Completely agree. Perhaps the previous guy didn't take the time to inform the management of what was required to do the job properly, or didn't know himself, or was more interested in painting himself as indispensable than doing the right thing. First things first, if this is genuinely a thriving e-commerce company then their website is their number one priority and their fulfilment systems are the number two priority, phones are number 3 with everything else taking a back seat - and they REALLY need to get a second employee. If you are ill, on holiday, or, deity forbid, something happens to you, then they need someone else who can step in. If their infrastructure is as shot as you suspect then you're going to need a second brain to sort it all out and help you implement it.
You must make sure that backups are being taken and are robust. You need a disaster recovery plan. You need both short term and long term plans to scale the infrastructure as the business grows and reactively if there's a sudden growth spurt. You need to know where the next bottleneck in the system is and come up with a plan to fix it. Do you have an adequate handle on monitoring traffic to the site from when they first land through to placing an order? Do management have the stats required to make informed decisions about the business? Management will also need to be aware of when IT will need extra funds as mapped against their own sales growth targets.
Once all of the above is sorted, and decent management allowing (and presuming this isn't something that is already being taken care of), you need to start suggesting to management the skillsets of people and / or contractors and / or agencies that need to be brought in to proactively grow the business. Be it SEO, PPC, UX, new features, etc. whatever it is, you have the opportunity to help the business understand it all and be instrumental in their success.
You missed the parents point about security of the logs. If a hacker gets on a system with a text log it is trivial for them to change that log to cover their tracks. On systems with tamper proof binary logs it is a much much harder thing for them to do, meaning it is more likely that they will leave something in those logs that enables a competent sysadmin to work out what has happened.
So it's one of those deals where it saves the enterprise customers a whole lot of worry, but costs the average desktop user a little bit of hassle if they ever even delve into the logs.
From TFA that 'sudden drop' in CO2 levels equates to 6 - 10 ppm. Given that the current atmospheric concentration is 392 ppm, and in 2009 CO2 levels increased by 2ppm, we're talking about tiny quantities well within the margin of error of the measuring methods used. At worst we're talking about an equivalent to 5 years of increase, based on the 2009 figure, and that was enough to trigger a mini 'ice age'? This is junk science.
Wouldn't we also have seen a big dip around that time in all the CO2 graphs climatologists have been throwing around showing how CO2 has massively increased in the last few decades? I don't remember any such fluctuations specific to that period, so either this new theory is wrong or those graphs (and therefore data in the climate models) have all been wrong.
You think that the money stops with NASA's direct spending? Some goes on people, some goes on raw resources, some goes into the profits of contractors, etc. but all of that money is then spent or invested by those recipients passing it through to new recipients, who then spend it or invest it, etc.
Make an engineer richer and he'll spend his money on commodity goods made by the people who do fit into your "people who are having trouble finding work" category.
The thing is we don't know what technological breakthroughs will be required to get to Mars, especially for it to become routine, nor how those technological advances will impact humanity as a whole. A huge number of everyday items that you currently use are directly traceable to previous human endeavours such as the Apollo program and Concorde.
The advances in medical understanding required to get astronauts to and from Mars could include such wonders as tissue regeneration, stimulation of muscle growth, or stasis, which could have endless benefits for disease and accident victims. Advances in propulsion and heavy lift to orbit (not necessarily chemical rockets) could make space flight routine. Energy storage advances could lead to more practical electric cars.
We just don't know yet - and without the vision required to achieve these lofty goals our technological advances will happen at a vastly reduced rate.
Tony Benn isn't exactly a reliable source. He's very firmly on the left, believing in big state, nationalised industry, high tax, all corporations are bad, etc. all the while living out his hypocritical existence on his multi-million pound estate.
He is right in some aspects though, in that the politicians are just a management team that changes every now and then, but for the wrong reasons. The reality is that the politicians are in sway to big media and the lobbyists that set the news agenda and that the real power, and reason nothing ever seems to change, lies with the civil service. The directives from the top may change but the underlying structures and management, and therefore underlying agenda, within the ever more overtly politicised civil service remain largely unchanged from government to government.
I am unfamiliar with the inner workings of American politics but would be surprised if the overall situation were a world apart, even if the detail may vary.
And the tragic truth - so far at least it has been a nothing announcement. They've stuck the iPad 2 internals in the iPhone 4 case, and called it the iPhone 4S. Whoopdy doo. Oh and they tweaked the camera a bit...
