Another neat thing about Oracle that you obviously don't understand is that Oracle makes you pay for the features you use, but the software lets you turn on whatever features you want. If you're in a large organization with poor database oversight, you may wake up one day to discover that you're using features you aren't paying for, and you're one audit away from a few more tens of thousands of dollars being flushed down the Oracle toilet.
Lots of organizations bought Oracle in the past because it was trendy or had some little feature that necessitated it, and now that they're growing, they're discovering that the costs are going up too, but they don't need the features that necessitated the original purchase, or the open source databases now have those features. Or maybe they just realize that trendy and expensive doesn't beat free.
Marx's crazy ideas are only palatable to the ignorant and wishful-thinking because he got the diagnosis so spot on. The problem is that his solution is completely unworkable—much, much worse than the condition. His ultimate contribution is a resounding indictment with no real solutions offered. So nothing gained.
I'm pretty sure you don't post "thousands upon thousands" of stories each day, and yet not a week goes by that someone (usually you) posts something that was on the front page three hours before.
Rob has always been clear and vociferous in defining what makes a story appropriate for Slashdot, and those standards have become deeply ingrained in the rest of the editorial staff.
Except, of course, for the one speaking these words.
I think a more appropriate analogy might be "I owe the credit card company 12 million dollars, why don't I skip that cup of coffee this morning." We're talking about 7-8 orders of magnitude here.
I think the OP is questioning the choice of the word "anyone." There are two 2010 MacBook Pros in my house, and neither one has the issue either. Sounds to me like a bad batch rather than an epidemic.
You know, I do agree with you. But I also think this is being blown a little bit out of proportion. No enterprises go and install the newest version of Java the day it comes out on their production apps. It will be nice if we get to start using Java 7 in a year. It's definitely not going to happen next month, and by then they will probably have a release out with this fixed.
I agree that Oracle should have treated this as the show-stopper it is, but this is just another sign of what we already knew: Oracle's business model is basically to create unreasonable dependence and milk it for all its worth. They're not about creating value--the changes in Java 1.7 are fairly pitiful--no, they're really just about getting large organizations hooked on their stuff and then making them crawl through broken glass to get it. This is just more broken glass. Our whining about it is going to have the same effect it has on other kinds of junkies: no effect at all.
Not so. Canvas doesn't do sprites. You draw your vectors on the image, but as soon as your draw call returns, there's nothing persistent; no data structure is left around, just a bunch of pixels in an image buffer somewhere. This is one reason Raphael is still gaining developers. It's much easier to manipulate embedded SVG through JavaScript than the canvas.
The canvas tag is much more "fire and forget." There's also no decent scene graph library for canvas yet. Lots of web developers like me writing for-play scene graph libraries (Cake, Amino) but the one game developer that was working on a library for this got bought by Disney and forced in-house (RocketPack).
No, there's really no question that the Bison grammar is preferred. The only real question is why this is news at all. It's such a minor violation it's a complete technicality. The code for the Bison implementation and the grammar file are all GPL and available as well, they just weren't in the tarball for distribution due to a small oversight.
Yeah, the problem is that you want and need ACID, even if you don't know what it means. Very, very rarely, you may find yourself in a situation where availability demands are too great for systems with the ACID property, and then you should consider using one of these non-relational systems. The problem from where I'm sitting, is that too many young, ignorant, inexperienced developers think that their shitty little website needs to be prepared for handling millions of hits per second, and jump to two conclusions: one, that the problem is their database (and not the way they're using it), and two, that ACID should be thrown out the window to fix it.
All other things being equal, you are much more likely to be implicitly depending on ACIDity than in a situation where demand is great enough that choosing NoSQL is worth the trouble you're going to get into.
If apple.com were an invite-only social network released publicly just a few weeks ago and rate-limiting subscriptions I guess there would be no comparison, right?
They're equivalent to you. To my mom, there is a huge difference. The great thing about this world is that we each get to balance our priorities differently. My Mom hasn't yet found six months to devote to learning Linux, but she has no trouble dumping an extra $400 on a laptop every four years and perhaps an extra $300 on a backup drive every four years. Not much different from me spending $80 on an oil change when the oil probably only costs $20. Priorities.
In this particular case, the author spoke hardly any English, and apparently an early contributor suggested the name. She didn't find out what it meant until much later, and now she wants nothing to do with open source because of the havoc this malicious contributor started.
It might be hypocritical, but we're not here to be the arbiters of social norms. We're here to write code.
Naming stuff to be kitschy or to offend other people is childish. You don't have an obligation to anyone to name your software any particular way, but if you behave like a child, you shouldn't be too surprised when adults get offended. If your goal is to write code that gets used, you should pretend to be an adult--at least while you're naming it.
