You're right, but it's more than just a tradeoff between inhouse and outsourcing. There are many benefits of cloud computing that you can only get when you share your data center with others, such as:
* When you're a startup and you don't have much money, and you can't afford the high initial cost of setting up a data center (or many data centers, if you require multi-region redundancy). Even if it costs more, the cloud linearizes the cost of servers which simplifies planning.
* When I want a new server, I just click a few buttons and it's there. It's all automated and so I don't have to deal with the idiots in my company's internal IT department. At my old company I used to have to spend weeks or sometimes months begging for servers, and getting signatures from up and down the org chart. At my current company we use EC2 and I can get new servers in seconds.
* And because there are APIs to do this (in addition to the web UI), I can program my web app to automatically provision new servers when it needs it. Elastic autoscaling is awesome because if you operate a website with peaky load you don't have to pay for servers during the times that load is low. In this case, renting is a better payment model than buying. A cloud that you operate yourself will always suck, because everyone has to provision enough hardware to meet their individual peak loads. It's much more efficient to share.
Not really. Lexus cars are always better spec'd than their Toyota counterparts. Same goes for Acura and Infiniti. The specs might not go up linearly with the price, but they are objectively better cars.
Vertu's phones on the other hand are not as good as the iPhone and a lot of Android phones.
The only thing that might justify Vertu's prices are the luxury services that come with the phone (Vertu Concierge), but forcing their customers to use such a crappy handset is a serious drawback that brands like Lexus do not have.
If you RTFA, it measures usage in terms of "Active Usage" (defined as "Used or contributed to in the past month"), not number of accounts. So unless Google is somehow tricking them into posting on G+, I don't think this particular study is exaggerated.
You're confusing "have" with "use". You can have something installed that you don't use. Many people have the Java applet plugin installed, but few actually use it.
Knowing this, try reading the gp post again and you'll see it makes perfect sense.
According to this site total global food production is 4.4 billion tonnes per year, so in a world of 7 billion people that's 629 kg per person per year, or 1.7 kg per day. The average (median) American eats 1.03 kg per day, and the 90th percentile eats 1.73 kg per day, according to the EPA.
About 2.4 billion tonnes is cereals (e.g. corn, rice, wheat).
So yeah, if we're producing enough to feed 7 billion 90th percentile Americans, I think it's safe to say it's a distribution problem not a supply problem.
Why do you need an expensive compiler to create an.exe file which runs Java? All you need to do is compile this program or similar in any C compiler: int main(void) { system("java com.example.App"); }
Yes, Java bytecodes need to be compiled every time they are loaded, but with a JIT interpreter it's not so bad. Compare that to JavaScript which has to be compiled from source every time! And the JVM does not take any longer to start up than a modern web browser.
You're right about host OS integration, and yes, JavaFX was too little too late. But Android is an example of client-side, web-enabled Java done well. If only we had something like that for the desktop...
I wonder if pollution wafting over from China is one of them!
It's interesting that when mostly coal-induced smog chokes a city of 20 million people, it's minor news for a day, whereas Fukushima made global headlines for weeks. I don't want to downplay the seriousness of Fukushima, but imagine how many hundreds of thousands more people will develop cancer from the smog.
While I don't disagree with you completely, I think it's sad that JavaScript and HTML have "beaten" Java applets as the standard way to build network applications. Sun really dropped the ball in terms of the UX for desktop Java, and Oracle's security mismanagement has put the final nail in the coffin of Java on the desktop. But despite all of its flaws, the Java platform provides a much nicer programming model compared to "modern" web technologies.
HTML was originally designed as a way to display static, hyperlinked documents, and JavaScript was originally just a toy scripting language to do simple things like form validation. They've both evolved to support the creation of rich client interfaces, but creating rich clients using HTML5/JavaScript is not pretty. There's a web server, which spits out dynamically generated client code. Embedded in that client code is a mix of content, markup, JavaScript source code and maybe even inline stylesheets. It runs in one of a number of possible virtual machines (or "web browsers") which are all slightly incompatible, not to mention slow compared to a JIT bytecode interpreter (ironically, one of the early complains about Java applets was performance). Standardizing it all is a nightmare that takes years of political infighting and compromising on things like video formats. And you have to learn at least 3 different languages to even do anything!
It would've great if, instead of HTML/JavaScript evolving up into a full-blown rich client platform, Java just "devolved" a little bit so that it provided a stricter sandbox for applets. None of this "signed code" bullshit - everyone just clicks through on that, leading to all sorts of security problems. Just restrict all applets under same sandbox (like JavaScript does). Give it a more native UX (e.g. through SWT instead of AWT/Swing) and an App Store, and it would be great!