So that's ~£1,500 per TB. Yet you can get a 1TB drive for less than the 100GB SSD... That's a HUGE discrepancy for bulk storage where the speed of retrieving every last byte doesn't matter.
This technology has its place for now and provides a welcome speed boost for those unable or unwilling to invest in a full SSD solution for their bulk storage needs. Going all SSD is the best solution for some people; going all mechanical is best for others; and there's a whole range of people with needs in between each extreme.
No. The problem with caching in RAM is that it is volatile so if the power fails you'll lose the changes. Where this SSD helps is in providing a speed boost over a magnetic hard drive but without the volatility of RAM. The RAM cache will still be used to provide a further speed boost, but when a program issues an fsync to make sure that all the data held in the RAM cache is flushed to a physical disc, it will be the SSD that is picking up the slack.
For a read heavy environment with lots of RAM that is hardly ever switched off then probably not. For more general applications then it should provide a healthy speed boost without the cost of going all SSD.
Hopefully all those manufacturers will be looking at the bullshit lawsuits Apple has been firing around to get Samsungs products blocked from various market and will be wondering if they're next. Maybe then they will all work together to try and get IP law brought up to date into a more sensible form that benefits all, as was originally intended, rather than a select few who game the system.
It's a very worthwhile tradeoff, and something that we rely upon for the majority of our complex projects. Knowing that your data is always integral and internally consistent, enforced by rules in the database itself, is an enabler for rapid development of the various interfaces and processes that interact with that data. Need to use a better tool for the job for one aspect of the system? No worries, interface directly with the same database knowing it won't break anything instead of being limited to accessing your system via a single ORM (or maintaining the configuration of two or more).
INSERT IGNORE etc. are nice to haves but hardly a deal breaker or a hinderance to rapid development when the other database features are taken into account such as performance under concurrent load or the far more intelligent query planner - both features that enable you to stop having to worry about these things in your code.
Don't you think, though, that the people investing $300m in this cable have thought a little bit about their business model and believe it to be sound? Clearly those 6ms are really valuable to some people, and if not high frequency traders then who?
Completely agree. With the decent package managers at our disposal this is also good for the majority of end users - as long as they keep their system up to date. ISO downloads then just become a point in time snapshot of the current repositories.
The LTS releases also just need to pick a point in time, say every two years, and effectively fork at that point. They'll apply security updates and so on, but they just work on that system from there on in. That way the corporates that are writing their own software and don't want to move to continuous releases can rely upon stable versions of libraries etc. by developing against those LTS releases.
Are you _really_ suggesting apple should have the right to all things touch screen and square with rounded edges?
No, and no one else is suggesting this either.
And yet those are the patents that Apple is using to keep Samsung from selling tablets in Germany and Australia, and I believe the ones they're also throwing at HTC. The very system you are defending is the one you now deny.
They also insist on 'teaching' students outdated technologies based on theoretical knowledge rather than any practical understanding of what is required for a job in the real world. I've recently interviewed several graduates who have top notch degrees in CS and who claim to have passed programming courses but don't know the first thing about how to actually solve a programming problem - in pseudo code or one of the languages they proclaim to know.
The main problem they all shared was that not one of them had any interest in programming outside of their course so had not given themselves any practical experience. They turned up for their classes, studied the poor quality material they were spoon fed, got their grades, but then wondered why they didn't just walk straight in to a top flight job. A good programmer is primarily a problem solver as they will adapt to whatever language is required. This is not something that is taught or encouraged in our Universities.
There's also those other human traits of sloth and envy to take into account. If I cannot worker harder to better myself, and if there is no downside to my not working at all, then why would I bother? Once you introduce benefit or disadvantage for how hard you work then you introduce imbalance and jealous envy that some others have something I do not, even if there are logical reasons for that to be the case.
No system can ever be perfect as humans are not universally equal.
The dynamics of this are also different in that a publisher can choose whether to accept or refuse an offer of exclusivity and the competing vendors are welcome to offer more money to the publisher. In this case Microsoft are simply acting as a bully and attempting to leverage their platform to enforce desirable behaviours in publishers wishing to target that platform.
If you want your game to appear on the XBox at some point then you have to follow Microsofts rules governing your game on OTHER platforms! That is anti-competitive and morally wrong.
The problem with the unification of time systems is that 4am may be 4am everywhere, but now you'd need to know if that was the middle of the day in New York or the middle of the night. You still need to know all the time differences to have any meaningful interaction with other people, so the problem is no simpler. If you go on holiday you still need to learn to get up at 4pm instead of 6am, and it won't be as simple as just changing your watch and trying to adjust to the normal localised times you'd do those things.
