Whether Philip K. Dick's works declined or improved over time really depends on how much you're looking for amphetamine fueled visions of bat-shit crazy. Like it or hate it, his later work really didn't go through the usual out of ideas curve most writers follow over time.
Wait, you think I installed the steaming pile that is 12.04? That's pretty funny. I limped along with 10.04 until Debian Squeeze was released last year, and that was it for Ubuntu on my systems. I wanted no parts of Unity in 2011, same as I don't want Wayland in 2012.
Regardless, the "LTS" in Ubuntu's release titles is a joke. None of the bugs I ran into for 10.04 "LTS" were resolved via any means except "fixed in version ". When Ubuntu has a large and active backporting team worrying about their stable releases, such as RedHat's, then they can credibly use the LTS description.
Is there anyone who still thinks the Ubuntu release team prioritizes either usability or low number of bugs now? That's a serious question; I have no idea why this is considered a novel or even notable thing at this point. New Ubuntu release, leading edge software that's not ready for prime time is included, the release is at best beta quality software by any reasonable standard. Same story in every release going back to at least the 8.04 PulseAudio debacle.
The classic BOFH articles are at Simon's page. The stuff at The Register is mainly newer and weaker material, watered down for PFY like yourself. Jesus, the assaults on my lawn just will not stop.
I'm using K9 to do filtering on one PC right now. I haven't had any complaints about it yet. The hardware is vastly overpowered relative to the child using it, so whatever overhead K9 adds is irrelevant.
I am curious about where you're seeing BSoDs at. I'd understand that would be maddening if K9 were the official software of something like a classroom. Luckily with a single home install, I just tried it out, and haven't seen any issues so far.
Intel is starting to provide more serious competition to both NVIDIA and AMD/ATI too, on the laptop end of mobile computing. The latest rev of their graphics chipset, the HD 4000, is more than enough GPU power for many people.
So far this year Intel has basically finished off AMD from the high-end of the desktop CPU market, while advancing into the useful mobile desktop GPU market via their 22nm mobile Ivy Bridge HD 4000 chipset. There's nothing really competitive from them yet for under 15W of TDP, but it's obvious they intend to battle more on the mobile and SoC markets. Only new market to expand into at this point, and the only one still growing usefully. They're not there yet.
But it wasn't that long ago that Intel's integrated GPUs were the target of jokes too. The HD 4000 isn't great, but advocates of discrete GPUs aren't just laughing now. In smartphone and tablet land, the interesting question is not about this year's product, it's how long it will take the beast to retarget. I'd wager that the 14 nm shrink of Haswell is where things will get interesting.
As far as specific prior art for this case goes, just before I made my post I wandered downstairs for a minute to get a laugh from my wedge-shaped Apple ][. Jobs had been actively working in this direction, rather than the standard boxy computer look, since the 70's.
Engines are the classic example used for design vs. utility patents. A good example in this area is the Bruce Crower's engine, which as commented on there is sketchy to try and patent as anything other than a design patent, given how old prior art is for combining stream with engines in various ways.
Now, if you physically have one of these engines, it might be feasible to reverse engineer how it works with less resources than it takes to license the design, amortized over enough production units. The idea itself is worthless though; you need a functional prototype before you can prove this will work usefully in the real world. If I can read the summary page of a patent and duplicate the technology from that, it's really a stretch to say it's worth awarding a patent on. If it's not difficult to build a functional device (or program, to extend to software too) if we just have a brief outline of the idea, it's pretty ridiculous to claim it's an innovation big enough to patent. That's how I'd like to see the prior art claims of a patent checked. If a "person having ordinary skill in the art" can duplicate the "advance" just given the claims, not the method, that should never be a patentable advance; it's only an obvious small step forward.
If your post was a patent application, I'd reject it over several unsupported claims. Patents were not intended to fix the "free rider" problem. Anything innovating enough to deserve a patent could be kept a trade secret instead. Things that can be easily copied are by definition more derivative than innovating. This wedge based design for example; it's an obvious advance made possible by continued reduction in component size. Once it's becomes possible to shrink things to that form factor, it was inevitable. Cue "shoulders of giants" comments and how many instances of co-discovery litter scientific history.
