12-21-2012, the World wide intertubes crashes and now an international team of super hackers/spies must quickly move to find and safely bring together the seven cards before The Inventor (Al Gore) allows one ACTA to rule them all
hmmmm.......me thinks I should open up Celtx and start writing...
I think this is where the breakdown occurs. When a lot of folks are saying "socialism" what they mean is a big powerful and unwiedly Federal government dictating from the top. Things like streets, fire, and police tend to be bought and paid for at the local level with sales taxes and property taxes. And myself and most others don't mind that because at least where I live I have more direct impact when it comes time to vote for sales tax or property tax increases to fund such items.
What I want is a smaller Federal Government that provides national defense, engages in foreign affairs, and acts as the referee on interstate commerce disputes. What I don't want is DC telling the states, "You have to provide >. You have to do this because we're the feds and we say so. Oh, by the way, you've got to figure out how to pay for 90% of it yourselves. We're not going to help. Or at least not help you enough unless you are >".
Leave more of governing to the states. If Massachusetts wants to have Universal health care and the people voted for it and are in favor of it, by all means do it. But what works in one state may not work for another due to demographics, etc..
Because if Joe Smoe Computer starts selling Oracle Linux and their hardware and support is crap it reflects poorly on Oracle. With Sun out of the picture, there are only three Enterprise hardware venders left: IBM, HP, and DELL. And Oracle sees IBM as a direct competitor. So that leaves HP and Dell.
The biggest problem Microsoft has is that it is an enterprise software company. Apple is a consumer hardware company. While Apple has some software (OSX, iOS) they are both designed to run on the hardware they sell. Microsoft has a lock on the enterprise software market when it comes to out fitting offices with an OS and productive suite.
We wrote an e-commerce system a few years ago in PHP because when we first started, PHP was available and we were working with a windows host with the goal of someday moving it to *iux. As time went on, it started to become a mess to maintain especially as long standing PHP functions were being deprecated (in our case it was split) and as we grew we knew that we would reach the limit of PostgreSQL. Well, as we started to plan out the next version, it seemed like every time we wanted to add a new feature, there was "already a Perl module" to do it. And our hosting company provides just about every Perl Module worth a crap in it's install (Dedicated servers from Pair Networks). I wrote the initial version of our API in Perl on a sunday afternoon and as we looked to including other databases like Teradata for data warehousing, we found Perl had DBI modules for that, our only option with PHP was ODBC and it's performance was horrible.
I'm from the systems admin background and love my procedural perl, but all the developers are OO guys. I still think that OO Perl is an oxymoron, but with frameworks like catalyst, they can still use their MVC methodology and everyone goes home happy. We're in the middle of building our next version 100% around perl. Perl is robust, well tested, and works. It's just not "sexy" as people say. But I care less about "sexy" and more about building a solution that works today and will likely work years from now.
Those Perl 5 scripts I wrote for basic systems maintanence 10 years ago can be dusted off, change a couple lines to point to the location of perl, and they still work a decade later. I don't think stuff I wrote in php 3 would fair as well.
We started using PostgreSQL back when Sun bought MySQL. And I can't say we've had any real complaints and actually have found PostgreSQL to be easier to maintain with less table corruption, etc..
Somehow I doubt they'd be buying up projects like Drupal, Wordpress, or Joomla. But I could see them buying up companies like Jaspersoft, Openbravo, etc. that produce enterprise grade OSS tools used for BI, ERP, etc. which does fit nicely into their business market. Although seeing Oracle in action in the past, it would likely be that they would buy then slowly let the products wither and die to they are no longer a threat to their core business.
This day in age, if your storing credit card numbers instead of a token, you're doing it wrong. And if your gateway doesn't support tokenization, get one who does. They'll meet or beat your current processing rates.
Depends, how much is your time worth? I worked as an IT guy for a medium sized production house that switched from a mix of PC's and Macs to all macs back in 2002 - 2004. It saved them something like $100,000 in salary costs per year because the 3 MCSE's on staff were let go. All they did was update anti-virus and then clean all the malware & viruses off the machines the AV missed.