There's nothing really inherently wrong with the Java platform, and nothing inherent in its design that makes it less secure than JavaScript. The only problem is Oracle's lack of support, and some small implementation flaws. HTML5/JavaScript on the other hand is just a giant hack. But a standard one.
Well, that depends on what kind of "consumer" they are. If they're a user who only has the Java plugin installed, then yeah, you're right.
But for people who are running non-browser-based desktop apps like Vuze, PHBs who oversee server-side Java projects, and the poor bastards who have to work under them, the advice that "Java is unsafe!!" is misleading and sensationalist.
I'd wager that most Java applications are not applets, and so they are safe from this exploit and similar ones. So the distinction between the Java platform in general and the browser plugin is a valid one.
Right....maybe they should switch from using NTOSKRNL.EXE to Linux too. After all, no one cares about the kernel; users and developers only care about the UI and APIs that sit above it. And maybe they could turn Visual C++ into a front-end to LLVM, and have.NET target the JVM. All of these changes would save Microsoft from the trouble of developing several large pieces of software.
From Microsoft's point of view, of course they should keep Trident development going. I'm surprised this is even being questioned. To do otherwise would be to give control of the web over to Apple and Google. The only reason that Apple and Google care about standards right now is because Microsoft is still a big player in the game. If it was up to Google, they'd be making their own proprietary versions of HTTP, JavaScript and ActiveX;)
Then there's Apple - and even though I'm a Linux user, I'm happy that Microsoft is there to keep Apple in check!
I'm sure food stamps are abused on occasion, but I can't imagine that this happens on a large enough scale that anyone should care.
According to the USDA, the average (nation-wide) food stamp benefit was $133.42 per month. That's $4.39 per day! At a maximum, an individual can get $200 per month, or $6.57 per day.
How the fuck could any of these people have anything left over after buying the minimum amount of food they need to not feel hungry? The idea that there are large numbers of poor people living large, paying for alcohol and drugs and strippers with their EBT cards, is retarded. Even if it does happen once in a while, it cannot be enough of a problem to warrant the amount of anti-poor vitriol that are in the comments here.
Why not go after things that actually waste significant amounts of money? Like tax evaders, corporate bailouts, corn subsidies, the broken health care system, useless wars, etc.
And if you think there really is any significant amount of food stamp money going to strippers, at least provide some proof and numbers to back up your claims.
The reason that the metric system is better than the imperial system is because of its advantages in scientific and industrial applications. And so the reason that the US should adopt the metric system is so that future scientists and engineers have an intuitive feel for the units.
But there are a few day-to-day advantages. The biggest one that comes to mind is unit pricing at the grocery store. The whole point of unit pricing is to make it easy to compare the price of products that are sold in different volumes, and in countries that use the metric system this is easy. But in the United States, you'll often see products side-by-side that cost $X per pint, $Y per quart, and $Z per ounce. It's not easy to compare these prices because the unit conversions are not simple to do in your head.
I'm not a vegan or vegetarian, but not cooking veggies on the same grill as the meat seems reasonable to me. When I'm with vegetarians, I always ask, and to be honest I'm a bit surprised when they say they don't mind that their veggies have been simmering in animal fat.
After all, I would be grossed out at the idea of eating bacon that was cooked on the same grill as human flesh. Sometimes our instinctive gut reactions are related to our ethical beliefs.
Granted, the special effects were well done, but "a decent story"? All I remember was this:
WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!!!
Some dwarves, a hobbit and a wizard go on an "adventure". They get into trouble, and then the wizard saves them. Then they get into trouble again, and the wizard saves them again. Then they get into trouble again, and the wizard summons some really big birds to save them again.
I still don't understand why they didn't just take the birds from the start, and all the way to the end. It would've saved a lot of trouble, not to mention hard disk space.
What for? It's already completely obvious that the units are degrees Fahrenheit, even to people from outside of the United States, such as myself. 136.4 degrees Celsius is 36.4 degrees above the boiling point of water; it's unlikely that good record keeping would have been done in such a climate:P
The problem is that you're thinking of it from a consumer/desktop point of view. It sounds more like Canonical wants to go after the server market.
The cloud that he is referring to is PaaS, which is essentially just automated data centers. Think web hosting companies but with the customer facing ops people replaced with REST APIs. This lets you have things like elastic scaling, which is useful for hosting websites with peaky traffic loads.
