Its not like they could have just said Critical update patch...oh no, we need to make things confusing.
What happens when admins get confused and pour the contents of their beverage containers into their servers?
We apologize for the confusion in the Critical Patch Updates. The individuals responsible have been sacked. To avoid further confusion, all CPUs will be processed through CUPS, the Critical Update Patch Server.
Given that the patent office is self-funded, and rejections only make more time-consuming work, it'd be silly for some Machiavellian Patent Office executive to hand out incentives for rejecting patents.
Au contraire. Given that the patent office is self-funded, and rejections only generate more filing fees, it'd be Machiavellian for some silly Patent Office executive to hand out incentives for rejecting patents.
One of the side thoughts I had about this was military applications. If we can capture asteriods or chunks of rocks, can we drop them into orbit to land on a city? A non-nuclear threat? I was of course thinking of the book "The moon is a harsh mistress".. Otherwise, why is NASA so interested in the topic?
Reminds me of this oldie-but-goodie on the evolution of warfare:
- Throw rock
- Hit other guy with stick
- Throw rock with stick on the end of it
- Shoot stick with rock on end of it at guy with curved stick
- Hit rock with fire, make copper, bronze, iron, steel rocks to put on ends of stick
- Put fire in tube, throw rock with fire
- Put fire in metal tube, throw metal rock with fire
- Put fire in metal rocks, drop exploding rocks on other guy
- Drop rocks made of unstable atomic metals on other guy
- Head for the asteroid belt. Throw rock
I nominate this for nerd meme of 2013. If slashdot was battletoads. If the republican national convention was battletoads. If shopping at Wal-Mart was battletoads. And then all those of us who never played it will have to make friends with gamefaqs all over again to understand WTF everyone is talking about.
I'm in.
If Microsoft was Battletoads, it would be like the rat army working for a chair-throwing Big Blag.
Panic and hysteria swept our world today upon the discovery of
an inbound cometary body with a non-zero impact probability.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, addressed a terrified world:
"Podmates and citizens, we believe this object to rate, at most a 1 or a 2 on the Q'nirot scale, and expect further observations to eliminate the possibility of a collision. There is cause for continued observation, but at present there is no cause for alarm."
"We believe this potential impactor to be a routine and natural phenomenon, not a hostile threat from the Blueworlders. For one thing, is approaching from the direction away from
the Blue World, from a region that even their invasion fleets have
yet to control. Furthermore, it has recently been demonstrated
that the Blueworlders, despite the technological terrors they have
sent to our world, remain utterly incapable of deflecting inbound
asteroids and comets. Unlike our illustirous Planetary Defense Forces,
the blueworlders lack the technology to do anything about an inbound impactor."
"A solid planetary defense is the right of every being in every technologically-advanced civilization. As the Blueworlders have so recently discovered the hard way, conquest and empire sometimes need to take a back seat to the basic tools that constitute civilization."
When a junior reporter suggested that EVERYBEING PANIC ANYWAYS,
the Speaker concluded his remarks:
"For decades, junior reporters have been making proposals to
this council that begin with 'we have to fight the blueworlders
over there before we have to fight them over here', and today
marks the day where they can finally put their gelsacs where
their mouths are."
The reporter's gelsacs were then mounted on the impactor unit of the the kinetic kill vehicle that remains the Planetary Defense Force's third and last line of defense.
250GB - $49.99 ($2.00 per 10 gigabytes)
320GB - $59.99 ($1.87 per 10 gigabytes)
500GB - $58.99 ($1.18 per 10 gigabytes)
1TB - $79.99 ($0.80 per 10 gigabytes)
I mean, don't get me wrong, the 1 terabytes are an attractive price on a price-per-gigabyte point of view. But there are times where you simply don't need (or want) a large drive, and a small one would do, or your budget for a larger one doesn't exist and you need a smaller drive. But the price per gigabyte is so out of whack on the low end models, it doesn't make sense to waste your money. You'd think stores and suppliers would want to dump their low end inventory for the larger capacities, but apparently they aren't in any hurry.