In 2005/2006 I left the company and did some freelance editing & 3D (lightwave) work for other videographers I knew in the area. These were mostly smaller shops that maybe had a couple jobs a year that had such requirements. Between the lot of them, it was enough work to keep me busy and earning a good living while studying for the LSAT. I used a Quad Core G5 with 8GB of Ram that set me back about $12k at the time for monitor and everything. Why? FCP & Shake were big reasons. But the other reason had to do with time. I think an equivalent Windows based PC would have been around $9K and I even bought my RAM aftermarket from Crucial for the G5. I studied for the LSAT while projects were rendering. So even if I was not in front of the computer, it was still making me money. I would set some projects to render over night. So while I was sleeping, the machine was working.
Given the performance hit of AV + 3 - 4 hours of down time per week for scanning + another 2 - 3 hours a month cleaning all the crap the AV missed would cost me something like $1200 per month in opportunity loss. And I had the work to keep the machines running. In fact I bought a few Mac Mini's to use as full time rendering nodes.
Then there would have been large software purchases to switch to PC. I was used to FCP & Shake and would have had to spend $$$$ to purchase windows equivalents and then spend more time learning the new programs.....
Lot more to think about there than just the initial cost of a machine and E-peen factors of who has the latest and greatest video card.
Wrong. We shouldn't have a federally owned ISP. In fact the government shouldn't be in the ISP business. They should be in the infrastructure business and that should be done at the city/county level and always should have been. The cities should have been building this infrastructure and in rural areas maybe a county or coop agency. If our local city would have wanted to vote for a sales tax or property tax increase to build fibre to our homes and would lease the lines to whatever ISP/teleco that wanted to compete in the market, we all would have won.
Free speech is free speech. You can decide whether or not to listen. I don't like what these people say. I don't like them protesting the funerals, but I'll defend their right to say/do it. I'll also defend the right of Patriot Riders to drown them out with their Harley's too.
But my understanding is that Sonalysts was/is a company that does a lot of work in programing military simulations for navel warfare for the Navy. The fact that some of those skills transfer over into making games for combat game enthusiasts was secondary. But the main claim to fame was the licensing of the games under the Jane's Defense brand. Once that branding was dropped, the games pretty much fell into obscurity except amongst a niche of folks wanting accurate combat sims, specifically submarine sims. I wonder what the sales figures were like pre/post Jane's branding & promotion.
And tomorrow unemployment goes to 30% or more because then most companies would move their corporate offices to another country to escape the US laws and other companies/countries pulling out of investment and investing elsewhere.
Given the problems we've had with hardware suddenly not working in Ubuntu from versions 8 - 9 - 10 vs. not having that problem with OpenSuSE or SLED, yeah, I wouldn't run Ubuntu either. It's the flavour of the year. In another or year or two they will do something that will make it "too main stream" and the linux fans will run to another up and coming distro.
is not always good. If you are talking about changes like Safari 4 to 5 where nothing changed much in terms of interface and user interaction, it's just a version number. But if you start monkeying around with the UI and changing things that quickly. You make people mad.
As an example I'll use Blender 3D. I used to work as the IT guy in a post production shop that mostly used Lightwave about a decade ago. I got to learn some of the basics, but 3D was a hobby along with video editing. I did some work on the side with FCP, but all the 3D work I did was pure fun & hobby. I was no where near talented enough to do it pro and the $2000 price tag of Lightwave made it a bit pricey (especially given the rendering times). Blender became usable for my goals in the 2.3x series and best of all I could get relatively cheap distributed rendering. I forget the exact details, but it was something like $50 per month unlimited frames of Blender. And I could do it month to month. So basically I'd create my scenes. That usually would take 3 - 5 months to get a few minutes of video. Once I had enough scenes to render about 5 minutes worth of animation, I'd buy a month subscription to the service and render away with multiple passes, etc..
Well, then things started to change with the 2.4x version where it seemed like just as I got used to the new interface, boom, everything suddenly changed and I'd spent the next month trying to figure out where all the old buttons went and what the new ones did. Then the physics engine changed and all the previous scenes I had with particles effects would have to be redone and this continued it seemed like every 6 months. As someone who got to use the program a few hours a week, it seemed like every 6 months I was trying to relearn a program I had been using since 2000.
Meanwhile, in the last couple years if I had used Lightwave, I would have had to upgrade once between Lightwave 8 and 9. And frankly, the interface hasn't changed that much since I started using the application in 1999 with version 5.6. A few things have moved, a bunch of features have been added, but basically I can load up the demo of 9 and within a weekend have my first scene ready to render. The overall style of the interface hasn't changed that much.