Amazon has their own version of Linux, based on Red Hat, that is designed to be run inside EC2. Shuttleworth doesn't want Ubuntu to be left out of this new market.
There are two big new platforms that need operating systems, and they are tablets and cloud servers. IMO tablets already have a few very good operating systems available, but the market for cloud server operating systems is still wide open.
Oh Whacking Day Oh Whacking Day Our hallowed snake skull-cracking day We'll break their backs Gouge out their eyes Their evil hearts we'll pulverize Oh Whacking Day Oh Whacking Day May God bestow his grace on thee
If a society has the ability to automate a job, but doesn't, and gives that job to a human instead, I would argue that the human doing that job is contributing nothing to society. He or she would just be doing busywork. You might as well ask these people to dig holes in the ground and fill them back in, there's no difference.
It would be better for everyone if we just gave these guys a check rather than find pointless busywork (ie manufacturing jobs) for them.
Amazon's efficiency means more than just cheaper books. It also means a wider selection of books, and this is what is more important to me.
If all the bookstores in the world were small local bookstores, then all they'd sell is the same small selection of shitty Twilight fan fiction and Dan Brown paperbacks. Ever try to buy a good, up-to-date programming book at a local bookstore?
That's an interesting way to approach life. But let me ask you this: if everyone followed your philosophy, would the world be a better place or worse? Sure, you buying locally will help your local community. But if other people in other communities restrict their shopping to their local shops, wouldn't your local community suffer because it no longer has any markets to export to?
That may be true, but that's not what the article is talking about. The article is talking about investors not wanting to invest in older CEOs.
This is interesting because although older software engineers are often the victims of age discrimination, it's usually the other way around for execs. The stereotype is that good software engineers are all young and good executives are all older (and therefore experienced). Rather than do away with this stereotype, the angel investors have simply reversed it - they seem to think that all good software executives must be younger (and therefore more dedicated and visionary).
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, but it's more than just a tradeoff between inhouse and outsourcing. There are many benefits of cloud computing that you can only get when you share your data center with others, such as:
* When you're a startup and you don't have much money, and you can't afford the high initial cost of setting up a data center (or many data centers, if you require multi-region redundancy). Even if it costs more, the cloud linearizes the cost of servers which simplifies planning.
* When I want a new server, I just click a few buttons and it's there. It's all automated and so I don't have to deal with the idiots in my company's internal IT department. At my old company I used to have to spend weeks or sometimes months begging for servers, and getting signatures from up and down the org chart. At my current company we use EC2 and I can get new servers in seconds.
* And because there are APIs to do this (in addition to the web UI), I can program my web app to automatically provision new servers when it needs it. Elastic autoscaling is awesome because if you operate a website with peaky load you don't have to pay for servers during the times that load is low. In this case, renting is a better payment model than buying. A cloud that you operate yourself will always suck, because everyone has to provision enough hardware to meet their individual peak loads. It's much more efficient to share.
Not really. Lexus cars are always better spec'd than their Toyota counterparts. Same goes for Acura and Infiniti. The specs might not go up linearly with the price, but they are objectively better cars.
Vertu's phones on the other hand are not as good as the iPhone and a lot of Android phones.
The only thing that might justify Vertu's prices are the luxury services that come with the phone (Vertu Concierge), but forcing their customers to use such a crappy handset is a serious drawback that brands like Lexus do not have.
calling bs on the hackers who claimed responsibility.
http://gizmodo.com/5980618/amazon-is-down
If you RTFA, it measures usage in terms of "Active Usage" (defined as "Used or contributed to in the past month"), not number of accounts. So unless Google is somehow tricking them into posting on G+, I don't think this particular study is exaggerated.
You're confusing "have" with "use". You can have something installed that you don't use. Many people have the Java applet plugin installed, but few actually use it.
Knowing this, try reading the gp post again and you'll see it makes perfect sense.
According to this site total global food production is 4.4 billion tonnes per year, so in a world of 7 billion people that's 629 kg per person per year, or 1.7 kg per day. The average (median) American eats 1.03 kg per day, and the 90th percentile eats 1.73 kg per day, according to the EPA.
About 2.4 billion tonnes is cereals (e.g. corn, rice, wheat).
So yeah, if we're producing enough to feed 7 billion 90th percentile Americans, I think it's safe to say it's a distribution problem not a supply problem.