There's more to a hard drive than the platters.
What this pricing is telling you is that it costs about $30-40 to produce a hunk of machined aluminum, a controller board, a few connectors, some cache memory, a voice coil, a fancy motor, and a read-write head. And it costs about $5 to produce a platter, regardless of whether it was a 500GB/1TB platter that's only good enough to be used on one side, both sides of a 320MB platter, etc.
The pricing curve for SSDs will have a very long-term advantage over spinning metal in that the costs of the "mechanical" parts of an SSD are negligible in comparison to the costs of a spinning disk. There'a a very real floor in HDD pricing, because there's a lot of things inside an HDD that don't store bits.
'Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we'll see or hear about today,'
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability
by simply hooking the logic circuits of a
Arduinopentamillenuova-5007 Sub-Microcontroller
to a Markov chain generator
driven by a strong RNG (say, a nice lava lamp and a photodetector)
were of course well understood - and such generators were often used to
acquire a first round of venture funding by
photoshopping all the pixels in the hostess's undergarments
simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance to the
theory of Rule 34.
Many respectable developers said that they weren't going to stand for this, partly because Web 2.0 was a debasement of technology, but mostly because they didn't get hired by those sorts of startups.
Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they
encountered while trying to construct a machine which could generate
the infinite improbability field needed to propagate a meme across
the bandwidth-draining distances between the farthest minds, and at
the end of the day they grumpily announced that such a machine was
virtually impossible.
Then, one day, an intern who had been left to sweep up after a
particularly unsuccessful startup found himself reasoning in this
way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility,
it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to virtualize one is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh round of really hot funding... and turn it on!
He did this and was rather startled when he managed to create the
long-sought-after golden Infinite Improbability generator. He was
even more startled when just after he was awarded the
Y Combinator 2013 Prize for Extreme Agility,
he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable developers
who had realized that one thing they couldn't stand was a smart-ass.
This is Slashdot we are talking about. Nobody is even kissing frogs here.
A computer programmer happens across a frog in the road. The frog
pipes up, "I'm really a beautiful princess and if you kiss me, I'll
stay with you for a week". The programmer shrugs his shoulders and puts
the frog in his pocket.
A few minutes later, the frog says "OK, OK, if you kiss me, I'll give
you great sex for a week". The programmer nods and puts the frog back
in his pocket.
A few minutes later, "Turn me back into a princess and I'll give you
great sex for a whole year!". The programmer smiles and walks on.
Finally, the frog says, "What's wrong with you? I've promised you
great sex for a year from a beautiful princess and you won't even kiss
a frog?"
"I'm a programmer," he replies. "I don't have time for
sex.... But a talking frog is pretty neat!"
...is that you don't talk about Aviation Security.
Modern bombs don't tick. But when a suitcase vibrates, then the throwers gotta shut down the airport. Nine times out of ten it's a dildo, but every once in a while... it's a toothbrush. Of course it's government policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a toothbrush... always use the indefinite article - a toothbrush, never your toothbrush.
The problem is that Pincus has a history of building up a large and popular product, getting a decent-sized population of users, then destroying it through poor management or general asshattery (see Tribe.net). Why anyone thinks he's a good CEO is beyond me.
Because he's smart enough to IPO or otherwise exit his POS companies before they implode. The people who back his ventures with initial capital make fortunes, and only the late-stage and retail bag^H^H^Hshareholders gets fucked.
Over time, all companies either sell out or go to zero. The CEO who's unwilling to sell out because he loves his work, his customers, or his employees too much, is the one who rides it all the way from zero to billions and back to zero again. By the time he realizes it's time to sell, it's too late to sell. Cue the weeping and gnashing of teeth from shareholders of sustainable businesses like RIMM, SUNW, etc.