If you make a useful library and intentionally give it a disgusting name, you're a psychological sadist. You don't care what other people think, you just enjoy knowing they squirm every time they have to deal with your library. Grow up. Get a little empathy.
I got an MD player in 1999, and there was zero confusion over whether or not it would take MP3s or hook up to your computer. The answer was no. NetMD came out in 2001 and purportedly let you transfer music from your computer to your MD player. I never wanted one in particular, because the software was Windows-only and I ran Linux exclusively back then. I could see the confusion, but I thought they were pretty up-front about MD being ATRAC-only, because they thought ATRAC was a really rad format. I don't really know enough about it to have an educated opinion, but I remember on some of the MD forums people would talk about what CDs they had that produced artifacts when compressed to ATRAC, and there were really only a handful of good examples.
It's a distortion on the part of the article. Radio astronomy raw data are not images. And the computational effort to reduce the raw data into data from which you could make images is large enough that you tend to store the result of the processing alongside the original data--it takes up more space, not less.
It still doesn't matter, because there's no way they'll be running the telescope at full throttle until several years after commissioning.
It's a specious analogy. Video and audio can be compressed with loss, and the algorithms make heavy use of human perceptual limitations. Scientific data produced by large instruments need to have breadth and depth; the instrument is a scarce resource and there are unlimited ways of reducing radio astronomy datasets to produce different data and different insights. Especially with radio, you're going to be collecting a ton of white noise-looking data, but you can't use a lossy compression algorithm to trim it, so you're stuck doing lossless compression on essentially random data, which doesn't work so well.
At the same time, it's an empty boast. I'm a programmer on the EVLA project. WIDAR would happily produce hundreds of gigabytes per second if we let it, but the rest of our pipeline is completely unprepared for it, and the astronomers don't have a cluster large enough to reduce datasets that big anyway. Some of their analyses aren't even parallelizable. So in practice, you want an instrument that can gather ridiculous amounts of data for PR and future-proofing purposes, but your scientists aren't likely to use it that way. Certainly not in the year it goes live.
Slashdot Mirror
Another neat thing about Oracle that you obviously don't understand is that Oracle makes you pay for the features you use, but the software lets you turn on whatever features you want. If you're in a large organization with poor database oversight, you may wake up one day to discover that you're using features you aren't paying for, and you're one audit away from a few more tens of thousands of dollars being flushed down the Oracle toilet.
Lots of organizations bought Oracle in the past because it was trendy or had some little feature that necessitated it, and now that they're growing, they're discovering that the costs are going up too, but they don't need the features that necessitated the original purchase, or the open source databases now have those features. Or maybe they just realize that trendy and expensive doesn't beat free.
Marx's crazy ideas are only palatable to the ignorant and wishful-thinking because he got the diagnosis so spot on. The problem is that his solution is completely unworkable—much, much worse than the condition. His ultimate contribution is a resounding indictment with no real solutions offered. So nothing gained.
Guile is working on Lua support.
I'm pretty sure you don't post "thousands upon thousands" of stories each day, and yet not a week goes by that someone (usually you) posts something that was on the front page three hours before.
Except, of course, for the one speaking these words.
Excellent book. This is exactly what I came here to mention. This isn't news at all.
Um, because it runs on the CLR in a fashion almost identical to Java on the JVM?
$500,000 << $14,000,000,000,000
I think a more appropriate analogy might be "I owe the credit card company 12 million dollars, why don't I skip that cup of coffee this morning." We're talking about 7-8 orders of magnitude here.
I think the OP is questioning the choice of the word "anyone." There are two 2010 MacBook Pros in my house, and neither one has the issue either. Sounds to me like a bad batch rather than an epidemic.
You know, I do agree with you. But I also think this is being blown a little bit out of proportion. No enterprises go and install the newest version of Java the day it comes out on their production apps. It will be nice if we get to start using Java 7 in a year. It's definitely not going to happen next month, and by then they will probably have a release out with this fixed.
I agree that Oracle should have treated this as the show-stopper it is, but this is just another sign of what we already knew: Oracle's business model is basically to create unreasonable dependence and milk it for all its worth. They're not about creating value--the changes in Java 1.7 are fairly pitiful--no, they're really just about getting large organizations hooked on their stuff and then making them crawl through broken glass to get it. This is just more broken glass. Our whining about it is going to have the same effect it has on other kinds of junkies: no effect at all.
Not so. Canvas doesn't do sprites. You draw your vectors on the image, but as soon as your draw call returns, there's nothing persistent; no data structure is left around, just a bunch of pixels in an image buffer somewhere. This is one reason Raphael is still gaining developers. It's much easier to manipulate embedded SVG through JavaScript than the canvas.