So it's a whole load of pain changing the system for no gain, or even a step backwards. Woo.
Apple were merely the first smartphone manufacturer to successfully market their devices to the masses and make them cool, same with tablets. They didn't invent the smartphone, not by a long shot, nor did they invent the tablet.
You also make it sound like competition is a bad thing - it categorically is a great thing for everyone except Apple. Even Apple fanbois should be embracing the competition as that has been and will be the driver behind Apple pushing their own products forward. Look at how OS X has stagnated, with even Lion failing to be a major step forward (I'm using it daily, I'm no more productive than with Leopard let alone Snow Leopard, and has a couple of nice new additions but it's also been a little unstable). This is because Apple aren't really having to compete in that market any more. Microsoft have stagnated as well and Apple see the future as being iOS not OS X. Doesn't matter one jot to them that they have a user base who would like to see some proper innovation and advancement, they are focusing their efforts on what they see as a bigger more important user base.
Lack of competition for iOS would lead to the same thing. Apple would have their monopoly and would be looking to muscle in on another market diverting all their resources there.
Do you honestly think that if you put the two side by side that the average consumer would be unable to see the difference? Apple have deliberately misrepresented their case here to manipulate the courts into giving them their injunction. They have adjusted the size, bezel colour and branding of their competitors product to produce an image allowing them to claim it's practically identical. That in and of itself is illegal as it is falsifying evidence amongst other offenses.
The problem isn't with the public sharing information, it's the public sharing mis-information. I know a couple of hypochondriacs and they come up with all kinds of crazy theories as to what is causing their latest ailment, and yet the doctors never find anything wrong with them and the changes they make to their diet / lifestyle / medicine / etc. never seems to make a blind bit of difference to their view as to whether or not they're ill in some way.
These types of people are far far more likely to kick up a fuss on a public web page if given the opportunity to than those of us who generally have a positive outlook on the few medical treatments we have received are likely to post something positive. Look at the fuss over MMR for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely agree. Perhaps the previous guy didn't take the time to inform the management of what was required to do the job properly, or didn't know himself, or was more interested in painting himself as indispensable than doing the right thing. First things first, if this is genuinely a thriving e-commerce company then their website is their number one priority and their fulfilment systems are the number two priority, phones are number 3 with everything else taking a back seat - and they REALLY need to get a second employee. If you are ill, on holiday, or, deity forbid, something happens to you, then they need someone else who can step in. If their infrastructure is as shot as you suspect then you're going to need a second brain to sort it all out and help you implement it.
You must make sure that backups are being taken and are robust. You need a disaster recovery plan. You need both short term and long term plans to scale the infrastructure as the business grows and reactively if there's a sudden growth spurt. You need to know where the next bottleneck in the system is and come up with a plan to fix it. Do you have an adequate handle on monitoring traffic to the site from when they first land through to placing an order? Do management have the stats required to make informed decisions about the business? Management will also need to be aware of when IT will need extra funds as mapped against their own sales growth targets.
Once all of the above is sorted, and decent management allowing (and presuming this isn't something that is already being taken care of), you need to start suggesting to management the skillsets of people and / or contractors and / or agencies that need to be brought in to proactively grow the business. Be it SEO, PPC, UX, new features, etc. whatever it is, you have the opportunity to help the business understand it all and be instrumental in their success.
You missed the parents point about security of the logs. If a hacker gets on a system with a text log it is trivial for them to change that log to cover their tracks. On systems with tamper proof binary logs it is a much much harder thing for them to do, meaning it is more likely that they will leave something in those logs that enables a competent sysadmin to work out what has happened.
So it's one of those deals where it saves the enterprise customers a whole lot of worry, but costs the average desktop user a little bit of hassle if they ever even delve into the logs.
It's also out of date as Apple are no longer the number one manufacturer of smart phones, that would be Samsung.
From TFA that 'sudden drop' in CO2 levels equates to 6 - 10 ppm. Given that the current atmospheric concentration is 392 ppm, and in 2009 CO2 levels increased by 2ppm, we're talking about tiny quantities well within the margin of error of the measuring methods used. At worst we're talking about an equivalent to 5 years of increase, based on the 2009 figure, and that was enough to trigger a mini 'ice age'? This is junk science.
Errr that would increase CO2, not reduce it as the article is claiming happened.