Re:Uh...it's still there, you know
on
The Web We Lost
·
· Score: 1
Similarly, I knew a few people who were involved in serious discussions of Middle-Eastern history, and found a similar problem: Any mention of Armenia would trigger a flood of bot-generated messages, some megabytes in size, from the Turkish crowd trying to interfere with anything that might mention the Armenian genocide. (Hmmm... I wonder if they're watching this discussion.;-).
Ah, the Serdar Argic "Howling Through The Wires" 1994 USENET World Tour. With T-Shirt from net.legend Joel Furr. And a net.poltergeist horror story from that summer. Good times, good times (dot exe).
I miss the web we lost, but I really miss the NET we USEd.
Figures, Best Korea would launch a satellite with a bad attitude.
Pity, Japan's having pitching a fit over NK's poor angle of attack, but y'all just need to get over it - NK clearly has no inclination to just roll over and take it!
I've seen PR flacks spin before, but never seen the efforts land so flat. It's clear that you get mad props for trying!
From the summary: It's just a matter of downloading an open-source app and changing an XML attribute from 'Trial' to 'Full.'
But it's XML. The framework doesn't let anybody do that! Why would anyone mess around with a text editor, or grep for strings like "trial"? You don't need a filesystem, you just need <QUANTITY="MOAR">XML</QUANTITY>. Separate your data from the presentation and the application, and let some other level of abstraction deal with everything else.
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." - Commander Montgomery Scott (Ret.)
Laughter and derision swept across our fair red world today as the Council of Elders confirmed the success of an intelligence coup against the green diagonally-tilted controlling intelligences (and their accompanying green spherule-shaped periodic functions) who continue to operate from undisclosed locations on the sinister blue planet.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, spoke thus:
Today marks another victory in our ongoing psyops campaign against the blueworlders. Renjoice, podmates, at the consternation of our enemies! On the homefront, our forces continue to track and monitor the intruder's activity. Laser-resistance is not the only means we have to defeat the intruder. Late-breaking news indicate great results achieved through our psychological operations division.
(An audio recording of Reporter #54550 screaming "Sorry, samzenpus, you put your foot in it today, I swear to CmdrTaco it wasn't me! No hard feelings! Don't devitrify me, 'bro!" as he was led away to the thermal polymerization chamber, has not been authenticated.)
and I really won't care much if I lose access to my steam game library, most of them i'm not bothering to play anymore anyways,
That's the difference between the DRM/stream-it/cloud crowd and the no-DRM/download-it/local-storage crowd. One generation has been brought up to think of content as ephemeral, wherein the older generation views cultural content, no matter how banal, as inherently worthy of preservation.
There is no guilt. The "enemy" is no longer people, but pixels rendered in false colour. No need to justify or otherwise rationalize murder. Neat. Welcome to the Ender's game.
On the other hand, if you fuck up because you got bored grinding out the full-bird-colonel level, you don't get to restore from the last save point, you can't even reroll a new character. Yes, rebuying some of your Steam games if you get caught cheating or griefing is rough, but it's nothing compared to a permaban in the form of a dishonorable discharge.
It's a choice the human driver would have to make, so when first starting your driverless car, it might as well prompt you with a series of moral questions like "should I crash into a bus or veer off a bridge if the situation arises?"
This is enterprise software; it's a much bigger problem than that. You're not installing "a single app", you're typically installing an entire software stack. LAMP is just the beginning.
From TFA:
Except it didn't really install correctly. One of the servers just wouldn't start up, and gave me no indication whatsoever the problem was. Another serverâ"the Tomcat web server that hosts the user interfaceâ"started up fine, so I was able to get to a login screen through the Web browser.
...
Oracle provides a pre-built Linux image with all of the necessary business-intelligence tools already installed, running inside Oracle VirtualBox. "What could be easier?" were my famous last words.
The past 20 years have seen us escaped Windows and DLL hell by moving to Linux. Then, we escaped its own little twisted maze of dependency hell by using apt-get. Then, we used all those open source tools to build... the infrastructure that was then used by the closed-source community. In the case of the SAP product, it comes with Tomcat as a web server. In the case of the Oracle.OVA installation, an entirely preconfigured Linux install that probably comes with its own separate stack. If you keep them all on separate VMs, you've got a shot at getting them to talk to each other, but is that really the best use of the underlying hardware? One bit of Java talking to some other abstracted piece of Java, using dozens of VMs as intermediate layers of abstraction?