Why do you need an expensive compiler to create an .exe file which runs Java? All you need to do is compile this program or similar in any C compiler:
int main(void) { system("java com.example.App"); }
Yes, Java bytecodes need to be compiled every time they are loaded, but with a JIT interpreter it's not so bad. Compare that to JavaScript which has to be compiled from source every time! And the JVM does not take any longer to start up than a modern web browser.
You're right about host OS integration, and yes, JavaFX was too little too late. But Android is an example of client-side, web-enabled Java done well. If only we had something like that for the desktop...
I wonder if pollution wafting over from China is one of them!
It's interesting that when mostly coal-induced smog chokes a city of 20 million people, it's minor news for a day, whereas Fukushima made global headlines for weeks. I don't want to downplay the seriousness of Fukushima, but imagine how many hundreds of thousands more people will develop cancer from the smog.
While I don't disagree with you completely, I think it's sad that JavaScript and HTML have "beaten" Java applets as the standard way to build network applications. Sun really dropped the ball in terms of the UX for desktop Java, and Oracle's security mismanagement has put the final nail in the coffin of Java on the desktop. But despite all of its flaws, the Java platform provides a much nicer programming model compared to "modern" web technologies.
HTML was originally designed as a way to display static, hyperlinked documents, and JavaScript was originally just a toy scripting language to do simple things like form validation. They've both evolved to support the creation of rich client interfaces, but creating rich clients using HTML5/JavaScript is not pretty. There's a web server, which spits out dynamically generated client code. Embedded in that client code is a mix of content, markup, JavaScript source code and maybe even inline stylesheets. It runs in one of a number of possible virtual machines (or "web browsers") which are all slightly incompatible, not to mention slow compared to a JIT bytecode interpreter (ironically, one of the early complains about Java applets was performance). Standardizing it all is a nightmare that takes years of political infighting and compromising on things like video formats. And you have to learn at least 3 different languages to even do anything!
It would've great if, instead of HTML/JavaScript evolving up into a full-blown rich client platform, Java just "devolved" a little bit so that it provided a stricter sandbox for applets. None of this "signed code" bullshit - everyone just clicks through on that, leading to all sorts of security problems. Just restrict all applets under same sandbox (like JavaScript does). Give it a more native UX (e.g. through SWT instead of AWT/Swing) and an App Store, and it would be great!
There's nothing really inherently wrong with the Java platform, and nothing inherent in its design that makes it less secure than JavaScript. The only problem is Oracle's lack of support, and some small implementation flaws. HTML5/JavaScript on the other hand is just a giant hack. But a standard one.
Well, that depends on what kind of "consumer" they are. If they're a user who only has the Java plugin installed, then yeah, you're right.
But for people who are running non-browser-based desktop apps like Vuze, PHBs who oversee server-side Java projects, and the poor bastards who have to work under them, the advice that "Java is unsafe!!" is misleading and sensationalist.
I'd wager that most Java applications are not applets, and so they are safe from this exploit and similar ones. So the distinction between the Java platform in general and the browser plugin is a valid one.
Right....maybe they should switch from using NTOSKRNL.EXE to Linux too. After all, no one cares about the kernel; users and developers only care about the UI and APIs that sit above it. And maybe they could turn Visual C++ into a front-end to LLVM, and have .NET target the JVM. All of these changes would save Microsoft from the trouble of developing several large pieces of software.
From Microsoft's point of view, of course they should keep Trident development going. I'm surprised this is even being questioned. To do otherwise would be to give control of the web over to Apple and Google. The only reason that Apple and Google care about standards right now is because Microsoft is still a big player in the game. If it was up to Google, they'd be making their own proprietary versions of HTTP, JavaScript and ActiveX ;)
Then there's Apple - and even though I'm a Linux user, I'm happy that Microsoft is there to keep Apple in check!
I'm sure food stamps are abused on occasion, but I can't imagine that this happens on a large enough scale that anyone should care.
According to the USDA, the average (nation-wide) food stamp benefit was $133.42 per month. That's $4.39 per day! At a maximum, an individual can get $200 per month, or $6.57 per day.
http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/18SNAPavg$PP.htm
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1269
How the fuck could any of these people have anything left over after buying the minimum amount of food they need to not feel hungry? The idea that there are large numbers of poor people living large, paying for alcohol and drugs and strippers with their EBT cards, is retarded. Even if it does happen once in a while, it cannot be enough of a problem to warrant the amount of anti-poor vitriol that are in the comments here.
