Well, it looks like the RAW processing was both slow and gave unacceptably poor results, the program was buggy and at least one review called it 'unusable in its current form.'
Sure, Oracle Enterprise has a $40k per CPU listing price, but let's be realistic. NOBODY pays $40k a CPU and maintenance and services. Not that I'm defending Oracle or their draconian pricing model, but in the end, Oracle can provide close to turn-key solutions when it comes to providing the product, escalating problems to engineering, custom solutions, consulting, deployment, implementation, long-term support. Combine that with Oracle's impressive feature list and the fact that most of the money that a company will spend on their database IT will NOT be DBMS licensing fees and you can see why upper management will spend thousands of dollars on a feature set that might very well be served by an open-source solution.
I am sure that there are many consulting firms that can mimick this kind of turn-key solution using PostgreSQL, but I'm not sure that they are as established--that is, give the CEO of XYZ company the warm & fuzzy that they require when they're about to undertake a multi-million dollar project whose backbone has to be a rock-solid DBMS.
It would be fabulous if Vault 10 IT consulting firms could provide this level of service using open source but that's just not the case Right Now(tm).
The truth is that company loyalty shouldn't be expected anymore; the people that extoll their adoration your work, dilligence and effectiveness are the very same ones that will let you go. You leave a job when the job doesn't satisfy your own personal balance of perks and financial compensation. This may sound unreasonably cynical, and certainly, things are seldom black & white, but alas, staying somewhere because of some quaint, Pleasantville-era work ethic has a much more negative net effect on your life than simply quitting and forging ahead.
When do you quit? As many here have noted, when that first round of layoffs is announced, when the perks and benefits start being trimmed, when it is painfully clear that the environment in which you work is more of a pean to mediocrity than a medium for productivity. I know, I know. I've just effectively nixed most companies (even some successful ones,) but the truth is that in the post-internet-resume world, IT workers are commodities (whether here or in India) and workplace egotism in a necessary evil.
We are all mercenaries. Don't do pensions, don't recite the latest company mantra, don't put up with abusive bosses, deadwood or pervasive mediocrity and don't bet on the come. Get your money when you can, stash it away (for you never know if you'll see it again) and retire on your terms.
8. I also forgot to mention the Almost a Physics PhD crowd that will go into a torturing pedantic argument over relativity, orbital mechanics and specific impulse. This will inevitably lead into a whole sub-thread about the viability of John Carmack as an aerospace engineer and Burt Rutan's virility.
Let's break down the characters that this post will attract:
1. We'll have the Heinlein / Asimov geeks that will start extolling the virtues of colonization. Sometimes these chaps will actually try to pitch the idea of interstellar mining for ores, they'll start talking about beanstalks / space elevators, nanotubes and perhaps a Rama reference or two. I won't even comment on that.
2. Then the cynics will start their usual diatribe about the pointless expenditure of money and resources on a frivolous goal and/or ideal of human space travel.
3. The above will be quickly followed by the NASA groupies that will then point out every single invention that is ever so faintly and indirectly a consequence of some NASA 1960s research.
4. The NASA geeks will then be supported by the Altruists, who will wax philosophical about the triumph of the human spirit and the ennobling effects of exploration and conquest.
5. Finally, we'll have an assorted collection of people who didn't RTFA and who won't but yet take a generous amount of time to argue about the merits of said article and the implications of the arguments brought forth my all of the above.
Come on! This was the guy that in years past thought that
a) Microsoft would ship a hard drive full of MS Software (you have to go waaaaay back, when PCMag was still a thick magazine) b) Email would become as slow as snail-mail c) That the Internet would die a fiery death at least a half-dozen times
His wisdom is peerless and his insights bordering on omiscient.
Commercial quantities of hydrogen are not made by 'splitting up' water, since it is much too slow a process (and energy-consuming) but rather decomposing methane.
Moreover, any process to change XXXXXX into Liquid Hydrogen uses energy. How will you produce such energy? Even if you use a non-oil-based energy source, at some point in the manufacturing process, oil will be involved. Whether it was materials, production, whatever.