What patents were intended to do was let an inventor make a deal with the world. They could get monopoly rights on their invention in return for sharing it with everyone. Other companies wouldn't have to reverse engineer the process, they could just license it for a fee instead. The production capabilities of the world move forward; other companies don't have to waste time re-inventing the same wheel.
If it's possible to re-invent the wheel in question without seeing the so-called "intellectual property", it wasn't a non-obvious advance. That's where the bar is supposed to be at here, with an explicit obviousness test. That test has been weakened into a ridiculously low one now. And the result is a patent process that does nothing but weaken business. There is no value being provided by patent holders anymore, no resulting benefit to society sufficient that they should be rewarded with a monopoly on something. The social contract implied by the patent process is no longer being honored by the companies patenting things, and instead they're just stifling innovation, by small companies in particular.
The reason why healthcare rates are skyrocketing is not because of additional use by policy holders, but because of skyrocketing costs at hospitals and other covered facilities that have to make up for their losses on indigent and poor that use their facilities as primary care.
ER as primary care is far from the only factor going into rates increasing; it's surely not even the most important one. It's only in the second tier of the first list I found. By far the biggest factor is easy to see in any graphs of age distribution. Young people cost less to take care of; as our population shifts toward being older on average, costs go up. That combines badly with one of the other major issues here, that there are a whole lot more expensive drugs available now that are targeted at older patients, both from a functional and marketing perspective.
Your typical New York resident can afford a $10 pack about as easily as a typical West Virginia one can come up with $4.50; see states by income. The main reason many of the NYC smokers I know gave up smoking (I'm speaking across a sample base of around 20 people there) was not the cost, it was the bans on public/workplace smoking. When you can't smoke easily in a bar, that takes much of the old fun of smoking away. And if it's hard to smoke while working, that makes for a dead period that impacts addiction. People either face constant withdraw symptoms when they to work, or just quite altogether to make life easier. Taxes, education, trendiness, and the restrictions I'm mentioning here all have played a role in making smoking less popular.
I was strictly speaking, because pgpool-II's statement replication is neither built-in nor without limitations--compared to the full feature set of PostgreSQL. Another write scaling approach is to use the PL/Proxy language to wrap database access. There's also people doing PostgreSQL sharding in their application layer, connecting to one of multiple databases based on what they need. None of these ideas are popular nor built-in to the database yet though.
The whole "XML in databases!" trend came out of people being frustrated with not being able to stuff arbitrary data into a relational database. This "new" document storage idea is addressing the exact same problem in a similar way, only it's a different schemaless storage scheme/database pair. That's why I was amused by the similarity.
Z39.50 and WAIS were implementing a client/server protocol that wasn't tied to any particular database storage backend. If I were searching for a historical precedent for flexible data transfer mechanisms, that concept surely goes back earlier than Z39.50. I'd expect to find prior art for that broader idea among the earlier 50's and 60's research into data storage.
JSON is relevant to NoSQL because it gives a good answer to "how do I store more complicated things than key/value lookups?", one that's even possible to decode in a web browser noadays. XML databases gave an answer to "how do I store schemaless data in a relational database?", a similar issue. Both combinations--relational + XML, NoSQL + JSON--end up providing the same basic capabilities.
Sadly, his post will be missed because everyone's too busy talking about how everything can be done just as easily on a $500,000 server farm running Oracle's latest and greatest turd.
Actually, I was going to talk about how PostgreSQL 9.2 (expected in Q3 of this year) will include JSON support. The database also has non-relational key value storage, and that feature is even available in Heroku deployments now.
There are two things PostgreSQL doesn't do as well as MongoDB. It won't do simple key/value lookups quite as fast; I normally eliminate that problem by putting a memcached server in at some level. And you can't split writes among multiple nodes easily yet.
Yes, no one would suggest ZFS as the filesystem for your phone. You might have to do things like disable checksums if you have an older or otherwise underpowered CPU, and it's tuned by default to use memory quite heavily. That anecdote isn't very relevant for today's desktop or server environments though.
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I'd intentionally fall into a river if the other option was reading more Gibson.
Whether Philip K. Dick's works declined or improved over time really depends on how much you're looking for amphetamine fueled visions of bat-shit crazy. Like it or hate it, his later work really didn't go through the usual out of ideas curve most writers follow over time.
Your quick summary could use a quick summary.
