What the hell is with this moderation? This isn't insightfull, it's innane.
It sounds like this isn't the first problem with redhat, and I hope they can pull out of it. But a lot of people may have sunk money into RH thinking it was a good investment, and run by professionals.
red hat's earnings per share are dropping form a measly 3 to an even mealier 2. If you think that's "profitable" you're out of your mind.
How the hell are these people "ambulance chasers"? There's no ambulance here, just the kind of shady accounting that we all decry when it's Ken Lay or the guy from worldcom.
And I love how the poster tries to make it seem like the lawyers are trying to sue because of the announcement rather then the act they were announcing (i.e. that they cooked their books)
Poster needs to get a clue. Maybe red hat did just make 'a mistake' but they're still liable for it.
Somerville is well-intentioned but completely in the wrong here. Corporations must act this way to protect themselves and I believe they're well within their rights here.
This is incorrect. Companies do not need to enforce copyrights or patents, only trademarks.
Is he saying that DVDs as a format will be obsolete? Then I'd say yes. Obviously there is going to be some changes. with DVD-HD, and blu-ray disks. But as with CDs, I'm sure we'll see backwards compatibility.
If he thinks we're all going to give up our 5" silver disks, he's crazy. Unless there's a major technological breakthrough (like who knows, holographic cubes or something) they're going to stay around for a while. People still use punch-cards for Christ sake!
It took decades for CDs to overtake tapes and records (yet much less time for DVDs to take over from VHS tapes).
According to the artcle, they built a cluster using Oracle Real Application Cluster, (I guess Beowulf is just for toy apps:P) which allowed them to spread the core DB over multiple machines (!).
Apart from being able to consolidate 21 databases into one, the new NZX system runs faster, more reliably and at less cost, says the company's tech team.
One key query - searching the data on historical trades to identify maximum trade values - has been cut from 36 seconds to 0.03 seconds.
Well yeah. They consolidated 21 databases. It sounds like they had an 'overgrown' design, with lots of hacks. That's why it was slow, the consolidated the whole thing into one. Probably with help from Oracle themselves on optimization. Anyone would get a huge speedup out of that.
I can't believe you'd get a three order of magnitude improvement in a single function simply because of a change in operating system. I mean, unless they had been using SCO or something.
Sure, a more efficient process scheduler, a more efficient IO scheduler, but really. It would make a lot more sense for the difference to be in the DBM, or even more likely, in the design of the database itself.
Just because someone works for a big company doesn't mean they know what their doing. The most likely reason for the speedup would have been an optimization in their own software, or their database schema. Followed by an improvement in the RDBM, and finally the OS.
A thousand fold increase in speed simply from changing the OS is just impossible to believe -- unless there was something very wrong to begin with.
What they should be doing is making sure the voting machines are NEVER able to remotely connect to anything. Once voting is done for the night election officials should have to PHYSICALY connect or transfer votes from the machines to a device that sends the tally to the central counting.
Of course, that would let the election admin tamper with the card at his leisure while delivering it to the sending device. If you don't think the machine can be made tamper proof, then I don't see why you think the card could be.
A simpler idea would be an interface on the machine that only had one input line, meaning "send", when the signal goes high, start dumping the data to a write-only line.
Of course, you need a way to input balots and whatnot after the election...
Well, assuming that the static power draw of the chip isn't to bad, why not simply slow down the clock by 7x? Wouldn't that accomplish the same thing without the need for developers to write septathreaded code in order to maximized performance?
Voting machines need to be certified, basically this means someone needs to inspect it and make sure it works correctly, is tamper-resistant, etc. hardware and software is certified together. but Diebold treated their software like many IT products. release what you have and patch, patch, patch. Unfortunately, in the case of election this meant uncertified software (and allegedly uncertified modems as well) was used. Diebold could have put anything in that code.
Of course, whoever did the certification job on the Diebold certainly wasn't doing their jobs very well.
A good model for EVM would actually be the Navada Gaming commission for slot machines and the like. Software updates need to digitally signed and encrypted by both the company, and the commission. Running slot machines without approved software is illegal.
Is there any attempt to keep entries in multiple languages synchronized? Is that something that people strive for, or do you just have multiple wikipedias with some translated instructions?
Why in gods name would they include 7 processors? That just dosn't make any sense. My guess is that some idiot just counted up all the chips in the system, or something.
Ugh, who's idea was it to use that JPG for that bar-code American flag graphic. It looks awful, full of compression artifacts (most of which aren't even the right color, look at the gray borders on the red stripes).
You'd think that the people running a multi-million dollar the NYT would know how to use PNG files! If they were worried about way-backwards compatibility, they could have used a GIF.
