Make sure you're ready for some time in jail for blackmail, too, if you follow that route. The only thing worse than reporting this sort of data the nice way is to report it in a way that's threatening.
You say that as if those are worthless things. Knowing how to get along with people and avoid trouble with authority are important real-world skills too.
Anyway, this kid needs less reading and more doing. A useful alternate question is how you fit Gabriel into the less academic work that's already there. There's no useful math/science classes left for the kid, but there are electives that should keep him busy learning useful things while socializing too. Forget about music theory; learn how to play a few instruments in a regular music class instead. At 13, learning guitar to get laid would be a good choice too. Similarly, stop researching physics and use the electronics/shop classes to get practice building better stuff. Unless his parents have a giant shop in the house, the facilities at the school make a useful lab for a budding inventor like this kid.
I found "electives" like these were much more open to having a rouge genius wandering around doing their own thing than the normal classes too. My electronics teacher thought it was great when I burned through (pun intended) all the simple soldering projects included in the main track, and moved on to sitting in the back building a robot the rest of the year instead.
Please read the book, "Why Are Artists Poor" from Amazon.
Or you could be like most people and download the torrent and get a whole pile of books from that publisher too.
I wrote a book about using open-source software last year. It's complicated enough reading that a decent number of people prefer a paper copy. And the Kindle format is worthwhile for people with one of those readers to by. But by far the most popular format is "illegal PDF e-book", even though it only costs $11, worst case (when no promotions are active) for a legal one.
PSN was never secure. It just wasn't obvious yet where the insecure pieces were at earlier. Have you considered that the idiot executives who said the platform was safe at any level were the real problem here? They should have been all kinds of nervous about the sheer number of ways their data was insufficiently secure. Instead they were arrogant and decided to challenge people with real hacking stills to come rumble with them. There was no question who is going to get the beatdown when it's pirates vs. corporate types. It's not even fair.
There are already far too many lawyers sucking overhead out of software development companies. Increasing liability for code will drive up how much it costs; software is only cheap because it's relatively low risk to release.
I make my living working on open-source projects. Given how many imperfect components I work with, in a world with liability issues my full time job would become contract paranoia instead. It's already extremely dangerous to try and make a living from open-source work due to the huge patent minefields you're exposed to. If something like this happened, the only companies who would still be able to afford the risk of coding would be corporations with large legal departments. I'd have to move to a country that doesn't have these laws instead, which is exactly where all the software jobs will migrate to (even faster than they are already migrating now).
"shockingly high licensing fees Microsoft was demanding" and "exorbitant per device royalty" are right from the filed Barnes & Noble complaint response. The wording is somewhat inflammatory, but those are exactly the terms the used when responding to the court.
This isn't an optimization problem. As noted elsewhere in the comments here, Oracle handles string nulls oddly. Because of that, joins happen differently against a null value vs. an empty string. That will produce different query results in Oracle vs. PostgreSQL. It's one of those really annoying conversion quirks, either going to Oracle or escaping from it.
It's also part of the Oracle lock-in. Try to move off Oracle, discover queries that vary depending on null behavior (such as OUTER JOIN) don't do quite the same thing anymore. Auditing for queries that misbehave due to Oracle's sloppiness here is a giant headache when moving to PostgreSQL from it.
PostgreSQL changes are driven by what people want badly enough that they are willing to invest resources--development manpower, time, etc.--into that change. So your suggestion that performance is more important than these features can't be true. If performance were really the driver for most people, there would be more performance changes instead of all these features contributed. Extending PostgreSQL and getting the code committed is a lot of work to do right. There's very few people developing features here for fun; most of the new features are developed to solve very real business needs. PostgreSQL 9.2 looks like it will have a number of performance improvements however, the pendulum seems to have swung back to where those are more needed again. (The last release to focus mainly on performance was 8.3)
Parallel query and multi-node operation would all be nice. Progress continues toward those goals, while still shipping a new, stable version each year.
The fact that the WAL segments are fixed at 16MB doesn't have the impact you're describing anymore. The streaming replication introduced last year in PostgreSQL 9.0 allowed copying partial WAL files over. And there is no wasted space just because a checkpoint ran when only part of a WAL file was used; checkpoints don't move to another WAL file. If you turn on the archive_timeout feature, that has the problem you describe. But that's been considered obsolete by most people, now that the 9.0 streaming feature is available.