Wouldn't we also have seen a big dip around that time in all the CO2 graphs climatologists have been throwing around showing how CO2 has massively increased in the last few decades? I don't remember any such fluctuations specific to that period, so either this new theory is wrong or those graphs (and therefore data in the climate models) have all been wrong.
You think that the money stops with NASA's direct spending? Some goes on people, some goes on raw resources, some goes into the profits of contractors, etc. but all of that money is then spent or invested by those recipients passing it through to new recipients, who then spend it or invest it, etc.
Make an engineer richer and he'll spend his money on commodity goods made by the people who do fit into your "people who are having trouble finding work" category.
The thing is we don't know what technological breakthroughs will be required to get to Mars, especially for it to become routine, nor how those technological advances will impact humanity as a whole. A huge number of everyday items that you currently use are directly traceable to previous human endeavours such as the Apollo program and Concorde.
The advances in medical understanding required to get astronauts to and from Mars could include such wonders as tissue regeneration, stimulation of muscle growth, or stasis, which could have endless benefits for disease and accident victims. Advances in propulsion and heavy lift to orbit (not necessarily chemical rockets) could make space flight routine. Energy storage advances could lead to more practical electric cars.
We just don't know yet - and without the vision required to achieve these lofty goals our technological advances will happen at a vastly reduced rate.
Tony Benn isn't exactly a reliable source. He's very firmly on the left, believing in big state, nationalised industry, high tax, all corporations are bad, etc. all the while living out his hypocritical existence on his multi-million pound estate.
He is right in some aspects though, in that the politicians are just a management team that changes every now and then, but for the wrong reasons. The reality is that the politicians are in sway to big media and the lobbyists that set the news agenda and that the real power, and reason nothing ever seems to change, lies with the civil service. The directives from the top may change but the underlying structures and management, and therefore underlying agenda, within the ever more overtly politicised civil service remain largely unchanged from government to government.
I am unfamiliar with the inner workings of American politics but would be surprised if the overall situation were a world apart, even if the detail may vary.
And the tragic truth - so far at least it has been a nothing announcement. They've stuck the iPad 2 internals in the iPhone 4 case, and called it the iPhone 4S. Whoopdy doo. Oh and they tweaked the camera a bit...
So that's ~£1,500 per TB. Yet you can get a 1TB drive for less than the 100GB SSD... That's a HUGE discrepancy for bulk storage where the speed of retrieving every last byte doesn't matter.
This technology has its place for now and provides a welcome speed boost for those unable or unwilling to invest in a full SSD solution for their bulk storage needs. Going all SSD is the best solution for some people; going all mechanical is best for others; and there's a whole range of people with needs in between each extreme.
No. The problem with caching in RAM is that it is volatile so if the power fails you'll lose the changes. Where this SSD helps is in providing a speed boost over a magnetic hard drive but without the volatility of RAM. The RAM cache will still be used to provide a further speed boost, but when a program issues an fsync to make sure that all the data held in the RAM cache is flushed to a physical disc, it will be the SSD that is picking up the slack.
For a read heavy environment with lots of RAM that is hardly ever switched off then probably not. For more general applications then it should provide a healthy speed boost without the cost of going all SSD.
Hopefully all those manufacturers will be looking at the bullshit lawsuits Apple has been firing around to get Samsungs products blocked from various market and will be wondering if they're next. Maybe then they will all work together to try and get IP law brought up to date into a more sensible form that benefits all, as was originally intended, rather than a select few who game the system.
It's a very worthwhile tradeoff, and something that we rely upon for the majority of our complex projects. Knowing that your data is always integral and internally consistent, enforced by rules in the database itself, is an enabler for rapid development of the various interfaces and processes that interact with that data. Need to use a better tool for the job for one aspect of the system? No worries, interface directly with the same database knowing it won't break anything instead of being limited to accessing your system via a single ORM (or maintaining the configuration of two or more).
INSERT IGNORE etc. are nice to haves but hardly a deal breaker or a hinderance to rapid development when the other database features are taken into account such as performance under concurrent load or the far more intelligent query planner - both features that enable you to stop having to worry about these things in your code.
Don't you think, though, that the people investing $300m in this cable have thought a little bit about their business model and believe it to be sound? Clearly those 6ms are really valuable to some people, and if not high frequency traders then who?
Completely agree. With the decent package managers at our disposal this is also good for the majority of end users - as long as they keep their system up to date. ISO downloads then just become a point in time snapshot of the current repositories.