And now we're right back where we started. SAP will support this revision of Tomcat which works with this version of Java, because, well, that's the Java way. And Oracle appears to have solved that problem by throwing down a.OVA for every subcomponent.
Web services are a great way to save developer time - but in return for that, they're yet another layer of abstraction that has to be dealt with.
Virtualization's a great way to save administrator time. Rather than having to separately install "the right version" of the entire stack from the OS to Java to the configuration properties of the web server, just grab the.ova and work from there. It also gives you some scalability that you might not have had - fire up the.ova on your PC for a demo, or on bigger iron for production.
But in exchange for the ability to get crap out the door ("it works on my machine / Great! Virtualize it and your machine's now the installer!") faster, we've merely exchanged one dependency tree for another: instead of kilobyte-sized.DLLs or megabyte-sized repositories of source from which we can rebuild our binaries, we're now dealing with gigabyte-sized VMs.
The internet may be contributing to divorces (thanks, Facebook!)
Or you could instead say that its facilitating the catching of cheating rats.
The quest giver in the MMORPG says I have to catch 10 rats in order to level up. (Or for the poor saps who work in the industry, the boss says you have to find and ban 10 exploiters before moving off front line support.)
On the plus side, we gamers never had to worry about divorce because we never even leveled up to dating.
You don't see how it would enhance MMORPGs to be able to have a bigger world, so that players could create locations you're unlikely to stumble upon by accident?
Back in the day, SWG actually had that feature - you could buy certain scriptable items and set up a player-driven quest/event. IIRC you could even arrange a event coordinator (a human-controlled NPC working on behalf of the game company) to show up for 5-10 minutes as Vader, Solo, Leia, etc...
The problem is that if you give MMORPG players too much freedom to create, you get the Spore problem: every dungeon entrance looks like Goatse.
Where is the missive from K'breel warning the martians about this impending disaster? Could it be that the methane has already taken out this planetary spokesman?
The Council has been in deliberations. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, summarized the minutes of the deliberations thusly:
"Why, do the beings from the blue world seem so fixated on the offensive properties of methane, a gas released during respiration? Yet they completely ignore the offensive properties of water vapor, the substance most commonly associated with gaseous release during the process of digestion?"
"All the blueworlders point appendages their spindly little appendages at us, and some of the pink ones even make flap-flapping sounds with their upper orifices while expelling water vapor. This insolent gesture is an attempt to mock us; they project their insecurities over the fact that 70% of their world's surface is covered in condensation formed by their own rampant and uncontrolled flatulence!"
When a junior exobiologist suggested that the presence of oxygen in the blueworlders' atmosphere would imply a very short half-life for methane in their atmosphere (and the simultaneous production of egregious quantities of both water and carbon dioxide), K'Breel had the exobiologist sent on a field mission to the blue world, whereupon his gelsacs were dissolved in a can of soda left on someone's desk at JPL.
There was a profound and significant bias towards looking early and often at the eyes of humans and humanoids and also, critically, at the eyes of monsters.
Makes sense. There's a survival advantage whether you're predator or prey, it doesn't matter if you can see it, it's whether or not it can see you. Being able to see its head, claws, or gelsacs is useful, but the thing that gives you a survival advantage is knowing whether or not it can see you. If you can see its eyes, it can see you. (The converse - if you can't see its eyes, it can't see you - does not hold unless you're a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.)
Car Analogy: Same as if you're driving on the highway past an 18-wheeler. If I can see the trucker's eyes in the side mirrors, he can see me. (I'll assume he can't for the sake of prudence, but it's possible he can see me). If I can't see his eyes in the side mirrors, it's my responsibility to position me vehicle in such a way that he can see me, and/or somewhere he can't hit me whether he can see me or not.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's growing faster than G+, then?