Wait, you think I installed the steaming pile that is 12.04? That's pretty funny. I limped along with 10.04 until Debian Squeeze was released last year, and that was it for Ubuntu on my systems. I wanted no parts of Unity in 2011, same as I don't want Wayland in 2012.
Regardless, the "LTS" in Ubuntu's release titles is a joke. None of the bugs I ran into for 10.04 "LTS" were resolved via any means except "fixed in version ". When Ubuntu has a large and active backporting team worrying about their stable releases, such as RedHat's, then they can credibly use the LTS description.
Is there anyone who still thinks the Ubuntu release team prioritizes either usability or low number of bugs now? That's a serious question; I have no idea why this is considered a novel or even notable thing at this point. New Ubuntu release, leading edge software that's not ready for prime time is included, the release is at best beta quality software by any reasonable standard. Same story in every release going back to at least the 8.04 PulseAudio debacle.
The classic BOFH articles are at Simon's page. The stuff at The Register is mainly newer and weaker material, watered down for PFY like yourself. Jesus, the assaults on my lawn just will not stop.
I'm using K9 to do filtering on one PC right now. I haven't had any complaints about it yet. The hardware is vastly overpowered relative to the child using it, so whatever overhead K9 adds is irrelevant.
I am curious about where you're seeing BSoDs at. I'd understand that would be maddening if K9 were the official software of something like a classroom. Luckily with a single home install, I just tried it out, and haven't seen any issues so far.
Intel is starting to provide more serious competition to both NVIDIA and AMD/ATI too, on the laptop end of mobile computing. The latest rev of their graphics chipset, the HD 4000, is more than enough GPU power for many people.
So far this year Intel has basically finished off AMD from the high-end of the desktop CPU market, while advancing into the useful mobile desktop GPU market via their 22nm mobile Ivy Bridge HD 4000 chipset. There's nothing really competitive from them yet for under 15W of TDP, but it's obvious they intend to battle more on the mobile and SoC markets. Only new market to expand into at this point, and the only one still growing usefully. They're not there yet.
But it wasn't that long ago that Intel's integrated GPUs were the target of jokes too. The HD 4000 isn't great, but advocates of discrete GPUs aren't just laughing now. In smartphone and tablet land, the interesting question is not about this year's product, it's how long it will take the beast to retarget. I'd wager that the 14 nm shrink of Haswell is where things will get interesting.
As far as specific prior art for this case goes, just before I made my post I wandered downstairs for a minute to get a laugh from my wedge-shaped Apple ][. Jobs had been actively working in this direction, rather than the standard boxy computer look, since the 70's.
Engines are the classic example used for design vs. utility patents. A good example in this area is the Bruce Crower's engine, which as commented on there is sketchy to try and patent as anything other than a design patent, given how old prior art is for combining stream with engines in various ways.
Now, if you physically have one of these engines, it might be feasible to reverse engineer how it works with less resources than it takes to license the design, amortized over enough production units. The idea itself is worthless though; you need a functional prototype before you can prove this will work usefully in the real world. If I can read the summary page of a patent and duplicate the technology from that, it's really a stretch to say it's worth awarding a patent on. If it's not difficult to build a functional device (or program, to extend to software too) if we just have a brief outline of the idea, it's pretty ridiculous to claim it's an innovation big enough to patent. That's how I'd like to see the prior art claims of a patent checked. If a "person having ordinary skill in the art" can duplicate the "advance" just given the claims, not the method, that should never be a patentable advance; it's only an obvious small step forward.
If your post was a patent application, I'd reject it over several unsupported claims. Patents were not intended to fix the "free rider" problem. Anything innovating enough to deserve a patent could be kept a trade secret instead. Things that can be easily copied are by definition more derivative than innovating. This wedge based design for example; it's an obvious advance made possible by continued reduction in component size. Once it's becomes possible to shrink things to that form factor, it was inevitable. Cue "shoulders of giants" comments and how many instances of co-discovery litter scientific history.
What patents were intended to do was let an inventor make a deal with the world. They could get monopoly rights on their invention in return for sharing it with everyone. Other companies wouldn't have to reverse engineer the process, they could just license it for a fee instead. The production capabilities of the world move forward; other companies don't have to waste time re-inventing the same wheel.
