta-kinda read some perl if it's not too obfuscated. I keep trying to learn Python, but I don't do it often enough for it to stick in my head.
While I have no desire to push my daughter to be a programmer [or do anything computer-centric] I do expect to ensure that she's at least exposed to some sort of programming, so that she has at least a reasonable idea of what makes all her computers and gadgets actually work. I have no desire for BASIC to be the thing that I use for showing her programming. Perhaps LOGO [how can you beat moving a turtle around for a kid?], and maybe Python.
I like the idea of python because, much like BASIC back in the day, you can very easily start a command line interface, and get action immediately.
BASIC:
10 print"Hello"
RUN
Python
>>> print "Hello"
Quick and simple, but without the danger of getting stuck in the rut of GOTOs.
this is such a waste of energy and resources ... for what? so that people can post pictures about their cat? and what happens when facebook goes the way of friendster? does this datacenter become a wasteland? how do you properly dispose of so much junk?
No. Then some other lucky company gets the deal of the century on a lightly used, modern datacenter.
A lab full of scientists claiming Antihydrogen will have some evidence to support their claims. More importantly, they will continue to replicate the results.
There's a difference between blind faith and having faith in the experts.
And a whole host of religious leaders will tell you that they see miracles and evidence of God's existence daily. I personally have never seen evidence of God's existence. I've also personally never seen evidence of the existence of Anti-hydrogen.
Don't get me wrong, I think that what the scientists are saying is more likely true, but that doesn't change the fact that it requires me to believe [have faith in] a bunch of people who make claims based on things I [or the general population] do not understand. I don't know those scientists personally. They could be lying, young-boy-sexual-abusing bastards, just like the religious leaders. Why do I trust the scientists more? Why do other people trust the religious leaders more. Either way, it's faith to some degree.
The actual Vericode post says it's both the iPhone and Android versions. I'm not sure why the article linked in the summary [and thus the summary] only mentions the Android version.
I wonder then, does the web browser interface do something similar, minus the GPS info of course? What about the Pandora One desktop app?
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss what you call baby-bonics. Words are made up of simple sounds and this is what babies are trying to do. We encourage them by making those sounds back. From mastering those little things, they move on to bigger and better things.
The baby-bonics is important for the baby to use though, not for the parents. When the baby starts using 'baba' [we were thrilled!], it seems to me that if as a parent you use 'baba', it would reinforce that 'baba' is the right word. Because at that stage *MOST* of what the baby actually understands is tone and inflection, it makes more sense to say something with a positive inflection/tone like, "That's right, bottle" or "Oh, do you want your bottle?", as you hand them the bottle. I think that might give them the positive feedback that they've started saying it while letting them hear what it should eventually end up sounding like. This should have the baby thinking [in non-verbal terms of course], "Well, I said 'baba' and that got the point across, and they were happy, but they keep saying 'bottle' so that must be what it should sound like once I gain full control of my vocal ability."
Obviously my one child anecdote != data. I'd love to see a long-term wide-spread study done on stuff like this.
It is very interesting that she did that, but not exactly justifiable. In a lot of cases, like this one, those words are pretty much interchangeable (a class - especially in kindergarten - requires attention to proceed smoothly, therefore distraction is disturbance). I find it curious that she phrased it as a correction instead of a question, like "do you mean 'distracting'?". I hope it's not the case, but I've seen my share of obnoxious kids with a certain excess of self-confidence and such behaviour is quite typical. Soon enough she might be commenting on /.
You know, that's a good point. We do try to get her to be gracious in things, and not be a 'know it all', but sometimes I miss things. I'm going to make a point to suggest she put something like that in a less 'corrective' tone in the future. She's also a very cute kid, to the point where we constantly have people going out of their way to come over and comment on it. It's a bit embarrassing really for me at least, as an introverted geek. For awhile her response would be "Yeah, I know". We've had to explain that that is a bit of a rude response, and to just be gracious and say, "Thank you". Guess we need to do the same thing with her 'need to be right' corrective attitude. There's a reason we call her "The enforcer" :)
Granted, it's hard to tell how much of her current ability involved her natural abilities versus the way we've treated and interacted with her. The old 'nature vs. nurture' argument. It's entirely likely that she just has a natural predilection for language. But I'm fairly certain that given her natural abilities, she's further along now because we spoke in complete sentences and explained in detail everything that we did, than she would have been had we not done so.
And though she's not as strong in math, because we've always worked with her in as natural a way as possible (explaining money, having her help pull change, and count things), she's probably further along now than she would have been had we not done that as well.
As I said though, I'm hardly an expert on child development, so I could be wrong. :)
And there's certainly the chance that she might reach a given level of ability in either of those things, then progress no further, allowing her classmates to catch up. I suspect not though as both my wife and I are fairly intelligent. [Relative to the general population anyway. I think I hang around in the wrong circles where I sometimes feel inadequate in my intelligence.]
Well, we used to be, before we had a kid. We do have a pool so we do swim, but many of the physical activities we used to do, we haven't done for some time.
However I am aiming to change that. As a matter of fact, just this past weekend I finally bought a new bike. I used to ride [bmx/freestyle] EVERYWHERE when I was young, but had gotten out of the habit. I plan to ride frequently now, and hopefully that will motivate her to want to learn to ride so she can ride with us.
We didn't really aim to cultivate precocity. We just wanted her to grow up hearing proper speech so she learned that first instead of the 'baby-bonics' of 'baba' and 'wawa'. As for her math, I was basically being facetious. She's not as advanced in her math as she is with her speech/reading, but she's still a bit ahead of most of her class. She just is picking up the reading more quickly.
If my wife and I were total asses, we probably could have pushed her day-in and day-out to advance academically at the expense of everything else and she could probably have been one of those poor kids who graduate HS at 12 and get their PhD at 19 or whatever. But that's not the kind of [sad] life we want for our kid. We read to her at bed time (or have her read to us), we guide her to do things for herself when possible. She actually enjoys doing vocabulary and math workbooks, so I'm not exactly going to tell her no. But on the flip side, she likes watching cartoons and playing computer games, so she spends as much of her spare time watching mindless pap as she does working her brain.
I think the only way I've failed her thus far is her physical fitness. She's not fat [she usually makes healthy eating choices] but she has no strength at all. I'm working on getting her outside more and strong enough to actually pedal her little bike, but it's a slow process. I figure all of her calories are going to her brain...
Or you can teach them basic sign language, which the baby is able to do well before they are capable of speech. It's great having a baby who rarely cries because they can make their needs known instead of just screaming until you manage to figure out the problem through trial and error.