It's not trivial to figure out, but we've been deploying PostgreSQL 9.0 without the problem you describe (must do a fresh dump from the master) for a while now. The repmgr software we've released takes care of all the promotion trivia. Worst-case, unusual situations can require you use a tool like rsync to make an out of date standby node into a copy of the new master. That's not the expected case though.
That will be ready any day now. Packages for Ubuntu are already available. Debian packages for pre-release versions of PostgreSQL 9.1 have been around for some time already.
There's a sunk cost fallacy here. I regularly convert companies from Oracle to PostgreSQL, financing the project out of savings in the recurring annual maintenance/support costs that Oracle applies. Just because you've already spent a lot of money on a commercial database, that doesn't mean you can't cost justify it based on the recurring overhead.
Lots of companies are converting from Oracle Spatial to PostgreSQL plus PostGIS because it's faster and has better compliance to GIS standards. The text of the talk isn't available, but the FAA Airports GIS and PostgreSQL presentation was a typical report I was in the audience for. The FAA's first conversion happened very quickly: just export their data in a standard format, import into PostgreSQL, and tweak some queries. The result worked so much better that they've standardized on PostgreSQL for spatial applications at the FAA now. Internal projects needing a spatial database have to justify why they want the budget for Oracle Spatial, and it's default deny unless you have a really good reason.
The addition of synchronous replication to 9.1 has made it a pretty even match for Oracle's Data Guard now. The main bonus is that you can control the integrity level you want at the transaction level. So you can have a database with a mix of important data (only considered safe when on two nodes) and fast, best attempt eventual consistency data, all in one place. Nothing else can replace Oracle at the top end while still having a lean enough mode to be competitive with NoSQL database when integrity isn't the top priority.
We convert Oracle installs to PostgreSQL all the time at my day job. The main obstacles I keep seeing that don't have simple solutions are 1) using a lot of PL/SQL, 2) differences in query handling, such as OUTER JOIN behavior or reliance on optimizer hints, and 3) can't limit the resources used by individual users easily in PostgreSQL yet. I actually have a design outline for how to solve (3)...would only cost a fraction of a typical Oracle license to sponsor that feature. EnterpriseDB's version of Oracle comes with PL/SQL compatibility, but only in a commercial product that lags behind the open-source releases--and buying from them just switches which vendor you're locked into.
The reason piracy is the rule here is that it's almost impossible for a single home user to acquire the rights to use these ROMs. There are a few game vendors who have packaged up their ROM files to sell in that form. But those aren't normally aimed at an individual to buy; they're only packaged as a set of raw ROM files ffor resale as part of something else.
If you buy a fully legitimate arcade console with licensed games, what they will typically do is negotiate licenses to several sets of these packaged games from multiple manufacturers. For example, X-Arcade Machine includes 205 licensed games, for the most part collections such as Namco Muesum and Midway Arcade Treasure's Titles where the manufacturer has gone to the trouble of packaging the game ROMs for distribution--and therefore licensing. (Note that the quality of the joystick and buttons used in the X-Arcade hardware is considered low compared to what most DIY consoles aim for; don't consider the above a recommendation for buying one of them, they're just a good example here)
Packages such as Namco Muesum are available to buy on a wide variety of platforms. When you buy those, you're not directly given the ROMs though; you just get the right to play them as they are packaged for that platform. What I do to try and keep myself morally clean here is purchase any such collection that's available for the games I play on MAME.
I buy these collections, I bought all of the games I liked from StarROMs when they were available. But the ROMs I play on MAME, those are coming from the bootleg distributions; like a lot of things, the pirates provide the easiest to use packaging of the software. Until companies like Namco and Atari start selling ROM licenses directly, I don't know that it's possible to be legally clean here, unless you buy one of the packaged cabinets from a manufacturer who is big enough to have negotiated a resale license.
Right; the next jump from "the Mac Mini fans are too loud" doesn't have to be fanless, which is particularly troublesome in an emulator situation where the CPU will always be running. The key to low noise fans is to get big ones that move air even at lower speeds, which right now means 120mm. Using fans that are too small, in order to make the case really tiny, is what the Mac Mini does wrong for this application. A case like the Sugo SG05-B will give you those in a reasonable form factor. It won't be tiny, but there's a fundamental trade-off here: you can either make your fans cool well, be small, or be quiet--never all three at once. I have done here on past emulator boxes is to use a case with a larger fan like that, combined with one of the Zotac Mini ITX boards using an Intel Atom processor.