The LTS releases also just need to pick a point in time, say every two years, and effectively fork at that point. They'll apply security updates and so on, but they just work on that system from there on in. That way the corporates that are writing their own software and don't want to move to continuous releases can rely upon stable versions of libraries etc. by developing against those LTS releases.
Are you _really_ suggesting apple should have the right to all things touch screen and square with rounded edges?
No, and no one else is suggesting this either.
And yet those are the patents that Apple is using to keep Samsung from selling tablets in Germany and Australia, and I believe the ones they're also throwing at HTC. The very system you are defending is the one you now deny.
They also insist on 'teaching' students outdated technologies based on theoretical knowledge rather than any practical understanding of what is required for a job in the real world. I've recently interviewed several graduates who have top notch degrees in CS and who claim to have passed programming courses but don't know the first thing about how to actually solve a programming problem - in pseudo code or one of the languages they proclaim to know.
The main problem they all shared was that not one of them had any interest in programming outside of their course so had not given themselves any practical experience. They turned up for their classes, studied the poor quality material they were spoon fed, got their grades, but then wondered why they didn't just walk straight in to a top flight job. A good programmer is primarily a problem solver as they will adapt to whatever language is required. This is not something that is taught or encouraged in our Universities.
There's also those other human traits of sloth and envy to take into account. If I cannot worker harder to better myself, and if there is no downside to my not working at all, then why would I bother? Once you introduce benefit or disadvantage for how hard you work then you introduce imbalance and jealous envy that some others have something I do not, even if there are logical reasons for that to be the case.
No system can ever be perfect as humans are not universally equal.
The dynamics of this are also different in that a publisher can choose whether to accept or refuse an offer of exclusivity and the competing vendors are welcome to offer more money to the publisher. In this case Microsoft are simply acting as a bully and attempting to leverage their platform to enforce desirable behaviours in publishers wishing to target that platform.
If you want your game to appear on the XBox at some point then you have to follow Microsofts rules governing your game on OTHER platforms! That is anti-competitive and morally wrong.
Actually maybe the boyfriend is long distance for a reason and we shouldn't be looking for the pics!
The problem with the unification of time systems is that 4am may be 4am everywhere, but now you'd need to know if that was the middle of the day in New York or the middle of the night. You still need to know all the time differences to have any meaningful interaction with other people, so the problem is no simpler. If you go on holiday you still need to learn to get up at 4pm instead of 6am, and it won't be as simple as just changing your watch and trying to adjust to the normal localised times you'd do those things.
So it's a whole load of pain changing the system for no gain, or even a step backwards. Woo.
Apple were merely the first smartphone manufacturer to successfully market their devices to the masses and make them cool, same with tablets. They didn't invent the smartphone, not by a long shot, nor did they invent the tablet.
You also make it sound like competition is a bad thing - it categorically is a great thing for everyone except Apple. Even Apple fanbois should be embracing the competition as that has been and will be the driver behind Apple pushing their own products forward. Look at how OS X has stagnated, with even Lion failing to be a major step forward (I'm using it daily, I'm no more productive than with Leopard let alone Snow Leopard, and has a couple of nice new additions but it's also been a little unstable). This is because Apple aren't really having to compete in that market any more. Microsoft have stagnated as well and Apple see the future as being iOS not OS X. Doesn't matter one jot to them that they have a user base who would like to see some proper innovation and advancement, they are focusing their efforts on what they see as a bigger more important user base.
Lack of competition for iOS would lead to the same thing. Apple would have their monopoly and would be looking to muscle in on another market diverting all their resources there.
Do you honestly think that if you put the two side by side that the average consumer would be unable to see the difference? Apple have deliberately misrepresented their case here to manipulate the courts into giving them their injunction. They have adjusted the size, bezel colour and branding of their competitors product to produce an image allowing them to claim it's practically identical. That in and of itself is illegal as it is falsifying evidence amongst other offenses.
The problem isn't with the public sharing information, it's the public sharing mis-information. I know a couple of hypochondriacs and they come up with all kinds of crazy theories as to what is causing their latest ailment, and yet the doctors never find anything wrong with them and the changes they make to their diet / lifestyle / medicine / etc. never seems to make a blind bit of difference to their view as to whether or not they're ill in some way.
These types of people are far far more likely to kick up a fuss on a public web page if given the opportunity to than those of us who generally have a positive outlook on the few medical treatments we have received are likely to post something positive. Look at the fuss over MMR for example.