I don't mean to sound trollish, and I ask these questions sincerely, but how is this any different from the Lotus Notes days of group messaging? Actually, how is this any different from being a slight nip-and-tuck from a messageboard?
Maybe I'm missing the point, but any script-kiddie that can tweak one of the millions of forum / messageboard / webmail scripts out there would be able to crank this out in a day.
Maxim (Stuff to) is the male equivalent of reading Cosmo: it just makes you feel inadequate. You're not going to wear their fashion, you're never gonna throw those kinds of parties, sex... well, you get my point. And if you are one of the few select males that does live that lifestyle, you don't read Maxim.
I can totall see an Apple SWAT squad, led by Steve Jobs, rappeling down a building and breaking through a window to bust a techie toying around with his Pegasos. Then Steve would try to sell him an iPod and a 17" powerbook.
How else could you explain the piece of code that works fine for a year, then you hear that there's a minor problem with it, and when you go and look at it to debug it, it shouldn't have worked in the first place???
That's nothing, my manager will make *me* inject *his* coding ideas (code necrotic agent) into a perfectly good working application, making it slowly decay into a slushy mess or barely readable code that I have to work on everyday as a trauma patient whose vitals will never stabilize. By the time I'm completely fed up, I have to practically rewrite the damn thing, just so that he can sinisterly make me administer new doses of necrotic agent all over again.
A sperm count that is 99.9% lower than normal would make it extremely hard to get a woman pregnant, just ask any fertility counselor. It would be impossible to produce a contraceptive for men or women that works 100% of the time... 99.9% is conisdered good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA : "The region was attractive to Microsoft due to its stable power supply..."
Am I the only one that can think of a few other places with stable power supply? Seriously, what's the upside to a datacenter in Irkutsk?
Check out Ars Technica's Aperture 1.0 reviwe:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/aperture.ars
Well, it looks like the RAW processing was both slow and gave unacceptably poor results, the program was buggy and at least one review called it 'unusable in its current form.'
Sure, Oracle Enterprise has a $40k per CPU listing price, but let's be realistic. NOBODY pays $40k a CPU and maintenance and services. Not that I'm defending Oracle or their draconian pricing model, but in the end, Oracle can provide close to turn-key solutions when it comes to providing the product, escalating problems to engineering, custom solutions, consulting, deployment, implementation, long-term support. Combine that with Oracle's impressive feature list and the fact that most of the money that a company will spend on their database IT will NOT be DBMS licensing fees and you can see why upper management will spend thousands of dollars on a feature set that might very well be served by an open-source solution.
I am sure that there are many consulting firms that can mimick this kind of turn-key solution using PostgreSQL, but I'm not sure that they are as established--that is, give the CEO of XYZ company the warm & fuzzy that they require when they're about to undertake a multi-million dollar project whose backbone has to be a rock-solid DBMS.
It would be fabulous if Vault 10 IT consulting firms could provide this level of service using open source but that's just not the case Right Now(tm).
The truth is that company loyalty shouldn't be expected anymore; the people that extoll their adoration your work, dilligence and effectiveness are the very same ones that will let you go. You leave a job when the job doesn't satisfy your own personal balance of perks and financial compensation. This may sound unreasonably cynical, and certainly, things are seldom black & white, but alas, staying somewhere because of some quaint, Pleasantville-era work ethic has a much more negative net effect on your life than simply quitting and forging ahead.
When do you quit? As many here have noted, when that first round of layoffs is announced, when the perks and benefits start being trimmed, when it is painfully clear that the environment in which you work is more of a pean to mediocrity than a medium for productivity. I know, I know. I've just effectively nixed most companies (even some successful ones,) but the truth is that in the post-internet-resume world, IT workers are commodities (whether here or in India) and workplace egotism in a necessary evil.
We are all mercenaries. Don't do pensions, don't recite the latest company mantra, don't put up with abusive bosses, deadwood or pervasive mediocrity and don't bet on the come. Get your money when you can, stash it away (for you never know if you'll see it again) and retire on your terms.
8. I also forgot to mention the Almost a Physics PhD crowd that will go into a torturing pedantic argument over relativity, orbital mechanics and specific impulse. This will inevitably lead into a whole sub-thread about the viability of John Carmack as an aerospace engineer and Burt Rutan's virility.