Your use of "it", such as "if it were C", reads like you're talking about PostgreSQL--when apparently the "it" you actually mean is the person's experience.
There's no formal bug tracker for PostgreSQL. Following the mailing list traffic about it on pgsql-bugs is the only way to know what happened right now. It's hard to justify the overhead of a better bug tracking system when the project has a zero tolerance policy for bugs, meaning there's very few of them open at any time. It has been looked at and that investigation isn't closed; just waiting for resources.
Your message is a confusing. PostgreSQL is written in C, with a few Perl scripts for building the code and some other scripting language bits. Were you trying to say only writing C++ code is worthwhile?
I work on PostgreSQL projects and hacking the source code for a living. The development community has extremely high standards, but there is a pretty formalized process to bring new people up to speed. The recommended way to start is doing patch review. Reading a patch that's similar to what you're interested in, and experimenting with it, teaches more of the real-world skills needed to work productively on an open-source project than writing new code does. Testing, code reading, and writing code that's easy to merge are the things new people don't know how to do, things that are critical to working on a real distributed development project. I even went to the trouble recently of writing an entire article on patch cleanup due to how often the project was running into issues there from new contributions; that's a very underappreciated skill.
Sure; Newegg. Go to the category of component you want, drill down a bit to get the basic thing you want, then do "Sort by: Best Rating". Ignore things that haven't been rated very often. You just found the good manufacturers.
I used to spend a lot more time reading review sites. Now I start with Newegg, narrow the field to only matching products that are well rated by buyers, and then I dig into the reviews of just those to check on performance/features. Big time savings, and I avoid almost all of the crap. The great thing about this approach is that it automatically adjusts in close to real-time to product quality as it's being delivered to people, which is often quite different than what review publications see.
Microsoft had already lost $4B on the XBox by 2005, and lost another $1B over the poor quality of the XBox 360 ('red ring of death' etc.) just in 2007. Checkout the Xbox 360 wiki page. They may never recoup that investment. Suggesting HP should follow their example is not such a great idea.
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Make sure you're ready for some time in jail for blackmail, too, if you follow that route. The only thing worse than reporting this sort of data the nice way is to report it in a way that's threatening.
You say that as if those are worthless things. Knowing how to get along with people and avoid trouble with authority are important real-world skills too.
Anyway, this kid needs less reading and more doing. A useful alternate question is how you fit Gabriel into the less academic work that's already there. There's no useful math/science classes left for the kid, but there are electives that should keep him busy learning useful things while socializing too. Forget about music theory; learn how to play a few instruments in a regular music class instead. At 13, learning guitar to get laid would be a good choice too. Similarly, stop researching physics and use the electronics/shop classes to get practice building better stuff. Unless his parents have a giant shop in the house, the facilities at the school make a useful lab for a budding inventor like this kid.
I found "electives" like these were much more open to having a rouge genius wandering around doing their own thing than the normal classes too. My electronics teacher thought it was great when I burned through (pun intended) all the simple soldering projects included in the main track, and moved on to sitting in the back building a robot the rest of the year instead.
Please read the book, "Why Are Artists Poor" from Amazon.
Or you could be like most people and download the torrent and get a whole pile of books from that publisher too.
I wrote a book about using open-source software last year. It's complicated enough reading that a decent number of people prefer a paper copy. And the Kindle format is worthwhile for people with one of those readers to by. But by far the most popular format is "illegal PDF e-book", even though it only costs $11, worst case (when no promotions are active) for a legal one.
PSN was never secure. It just wasn't obvious yet where the insecure pieces were at earlier. Have you considered that the idiot executives who said the platform was safe at any level were the real problem here? They should have been all kinds of nervous about the sheer number of ways their data was insufficiently secure. Instead they were arrogant and decided to challenge people with real hacking stills to come rumble with them. There was no question who is going to get the beatdown when it's pirates vs. corporate types. It's not even fair.
There are already far too many lawyers sucking overhead out of software development companies. Increasing liability for code will drive up how much it costs; software is only cheap because it's relatively low risk to release.
I make my living working on open-source projects. Given how many imperfect components I work with, in a world with liability issues my full time job would become contract paranoia instead. It's already extremely dangerous to try and make a living from open-source work due to the huge patent minefields you're exposed to. If something like this happened, the only companies who would still be able to afford the risk of coding would be corporations with large legal departments. I'd have to move to a country that doesn't have these laws instead, which is exactly where all the software jobs will migrate to (even faster than they are already migrating now).