/rimshot
We apologize for the confusion in the Critical Patch Updates. The individuals responsible have been sacked. To avoid further confusion, all CPUs will be processed through CUPS, the Critical Update Patch Server.
And now the goddamn printer doesn't work.
Au contraire. Given that the patent office is self-funded, and rejections only generate more filing fees, it'd be Machiavellian for some silly Patent Office executive to hand out incentives for rejecting patents.
Reminds me of this oldie-but-goodie on the evolution of warfare:
- Throw rock
- Hit other guy with stick
- Throw rock with stick on the end of it
- Shoot stick with rock on end of it at guy with curved stick
- Hit rock with fire, make copper, bronze, iron, steel rocks to put on ends of stick
- Put fire in tube, throw rock with fire
- Put fire in metal tube, throw metal rock with fire
- Put fire in metal rocks, drop exploding rocks on other guy
- Drop rocks made of unstable atomic metals on other guy
- Head for the asteroid belt. Throw rock
I'm in.
If Microsoft was Battletoads, it would be like the rat army working for a chair-throwing Big Blag.
Panic and hysteria swept our world today upon the discovery of an inbound cometary body with a non-zero impact probability.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, addressed a terrified world:
"Podmates and citizens, we believe this object to rate, at most a 1 or a 2 on the Q'nirot scale, and expect further observations to eliminate the possibility of a collision. There is cause for continued observation, but at present there is no cause for alarm."
"We believe this potential impactor to be a routine and natural phenomenon, not a hostile threat from the Blueworlders. For one thing, is approaching from the direction away from the Blue World, from a region that even their invasion fleets have yet to control. Furthermore, it has recently been demonstrated that the Blueworlders, despite the technological terrors they have sent to our world, remain utterly incapable of deflecting inbound asteroids and comets. Unlike our illustirous Planetary Defense Forces, the blueworlders lack the technology to do anything about an inbound impactor."
"A solid planetary defense is the right of every being in every technologically-advanced civilization. As the Blueworlders have so recently discovered the hard way, conquest and empire sometimes need to take a back seat to the basic tools that constitute civilization."
When a junior reporter suggested that EVERYBEING PANIC ANYWAYS, the Speaker concluded his remarks:
"For decades, junior reporters have been making proposals to this council that begin with 'we have to fight the blueworlders over there before we have to fight them over here', and today marks the day where they can finally put their gelsacs where their mouths are."
The reporter's gelsacs were then mounted on the impactor unit of the the kinetic kill vehicle that remains the Planetary Defense Force's third and last line of defense.
There's more to a hard drive than the platters.
What this pricing is telling you is that it costs about $30-40 to produce a hunk of machined aluminum, a controller board, a few connectors, some cache memory, a voice coil, a fancy motor, and a read-write head. And it costs about $5 to produce a platter, regardless of whether it was a 500GB/1TB platter that's only good enough to be used on one side, both sides of a 320MB platter, etc.
The pricing curve for SSDs will have a very long-term advantage over spinning metal in that the costs of the "mechanical" parts of an SSD are negligible in comparison to the costs of a spinning disk. There'a a very real floor in HDD pricing, because there's a lot of things inside an HDD that don't store bits.
Very probably just fine. I last booted my //e a year or so ago. Came up just fine. And yes, one of the disks was an Elephant.
EMS: An elephant never forgets.
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Arduinopentamillenuova-5007 Sub-Microcontroller to a Markov chain generator driven by a strong RNG (say, a nice lava lamp and a photodetector) were of course well understood - and such generators were often used to acquire a first round of venture funding by photoshopping all the pixels in the hostess's undergarments simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance to the theory of Rule 34.
Many respectable developers said that they weren't going to stand for this, partly because Web 2.0 was a debasement of technology, but mostly because they didn't get hired by those sorts of startups.
Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they encountered while trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to propagate a meme across the bandwidth-draining distances between the farthest minds, and at the end of the day they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, an intern who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful startup found himself reasoning in this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to virtualize one is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh round of really hot funding... and turn it on!