Let's break down the characters that this post will attract:
1. We'll have the Heinlein / Asimov geeks that will start extolling the virtues of colonization. Sometimes these chaps will actually try to pitch the idea of interstellar mining for ores, they'll start talking about beanstalks / space elevators, nanotubes and perhaps a Rama reference or two. I won't even comment on that.
2. Then the cynics will start their usual diatribe about the pointless expenditure of money and resources on a frivolous goal and/or ideal of human space travel.
3. The above will be quickly followed by the NASA groupies that will then point out every single invention that is ever so faintly and indirectly a consequence of some NASA 1960s research.
4. The NASA geeks will then be supported by the Altruists, who will wax philosophical about the triumph of the human spirit and the ennobling effects of exploration and conquest.
5. Finally, we'll have an assorted collection of people who didn't RTFA and who won't but yet take a generous amount of time to argue about the merits of said article and the implications of the arguments brought forth my all of the above.
This whole thing sounds like a jump-to-conclusions mat of Federal proportions.
Come on! This was the guy that in years past thought that
a) Microsoft would ship a hard drive full of MS Software (you have to go waaaaay back, when PCMag was still a thick magazine)
b) Email would become as slow as snail-mail
c) That the Internet would die a fiery death at least a half-dozen times
His wisdom is peerless and his insights bordering on omiscient.
Wrong Dick, I think we all know that this would explain a LOT more about Dick Clark.
Commercial quantities of hydrogen are not made by 'splitting up' water, since it is much too slow a process (and energy-consuming) but rather decomposing methane.
Moreover, any process to change XXXXXX into Liquid Hydrogen uses energy. How will you produce such energy? Even if you use a non-oil-based energy source, at some point in the manufacturing process, oil will be involved. Whether it was materials, production, whatever.
Oh dear... when geeks get clever...
Is it me, or does it sound like Dvorak cooked this one up?
I don't mean to sound trollish, and I ask these questions sincerely, but how is this any different from the Lotus Notes days of group messaging? Actually, how is this any different from being a slight nip-and-tuck from a messageboard?
Maybe I'm missing the point, but any script-kiddie that can tweak one of the millions of forum / messageboard / webmail scripts out there would be able to crank this out in a day.
Shouldn't this somehow get modded as "modified beowulf cluster posting" ?
Maxim (Stuff to) is the male equivalent of reading Cosmo: it just makes you feel inadequate. You're not going to wear their fashion, you're never gonna throw those kinds of parties, sex... well, you get my point. And if you are one of the few select males that does live that lifestyle, you don't read Maxim.
Can't you just imagine the annoying dog in Windows XP try to find something in that thing and just come out, give up on it and have a cigarette.
Yes, stiffness would be the primary concern.
Now i can see 3"x3" icons for little over $3K... a bargain at twice the price :)
I can totall see an Apple SWAT squad, led by Steve Jobs, rappeling down a building and breaking through a window to bust a techie toying around with his Pegasos. Then Steve would try to sell him an iPod and a 17" powerbook.
How else could you explain the piece of code that works fine for a year, then you hear that there's a minor problem with it, and when you go and look at it to debug it, it shouldn't have worked in the first place???
That's nothing, my manager will make *me* inject *his* coding ideas (code necrotic agent) into a perfectly good working application, making it slowly decay into a slushy mess or barely readable code that I have to work on everyday as a trauma patient whose vitals will never stabilize. By the time I'm completely fed up, I have to practically rewrite the damn thing, just so that he can sinisterly make me administer new doses of necrotic agent all over again.
A sperm count that is 99.9% lower than normal would make it extremely hard to get a woman pregnant, just ask any fertility counselor. It would be impossible to produce a contraceptive for men or women that works 100% of the time... 99.9% is conisdered good enough.
Microsoft has warned about a security hole in Notepad. While Microsoft prepares a fix, it advises that we all use EDLIN in the mean time.
I think the last adjective ever applied to SGI is "cheap" :) They'll make Ferrari owners feel like part of the proletariat.