Speaking of image formats... whatever happened to jpeg2000? Anyone know? It seemed to have a lot of promise, then... nothing.
Simplicity - the service should be simple and easy to use, so that your average non-geek can use it without having to care about encryption, PKI infrastruction, digital certificates or other arcane knowledge.
Yeah, that infrastruction. A real bitch.
Seriously, though. You seem to be thinking of people mailing notarized passport photocopies!? Yeah right. The vast majority of FRR sites only want to know their advertising demographics and do some geotargeting (also with ads). They don't need to know your SSN or even care. As long as 50% of the people respond truthfully, they're fine.
your system just sounds like a huge pain in the ass. It'll go nowhere.
see microsoft passport. I'm sure there are tons of online user ids, the biggest being passport and yahoo.
I wonder how hard it would be for an independant website to use passport for id?
Anyway, making your system for-profit would be kind of pointless, since there are already much larger commercial offerings. I'm not aware of many non-commercial ones, though. oh well.
The FCC tried to unilaterally ease ownership rules, meaning large media companies could get larger. This met with quite a bit of resistance, culminating in Trent Lot touting a MoveOn.org petition, if you can believe that. Powell came up with some idiotic justification like "Well, if the ACLU and the NRA oppose it, how can it be partisan?". Of course, it wasn't partisan, just bad. Bush Supported Powell, but the republican controlled congress attached a zero-funding measure to a huge spending bill, which would have been difficult for bush to veto.
The people who run always-on are obsessed with the idea of 'blogs' just about as much as they are with money. Really quite stupid, and it's disappointing that people with so little sense could have much money. These are the people who caused the dot com bomb. There was a guy on there a while ago advising people not to buy google, because he wanted to, and everything he ever invested in lost tons of money...
Kind of entertaining, and it's not surprising they'd have Michael Powel on there.
But yeah, these people think everything they do is blogging or something.
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Redhat's P/E is an amzing 125.
What the hell is with this moderation? This isn't insightfull, it's innane.
It sounds like this isn't the first problem with redhat, and I hope they can pull out of it. But a lot of people may have sunk money into RH thinking it was a good investment, and run by professionals.
red hat's earnings per share are dropping form a measly 3 to an even mealier 2. If you think that's "profitable" you're out of your mind.
How the hell are these people "ambulance chasers"? There's no ambulance here, just the kind of shady accounting that we all decry when it's Ken Lay or the guy from worldcom.
And I love how the poster tries to make it seem like the lawyers are trying to sue because of the announcement rather then the act they were announcing (i.e. that they cooked their books)
Poster needs to get a clue. Maybe red hat did just make 'a mistake' but they're still liable for it.
Somerville is well-intentioned but completely in the wrong here. Corporations must act this way to protect themselves and I believe they're well within their rights here.
This is incorrect. Companies do not need to enforce copyrights or patents, only trademarks.
It would seem that making a virus hard to debug/analize would be the hallmark of a well-written virus, not a poorly made one.
I realize that 'easy to exicute' is a design goal of most software writers, but I'd think virus writers would want to focus on other things.
Is he saying that DVDs as a format will be obsolete? Then I'd say yes. Obviously there is going to be some changes. with DVD-HD, and blu-ray disks. But as with CDs, I'm sure we'll see backwards compatibility.
If he thinks we're all going to give up our 5" silver disks, he's crazy. Unless there's a major technological breakthrough (like who knows, holographic cubes or something) they're going to stay around for a while. People still use punch-cards for Christ sake!
It took decades for CDs to overtake tapes and records (yet much less time for DVDs to take over from VHS tapes).
We're talking about gallons of uranium, right?
You burned calories doing all that walking, and most of the energy would have been in the form of hydrocarbons -- just like a car.
These vehicles would probably require less energy to get you there then walking.
I'm sure most of those designs would be street legal. If not sidewalk legal.
:P
I think street legality is mostly related to things like bumpers and lights, as well as emissions.
Btw, didn't they have a 10,000MPG vehicle a while ago? I think driven by a tiny 12 year old girl
According to the artcle, they built a cluster using Oracle Real Application Cluster, (I guess Beowulf is just for toy apps :P) which allowed them to spread the core DB over multiple machines (!).
Apart from being able to consolidate 21 databases into one, the new NZX system runs faster, more reliably and at less cost, says the company's tech team.
One key query - searching the data on historical trades to identify maximum trade values - has been cut from 36 seconds to 0.03 seconds.
Well yeah. They consolidated 21 databases. It sounds like they had an 'overgrown' design, with lots of hacks. That's why it was slow, the consolidated the whole thing into one. Probably with help from Oracle themselves on optimization. Anyone would get a huge speedup out of that.