He did this and was rather startled when he managed to create the long-sought-after golden Infinite Improbability generator. He was even more startled when just after he was awarded the Y Combinator 2013 Prize for Extreme Agility, he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable developers who had realized that one thing they couldn't stand was a smart-ass.
A computer programmer happens across a frog in the road. The frog pipes up, "I'm really a beautiful princess and if you kiss me, I'll stay with you for a week". The programmer shrugs his shoulders and puts the frog in his pocket.
A few minutes later, the frog says "OK, OK, if you kiss me, I'll give you great sex for a week". The programmer nods and puts the frog back in his pocket.
A few minutes later, "Turn me back into a princess and I'll give you great sex for a whole year!". The programmer smiles and walks on.
Finally, the frog says, "What's wrong with you? I've promised you great sex for a year from a beautiful princess and you won't even kiss a frog?"
"I'm a programmer," he replies. "I don't have time for sex.... But a talking frog is pretty neat!"
Modern bombs don't tick. But when a suitcase vibrates, then the throwers gotta shut down the airport. Nine times out of ten it's a dildo, but every once in a while... it's a toothbrush. Of course it's government policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a toothbrush... always use the indefinite article - a toothbrush, never your toothbrush.
For example, you tell him his code code not functional or elegant, and then, you ask him what he thinks about that.
And then you write the goddamn login page yourself.
Because he's smart enough to IPO or otherwise exit his POS companies before they implode. The people who back his ventures with initial capital make fortunes, and only the late-stage and retail bag^H^H^Hshareholders gets fucked.
Hence the rise of the âoesuccessfulâ unsustainable company.
Over time, all companies either sell out or go to zero. The CEO who's unwilling to sell out because he loves his work, his customers, or his employees too much, is the one who rides it all the way from zero to billions and back to zero again. By the time he realizes it's time to sell, it's too late to sell. Cue the weeping and gnashing of teeth from shareholders of sustainable businesses like RIMM, SUNW, etc.
Ah, the Serdar Argic "Howling Through The Wires" 1994 USENET World Tour. With T-Shirt from net.legend Joel Furr. And a net.poltergeist horror story from that summer. Good times, good times (dot exe).
I miss the web we lost, but I really miss the NET we USEd.
I've seen PR flacks spin before, but never seen the efforts land so flat. It's clear that you get mad props for trying!
But it's XML. The framework doesn't let anybody do that! Why would anyone mess around with a text editor, or grep for strings like "trial"? You don't need a filesystem, you just need <QUANTITY="MOAR">XML</QUANTITY>. Separate your data from the presentation and the application, and let some other level of abstraction deal with everything else.
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
- Commander Montgomery Scott (Ret.)
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, spoke thus:
When an elder member of the press corps suggested the psyops campaign in question consisted merely of deceiving "Editing Unit #5" into linking to http://nasaupdatecenter.us/press.html instead of http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20120928a.html, K'Breel had the young reporter's gelsacs slashed, after which the small, rounded particles were first catalyzed into plastic, and upon further heating, reduced to volcanic lapilli.
(An audio recording of Reporter #54550 screaming "Sorry, samzenpus, you put your foot in it today, I swear to CmdrTaco it wasn't me! No hard feelings! Don't devitrify me, 'bro!" as he was led away to the thermal polymerization chamber, has not been authenticated.)
That's the difference between the DRM/stream-it/cloud crowd and the no-DRM/download-it/local-storage crowd. One generation has been brought up to think of content as ephemeral, wherein the older generation views cultural content, no matter how banal, as inherently worthy of preservation.
On the other hand, if you fuck up because you got bored grinding out the full-bird-colonel level, you don't get to restore from the last save point, you can't even reroll a new character. Yes, rebuying some of your Steam games if you get caught cheating or griefing is rough, but it's nothing compared to a permaban in the form of a dishonorable discharge.
"Altima IV: Quest of the Avacar!"