If it's possible to re-invent the wheel in question without seeing the so-called "intellectual property", it wasn't a non-obvious advance. That's where the bar is supposed to be at here, with an explicit obviousness test. That test has been weakened into a ridiculously low one now. And the result is a patent process that does nothing but weaken business. There is no value being provided by patent holders anymore, no resulting benefit to society sufficient that they should be rewarded with a monopoly on something. The social contract implied by the patent process is no longer being honored by the companies patenting things, and instead they're just stifling innovation, by small companies in particular.
The reason why healthcare rates are skyrocketing is not because of additional use by policy holders, but because of skyrocketing costs at hospitals and other covered facilities that have to make up for their losses on indigent and poor that use their facilities as primary care.
ER as primary care is far from the only factor going into rates increasing; it's surely not even the most important one. It's only in the second tier of the first list I found. By far the biggest factor is easy to see in any graphs of age distribution. Young people cost less to take care of; as our population shifts toward being older on average, costs go up. That combines badly with one of the other major issues here, that there are a whole lot more expensive drugs available now that are targeted at older patients, both from a functional and marketing perspective.
Your typical New York resident can afford a $10 pack about as easily as a typical West Virginia one can come up with $4.50; see states by income. The main reason many of the NYC smokers I know gave up smoking (I'm speaking across a sample base of around 20 people there) was not the cost, it was the bans on public/workplace smoking. When you can't smoke easily in a bar, that takes much of the old fun of smoking away. And if it's hard to smoke while working, that makes for a dead period that impacts addiction. People either face constant withdraw symptoms when they to work, or just quite altogether to make life easier. Taxes, education, trendiness, and the restrictions I'm mentioning here all have played a role in making smoking less popular.
After week 4, the kid will either have lost interest, or will be sufficently hooked to ingest chemistry directly from the internet
Searching the Internet and ingesting chemicals recommended there? That's exactly the sort of plan "what could possibly go wrong?" was coined for.
There's a huge legal coming over who owns girls.girls.girls.
I was strictly speaking, because pgpool-II's statement replication is neither built-in nor without limitations--compared to the full feature set of PostgreSQL. Another write scaling approach is to use the PL/Proxy language to wrap database access. There's also people doing PostgreSQL sharding in their application layer, connecting to one of multiple databases based on what they need. None of these ideas are popular nor built-in to the database yet though.
The whole "XML in databases!" trend came out of people being frustrated with not being able to stuff arbitrary data into a relational database. This "new" document storage idea is addressing the exact same problem in a similar way, only it's a different schemaless storage scheme/database pair. That's why I was amused by the similarity.
Z39.50 and WAIS were implementing a client/server protocol that wasn't tied to any particular database storage backend. If I were searching for a historical precedent for flexible data transfer mechanisms, that concept surely goes back earlier than Z39.50. I'd expect to find prior art for that broader idea among the earlier 50's and 60's research into data storage.
Hey look, I created an abstract factory that takes a creation behaviour (built from an abstract behaviour) and covered it up in a facade!
You are such a newb; obviously this is useless unless you then wrap the result in an iterator.
Identifying which field is the primary key is not the same as indexing the fields, plural.
JSON is relevant to NoSQL because it gives a good answer to "how do I store more complicated things than key/value lookups?", one that's even possible to decode in a web browser noadays. XML databases gave an answer to "how do I store schemaless data in a relational database?", a similar issue. Both combinations--relational + XML, NoSQL + JSON--end up providing the same basic capabilities.
Sadly, his post will be missed because everyone's too busy talking about how everything can be done just as easily on a $500,000 server farm running Oracle's latest and greatest turd.
Actually, I was going to talk about how PostgreSQL 9.2 (expected in Q3 of this year) will include JSON support. The database also has non-relational key value storage, and that feature is even available in Heroku deployments now.
PostgreSQL also lets you relax ACID for performance when that makes sense, at the transaction level, using synchronous_commit parameter and unlogged tables.
There are two things PostgreSQL doesn't do as well as MongoDB. It won't do simple key/value lookups quite as fast; I normally eliminate that problem by putting a memcached server in at some level. And you can't split writes among multiple nodes easily yet.
It's so cute how NoSQL developers have reinvented the XML database.
Someone already suggested she become a quant.
Yes, no one would suggest ZFS as the filesystem for your phone. You might have to do things like disable checksums if you have an older or otherwise underpowered CPU, and it's tuned by default to use memory quite heavily. That anecdote isn't very relevant for today's desktop or server environments though.