"shockingly high licensing fees Microsoft was demanding" and "exorbitant per device royalty" are right from the filed Barnes & Noble complaint response. The wording is somewhat inflammatory, but those are exactly the terms the used when responding to the court.
This isn't an optimization problem. As noted elsewhere in the comments here, Oracle handles string nulls oddly. Because of that, joins happen differently against a null value vs. an empty string. That will produce different query results in Oracle vs. PostgreSQL. It's one of those really annoying conversion quirks, either going to Oracle or escaping from it.
It's also part of the Oracle lock-in. Try to move off Oracle, discover queries that vary depending on null behavior (such as OUTER JOIN) don't do quite the same thing anymore. Auditing for queries that misbehave due to Oracle's sloppiness here is a giant headache when moving to PostgreSQL from it.
PostgreSQL changes are driven by what people want badly enough that they are willing to invest resources--development manpower, time, etc.--into that change. So your suggestion that performance is more important than these features can't be true. If performance were really the driver for most people, there would be more performance changes instead of all these features contributed. Extending PostgreSQL and getting the code committed is a lot of work to do right. There's very few people developing features here for fun; most of the new features are developed to solve very real business needs. PostgreSQL 9.2 looks like it will have a number of performance improvements however, the pendulum seems to have swung back to where those are more needed again. (The last release to focus mainly on performance was 8.3)
Parallel query and multi-node operation would all be nice. Progress continues toward those goals, while still shipping a new, stable version each year.
The fact that the WAL segments are fixed at 16MB doesn't have the impact you're describing anymore. The streaming replication introduced last year in PostgreSQL 9.0 allowed copying partial WAL files over. And there is no wasted space just because a checkpoint ran when only part of a WAL file was used; checkpoints don't move to another WAL file. If you turn on the archive_timeout feature, that has the problem you describe. But that's been considered obsolete by most people, now that the 9.0 streaming feature is available.
It's not trivial to figure out, but we've been deploying PostgreSQL 9.0 without the problem you describe (must do a fresh dump from the master) for a while now. The repmgr software we've released takes care of all the promotion trivia. Worst-case, unusual situations can require you use a tool like rsync to make an out of date standby node into a copy of the new master. That's not the expected case though.
That will be ready any day now. Packages for Ubuntu are already available. Debian packages for pre-release versions of PostgreSQL 9.1 have been around for some time already.
There's a sunk cost fallacy here. I regularly convert companies from Oracle to PostgreSQL, financing the project out of savings in the recurring annual maintenance/support costs that Oracle applies. Just because you've already spent a lot of money on a commercial database, that doesn't mean you can't cost justify it based on the recurring overhead.
Lots of companies are converting from Oracle Spatial to PostgreSQL plus PostGIS because it's faster and has better compliance to GIS standards. The text of the talk isn't available, but the FAA Airports GIS and PostgreSQL presentation was a typical report I was in the audience for. The FAA's first conversion happened very quickly: just export their data in a standard format, import into PostgreSQL, and tweak some queries. The result worked so much better that they've standardized on PostgreSQL for spatial applications at the FAA now. Internal projects needing a spatial database have to justify why they want the budget for Oracle Spatial, and it's default deny unless you have a really good reason.
The addition of synchronous replication to 9.1 has made it a pretty even match for Oracle's Data Guard now. The main bonus is that you can control the integrity level you want at the transaction level. So you can have a database with a mix of important data (only considered safe when on two nodes) and fast, best attempt eventual consistency data, all in one place. Nothing else can replace Oracle at the top end while still having a lean enough mode to be competitive with NoSQL database when integrity isn't the top priority.
We convert Oracle installs to PostgreSQL all the time at my day job. The main obstacles I keep seeing that don't have simple solutions are 1) using a lot of PL/SQL, 2) differences in query handling, such as OUTER JOIN behavior or reliance on optimizer hints, and 3) can't limit the resources used by individual users easily in PostgreSQL yet. I actually have a design outline for how to solve (3)...would only cost a fraction of a typical Oracle license to sponsor that feature. EnterpriseDB's version of Oracle comes with PL/SQL compatibility, but only in a commercial product that lags behind the open-source releases--and buying from them just switches which vendor you're locked into.