This is enterprise software; it's a much bigger problem than that. You're not installing "a single app", you're typically installing an entire software stack. LAMP is just the beginning.
From TFA:
The past 20 years have seen us escaped Windows and DLL hell by moving to Linux. Then, we escaped its own little twisted maze of dependency hell by using apt-get. Then, we used all those open source tools to build ... the infrastructure that was then used by the closed-source community. In the case of the SAP product, it comes with Tomcat as a web server. In the case of the Oracle .OVA installation, an entirely preconfigured Linux install that probably comes with its own separate stack. If you keep them all on separate VMs, you've got a shot at getting them to talk to each other, but is that really the best use of the underlying hardware? One bit of Java talking to some other abstracted piece of Java, using dozens of VMs as intermediate layers of abstraction?
And now we're right back where we started. SAP will support this revision of Tomcat which works with this version of Java, because, well, that's the Java way. And Oracle appears to have solved that problem by throwing down a .OVA for every subcomponent.
Web services are a great way to save developer time - but in return for that, they're yet another layer of abstraction that has to be dealt with. Virtualization's a great way to save administrator time. Rather than having to separately install "the right version" of the entire stack from the OS to Java to the configuration properties of the web server, just grab the .ova and work from there. It also gives you some scalability that you might not have had - fire up the .ova on your PC for a demo, or on bigger iron for production.
But in exchange for the ability to get crap out the door ("it works on my machine / Great! Virtualize it and your machine's now the installer!") faster, we've merely exchanged one dependency tree for another: instead of kilobyte-sized .DLLs or megabyte-sized repositories of source from which we can rebuild our binaries, we're now dealing with gigabyte-sized VMs.
The quest giver in the MMORPG says I have to catch 10 rats in order to level up. (Or for the poor saps who work in the industry, the boss says you have to find and ban 10 exploiters before moving off front line support.)
On the plus side, we gamers never had to worry about divorce because we never even leveled up to dating.
Back in the day, SWG actually had that feature - you could buy certain scriptable items and set up a player-driven quest/event. IIRC you could even arrange a event coordinator (a human-controlled NPC working on behalf of the game company) to show up for 5-10 minutes as Vader, Solo, Leia, etc...
The problem is that if you give MMORPG players too much freedom to create, you get the Spore problem: every dungeon entrance looks like Goatse.
The Council has been in deliberations. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, summarized the minutes of the deliberations thusly:
"Why, do the beings from the blue world seem so fixated on the offensive properties of methane, a gas released during respiration? Yet they completely ignore the offensive properties of water vapor, the substance most commonly associated with gaseous release during the process of digestion?"
"All the blueworlders point appendages their spindly little appendages at us, and some of the pink ones even make flap-flapping sounds with their upper orifices while expelling water vapor. This insolent gesture is an attempt to mock us; they project their insecurities over the fact that 70% of their world's surface is covered in condensation formed by their own rampant and uncontrolled flatulence!"
When a junior exobiologist suggested that the presence of oxygen in the blueworlders' atmosphere would imply a very short half-life for methane in their atmosphere (and the simultaneous production of egregious quantities of both water and carbon dioxide), K'Breel had the exobiologist sent on a field mission to the blue world, whereupon his gelsacs were dissolved in a can of soda left on someone's desk at JPL.
Makes sense. There's a survival advantage whether you're predator or prey, it doesn't matter if you can see it, it's whether or not it can see you. Being able to see its head, claws, or gelsacs is useful, but the thing that gives you a survival advantage is knowing whether or not it can see you. If you can see its eyes, it can see you. (The converse - if you can't see its eyes, it can't see you - does not hold unless you're a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.)
Car Analogy: Same as if you're driving on the highway past an 18-wheeler. If I can see the trucker's eyes in the side mirrors, he can see me. (I'll assume he can't for the sake of prudence, but it's possible he can see me). If I can't see his eyes in the side mirrors, it's my responsibility to position me vehicle in such a way that he can see me, and/or somewhere he can't hit me whether he can see me or not.