The canvas tag is much more "fire and forget." There's also no decent scene graph library for canvas yet. Lots of web developers like me writing for-play scene graph libraries (Cake, Amino) but the one game developer that was working on a library for this got bought by Disney and forced in-house (RocketPack).
No, there's really no question that the Bison grammar is preferred. The only real question is why this is news at all. It's such a minor violation it's a complete technicality. The code for the Bison implementation and the grammar file are all GPL and available as well, they just weren't in the tarball for distribution due to a small oversight.
Aww, shucks, I guess that means nobody's hiring theologians.
Yeah, the problem is that you want and need ACID, even if you don't know what it means. Very, very rarely, you may find yourself in a situation where availability demands are too great for systems with the ACID property, and then you should consider using one of these non-relational systems. The problem from where I'm sitting, is that too many young, ignorant, inexperienced developers think that their shitty little website needs to be prepared for handling millions of hits per second, and jump to two conclusions: one, that the problem is their database (and not the way they're using it), and two, that ACID should be thrown out the window to fix it.
All other things being equal, you are much more likely to be implicitly depending on ACIDity than in a situation where demand is great enough that choosing NoSQL is worth the trouble you're going to get into.
If apple.com were an invite-only social network released publicly just a few weeks ago and rate-limiting subscriptions I guess there would be no comparison, right?
They're equivalent to you. To my mom, there is a huge difference. The great thing about this world is that we each get to balance our priorities differently. My Mom hasn't yet found six months to devote to learning Linux, but she has no trouble dumping an extra $400 on a laptop every four years and perhaps an extra $300 on a backup drive every four years. Not much different from me spending $80 on an oil change when the oil probably only costs $20. Priorities.
In this particular case, the author spoke hardly any English, and apparently an early contributor suggested the name. She didn't find out what it meant until much later, and now she wants nothing to do with open source because of the havoc this malicious contributor started.
It might be hypocritical, but we're not here to be the arbiters of social norms. We're here to write code.
Naming stuff to be kitschy or to offend other people is childish. You don't have an obligation to anyone to name your software any particular way, but if you behave like a child, you shouldn't be too surprised when adults get offended. If your goal is to write code that gets used, you should pretend to be an adult--at least while you're naming it.
If you make a useful library and intentionally give it a disgusting name, you're a psychological sadist. You don't care what other people think, you just enjoy knowing they squirm every time they have to deal with your library. Grow up. Get a little empathy.
I got an MD player in 1999, and there was zero confusion over whether or not it would take MP3s or hook up to your computer. The answer was no. NetMD came out in 2001 and purportedly let you transfer music from your computer to your MD player. I never wanted one in particular, because the software was Windows-only and I ran Linux exclusively back then. I could see the confusion, but I thought they were pretty up-front about MD being ATRAC-only, because they thought ATRAC was a really rad format. I don't really know enough about it to have an educated opinion, but I remember on some of the MD forums people would talk about what CDs they had that produced artifacts when compressed to ATRAC, and there were really only a handful of good examples.
It's a distortion on the part of the article. Radio astronomy raw data are not images. And the computational effort to reduce the raw data into data from which you could make images is large enough that you tend to store the result of the processing alongside the original data--it takes up more space, not less.
It still doesn't matter, because there's no way they'll be running the telescope at full throttle until several years after commissioning.
It's a specious analogy. Video and audio can be compressed with loss, and the algorithms make heavy use of human perceptual limitations. Scientific data produced by large instruments need to have breadth and depth; the instrument is a scarce resource and there are unlimited ways of reducing radio astronomy datasets to produce different data and different insights. Especially with radio, you're going to be collecting a ton of white noise-looking data, but you can't use a lossy compression algorithm to trim it, so you're stuck doing lossless compression on essentially random data, which doesn't work so well.
At the same time, it's an empty boast. I'm a programmer on the EVLA project. WIDAR would happily produce hundreds of gigabytes per second if we let it, but the rest of our pipeline is completely unprepared for it, and the astronomers don't have a cluster large enough to reduce datasets that big anyway. Some of their analyses aren't even parallelizable. So in practice, you want an instrument that can gather ridiculous amounts of data for PR and future-proofing purposes, but your scientists aren't likely to use it that way. Certainly not in the year it goes live.
The US is not even involved in the SKA.
Yep, that's you.
MiniDisc players are still fairly common in Japan. Popularity in Asia is a very different thing than popularity here.
I mean digitally sign in the cryptographic sense, which seems to be what the OP troll was saying.