Why not go after things that actually waste significant amounts of money? Like tax evaders, corporate bailouts, corn subsidies, the broken health care system, useless wars, etc.
And if you think there really is any significant amount of food stamp money going to strippers, at least provide some proof and numbers to back up your claims.
The reason that the metric system is better than the imperial system is because of its advantages in scientific and industrial applications. And so the reason that the US should adopt the metric system is so that future scientists and engineers have an intuitive feel for the units.
But there are a few day-to-day advantages. The biggest one that comes to mind is unit pricing at the grocery store. The whole point of unit pricing is to make it easy to compare the price of products that are sold in different volumes, and in countries that use the metric system this is easy. But in the United States, you'll often see products side-by-side that cost $X per pint, $Y per quart, and $Z per ounce. It's not easy to compare these prices because the unit conversions are not simple to do in your head.
I'm not a vegan or vegetarian, but not cooking veggies on the same grill as the meat seems reasonable to me. When I'm with vegetarians, I always ask, and to be honest I'm a bit surprised when they say they don't mind that their veggies have been simmering in animal fat.
After all, I would be grossed out at the idea of eating bacon that was cooked on the same grill as human flesh. Sometimes our instinctive gut reactions are related to our ethical beliefs.
Granted, the special effects were well done, but "a decent story"? All I remember was this:
WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!!!
Some dwarves, a hobbit and a wizard go on an "adventure". They get into trouble, and then the wizard saves them. Then they get into trouble again, and the wizard saves them again. Then they get into trouble again, and the wizard summons some really big birds to save them again.
I still don't understand why they didn't just take the birds from the start, and all the way to the end. It would've saved a lot of trouble, not to mention hard disk space.
What for? It's already completely obvious that the units are degrees Fahrenheit, even to people from outside of the United States, such as myself. 136.4 degrees Celsius is 36.4 degrees above the boiling point of water; it's unlikely that good record keeping would have been done in such a climate :P
The problem is that you're thinking of it from a consumer/desktop point of view. It sounds more like Canonical wants to go after the server market.
The cloud that he is referring to is PaaS, which is essentially just automated data centers. Think web hosting companies but with the customer facing ops people replaced with REST APIs. This lets you have things like elastic scaling, which is useful for hosting websites with peaky traffic loads.
Amazon has their own version of Linux, based on Red Hat, that is designed to be run inside EC2. Shuttleworth doesn't want Ubuntu to be left out of this new market.
There are two big new platforms that need operating systems, and they are tablets and cloud servers. IMO tablets already have a few very good operating systems available, but the market for cloud server operating systems is still wide open.
Oh Whacking Day
Oh Whacking Day
Our hallowed snake skull-cracking day
We'll break their backs
Gouge out their eyes
Their evil hearts we'll pulverize
Oh Whacking Day
Oh Whacking Day
May God bestow his grace on thee
If a society has the ability to automate a job, but doesn't, and gives that job to a human instead, I would argue that the human doing that job is contributing nothing to society. He or she would just be doing busywork. You might as well ask these people to dig holes in the ground and fill them back in, there's no difference.
It would be better for everyone if we just gave these guys a check rather than find pointless busywork (ie manufacturing jobs) for them.
And what did he use to do at Google? Did he work on Python only in his spare time or did Google pay him to hack on it?
But it also has a feature that will tell you where the wifi is...
Amazon's efficiency means more than just cheaper books. It also means a wider selection of books, and this is what is more important to me.
If all the bookstores in the world were small local bookstores, then all they'd sell is the same small selection of shitty Twilight fan fiction and Dan Brown paperbacks. Ever try to buy a good, up-to-date programming book at a local bookstore?
That's an interesting way to approach life. But let me ask you this: if everyone followed your philosophy, would the world be a better place or worse? Sure, you buying locally will help your local community. But if other people in other communities restrict their shopping to their local shops, wouldn't your local community suffer because it no longer has any markets to export to?
That may be true, but that's not what the article is talking about. The article is talking about investors not wanting to invest in older CEOs.
This is interesting because although older software engineers are often the victims of age discrimination, it's usually the other way around for execs. The stereotype is that good software engineers are all young and good executives are all older (and therefore experienced). Rather than do away with this stereotype, the angel investors have simply reversed it - they seem to think that all good software executives must be younger (and therefore more dedicated and visionary).
Demonstration units can be had for much less :P
For example a Chrysler 300C costs $36,000, and has has a Hemi V8 with Chrysler's Multi-Displacement System