I can't believe you'd get a three order of magnitude improvement in a single function simply because of a change in operating system. I mean, unless they had been using SCO or something.
Sure, a more efficient process scheduler, a more efficient IO scheduler, but really. It would make a lot more sense for the difference to be in the DBM, or even more likely, in the design of the database itself.
Just because someone works for a big company doesn't mean they know what their doing. The most likely reason for the speedup would have been an optimization in their own software, or their database schema. Followed by an improvement in the RDBM, and finally the OS.
A thousand fold increase in speed simply from changing the OS is just impossible to believe -- unless there was something very wrong to begin with.
The diffrence is 10%, or $5 million apeace. that would buy at leat 50 loaded H2s.
What they should be doing is making sure the voting machines are NEVER able to remotely connect to anything. Once voting is done for the night election officials should have to PHYSICALY connect or transfer votes from the machines to a device that sends the tally to the central counting.
Of course, that would let the election admin tamper with the card at his leisure while delivering it to the sending device. If you don't think the machine can be made tamper proof, then I don't see why you think the card could be.
A simpler idea would be an interface on the machine that only had one input line, meaning "send", when the signal goes high, start dumping the data to a write-only line.
Of course, you need a way to input balots and whatnot after the election...
Well, assuming that the static power draw of the chip isn't to bad, why not simply slow down the clock by 7x? Wouldn't that accomplish the same thing without the need for developers to write septathreaded code in order to maximized performance?
Voting machines need to be certified, basically this means someone needs to inspect it and make sure it works correctly, is tamper-resistant, etc. hardware and software is certified together. but Diebold treated their software like many IT products. release what you have and patch, patch, patch. Unfortunately, in the case of election this meant uncertified software (and allegedly uncertified modems as well) was used. Diebold could have put anything in that code.
Of course, whoever did the certification job on the Diebold certainly wasn't doing their jobs very well.
A good model for EVM would actually be the Navada Gaming commission for slot machines and the like. Software updates need to digitally signed and encrypted by both the company, and the commission. Running slot machines without approved software is illegal.
Is there any attempt to keep entries in multiple languages synchronized? Is that something that people strive for, or do you just have multiple wikipedias with some translated instructions?
You know, I spesificaly remember hearing that windows would no longer require service packs...
Why in gods name would they include 7 processors? That just dosn't make any sense. My guess is that some idiot just counted up all the chips in the system, or something.
Ugh, who's idea was it to use that JPG for that bar-code American flag graphic. It looks awful, full of compression artifacts (most of which aren't even the right color, look at the gray borders on the red stripes).
You'd think that the people running a multi-million dollar the NYT would know how to use PNG files! If they were worried about way-backwards compatibility, they could have used a GIF.
Speaking of image formats... whatever happened to jpeg2000? Anyone know? It seemed to have a lot of promise, then... nothing.
Simplicity - the service should be simple and easy to use, so that your average non-geek can use it without having to care about encryption, PKI infrastruction, digital certificates or other arcane knowledge.
Yeah, that infrastruction. A real bitch.
Seriously, though. You seem to be thinking of people mailing notarized passport photocopies!? Yeah right. The vast majority of FRR sites only want to know their advertising demographics and do some geotargeting (also with ads). They don't need to know your SSN or even care. As long as 50% of the people respond truthfully, they're fine.
your system just sounds like a huge pain in the ass. It'll go nowhere.
see microsoft passport. I'm sure there are tons of online user ids, the biggest being passport and yahoo.
I wonder how hard it would be for an independant website to use passport for id?
Anyway, making your system for-profit would be kind of pointless, since there are already much larger commercial offerings. I'm not aware of many non-commercial ones, though. oh well.
The FCC tried to unilaterally ease ownership rules, meaning large media companies could get larger. This met with quite a bit of resistance, culminating in Trent Lot touting a MoveOn.org petition, if you can believe that. Powell came up with some idiotic justification like "Well, if the ACLU and the NRA oppose it, how can it be partisan?". Of course, it wasn't partisan, just bad. Bush Supported Powell, but the republican controlled congress attached a zero-funding measure to a huge spending bill, which would have been difficult for bush to veto.
The people who run always-on are obsessed with the idea of 'blogs' just about as much as they are with money. Really quite stupid, and it's disappointing that people with so little sense could have much money. These are the people who caused the dot com bomb. There was a guy on there a while ago advising people not to buy google, because he wanted to, and everything he ever invested in lost tons of money...
Kind of entertaining, and it's not surprising they'd have Michael Powel on there.
But yeah, these people think everything they do is blogging or something.
What are you talking about?