The reason piracy is the rule here is that it's almost impossible for a single home user to acquire the rights to use these ROMs. There are a few game vendors who have packaged up their ROM files to sell in that form. But those aren't normally aimed at an individual to buy; they're only packaged as a set of raw ROM files ffor resale as part of something else.
If you buy a fully legitimate arcade console with licensed games, what they will typically do is negotiate licenses to several sets of these packaged games from multiple manufacturers. For example, X-Arcade Machine includes 205 licensed games, for the most part collections such as Namco Muesum and Midway Arcade Treasure's Titles where the manufacturer has gone to the trouble of packaging the game ROMs for distribution--and therefore licensing. (Note that the quality of the joystick and buttons used in the X-Arcade hardware is considered low compared to what most DIY consoles aim for; don't consider the above a recommendation for buying one of them, they're just a good example here)
Packages such as Namco Muesum are available to buy on a wide variety of platforms. When you buy those, you're not directly given the ROMs though; you just get the right to play them as they are packaged for that platform. What I do to try and keep myself morally clean here is purchase any such collection that's available for the games I play on MAME.
I buy these collections, I bought all of the games I liked from StarROMs when they were available. But the ROMs I play on MAME, those are coming from the bootleg distributions; like a lot of things, the pirates provide the easiest to use packaging of the software. Until companies like Namco and Atari start selling ROM licenses directly, I don't know that it's possible to be legally clean here, unless you buy one of the packaged cabinets from a manufacturer who is big enough to have negotiated a resale license.
Right; the next jump from "the Mac Mini fans are too loud" doesn't have to be fanless, which is particularly troublesome in an emulator situation where the CPU will always be running. The key to low noise fans is to get big ones that move air even at lower speeds, which right now means 120mm. Using fans that are too small, in order to make the case really tiny, is what the Mac Mini does wrong for this application. A case like the Sugo SG05-B will give you those in a reasonable form factor. It won't be tiny, but there's a fundamental trade-off here: you can either make your fans cool well, be small, or be quiet--never all three at once. I have done here on past emulator boxes is to use a case with a larger fan like that, combined with one of the Zotac Mini ITX boards using an Intel Atom processor.
Your use of "it", such as "if it were C", reads like you're talking about PostgreSQL--when apparently the "it" you actually mean is the person's experience.
There's no formal bug tracker for PostgreSQL. Following the mailing list traffic about it on pgsql-bugs is the only way to know what happened right now. It's hard to justify the overhead of a better bug tracking system when the project has a zero tolerance policy for bugs, meaning there's very few of them open at any time. It has been looked at and that investigation isn't closed; just waiting for resources.
Your message is a confusing. PostgreSQL is written in C, with a few Perl scripts for building the code and some other scripting language bits. Were you trying to say only writing C++ code is worthwhile?
I work on PostgreSQL projects and hacking the source code for a living. The development community has extremely high standards, but there is a pretty formalized process to bring new people up to speed. The recommended way to start is doing patch review. Reading a patch that's similar to what you're interested in, and experimenting with it, teaches more of the real-world skills needed to work productively on an open-source project than writing new code does. Testing, code reading, and writing code that's easy to merge are the things new people don't know how to do, things that are critical to working on a real distributed development project. I even went to the trouble recently of writing an entire article on patch cleanup due to how often the project was running into issues there from new contributions; that's a very underappreciated skill.
While a solicited one will cost you extra.
I hate it when I end up with bugs in my PB&J
Sure; Newegg. Go to the category of component you want, drill down a bit to get the basic thing you want, then do "Sort by: Best Rating". Ignore things that haven't been rated very often. You just found the good manufacturers.
I used to spend a lot more time reading review sites. Now I start with Newegg, narrow the field to only matching products that are well rated by buyers, and then I dig into the reviews of just those to check on performance/features. Big time savings, and I avoid almost all of the crap. The great thing about this approach is that it automatically adjusts in close to real-time to product quality as it's being delivered to people, which is often quite different than what review publications see.
And the phone says, "I'm fine now, I just got held up by the corner before".
And a two button mouse!
It makes me wonder just how many drunken clumsy incompetent idiots work in the iPhone department at Apple.
They're just trying to understand their customers by hiring them.
Smacking hookers to get your money back!
Microsoft had already lost $4B on the XBox by 2005, and lost another $1B over the poor quality of the XBox 360 ('red ring of death' etc.) just in 2007. Checkout the Xbox 360 wiki page. They may never recoup that investment. Suggesting HP should follow their example is not such a great idea.