If you reprocess the nuclear fuel and use breeder reactors you can power fission reactors for a few hundred years. At the end of it you end up with small amounts of hot material that remains dangerous for a couple hundred years. Not the couple eons of the current system of fueling reactors. And we're talking about hundreds of GW's of power for a couple hundred years with not a lot of waste.
We know what the costs are and as it stands, nuclear is really best form of energy for base load generation we have and we know it works.
Slashdot Mirror
And Al Gore got one to rule them all? Hmmm....whiskey and slashdot don't mix well....
12-21-2012, the World wide intertubes crashes and now an international team of super hackers/spies must quickly move to find and safely bring together the seven cards before The Inventor (Al Gore) allows one ACTA to rule them all
hmmmm.......me thinks I should open up Celtx and start writing...
but this reads like an intro to a bad cyberpunk novel/movie....
I'm just amazed at the fact you have to install a firewall on your PHONE. What's next, Antivirus and spybot scanners for Driod?
I think this is where the breakdown occurs. When a lot of folks are saying "socialism" what they mean is a big powerful and unwiedly Federal government dictating from the top. Things like streets, fire, and police tend to be bought and paid for at the local level with sales taxes and property taxes. And myself and most others don't mind that because at least where I live I have more direct impact when it comes time to vote for sales tax or property tax increases to fund such items.
What I want is a smaller Federal Government that provides national defense, engages in foreign affairs, and acts as the referee on interstate commerce disputes. What I don't want is DC telling the states, "You have to provide >. You have to do this because we're the feds and we say so. Oh, by the way, you've got to figure out how to pay for 90% of it yourselves. We're not going to help. Or at least not help you enough unless you are >".
Leave more of governing to the states. If Massachusetts wants to have Universal health care and the people voted for it and are in favor of it, by all means do it. But what works in one state may not work for another due to demographics, etc..
Because if Joe Smoe Computer starts selling Oracle Linux and their hardware and support is crap it reflects poorly on Oracle. With Sun out of the picture, there are only three Enterprise hardware venders left: IBM, HP, and DELL. And Oracle sees IBM as a direct competitor. So that leaves HP and Dell.
The biggest problem Microsoft has is that it is an enterprise software company. Apple is a consumer hardware company. While Apple has some software (OSX, iOS) they are both designed to run on the hardware they sell. Microsoft has a lock on the enterprise software market when it comes to out fitting offices with an OS and productive suite.
I'm waiting for HDTokenRing my self.
We wrote an e-commerce system a few years ago in PHP because when we first started, PHP was available and we were working with a windows host with the goal of someday moving it to *iux. As time went on, it started to become a mess to maintain especially as long standing PHP functions were being deprecated (in our case it was split) and as we grew we knew that we would reach the limit of PostgreSQL. Well, as we started to plan out the next version, it seemed like every time we wanted to add a new feature, there was "already a Perl module" to do it. And our hosting company provides just about every Perl Module worth a crap in it's install (Dedicated servers from Pair Networks). I wrote the initial version of our API in Perl on a sunday afternoon and as we looked to including other databases like Teradata for data warehousing, we found Perl had DBI modules for that, our only option with PHP was ODBC and it's performance was horrible.
I'm from the systems admin background and love my procedural perl, but all the developers are OO guys. I still think that OO Perl is an oxymoron, but with frameworks like catalyst, they can still use their MVC methodology and everyone goes home happy. We're in the middle of building our next version 100% around perl. Perl is robust, well tested, and works. It's just not "sexy" as people say. But I care less about "sexy" and more about building a solution that works today and will likely work years from now.
Those Perl 5 scripts I wrote for basic systems maintanence 10 years ago can be dusted off, change a couple lines to point to the location of perl, and they still work a decade later. I don't think stuff I wrote in php 3 would fair as well.
Native replication. There's been a number of very good 3rd party tools to do replication & clustering in PostgreSQL for a while now.
We started using PostgreSQL back when Sun bought MySQL. And I can't say we've had any real complaints and actually have found PostgreSQL to be easier to maintain with less table corruption, etc..
Somehow I doubt they'd be buying up projects like Drupal, Wordpress, or Joomla. But I could see them buying up companies like Jaspersoft, Openbravo, etc. that produce enterprise grade OSS tools used for BI, ERP, etc. which does fit nicely into their business market. Although seeing Oracle in action in the past, it would likely be that they would buy then slowly let the products wither and die to they are no longer a threat to their core business.
This day in age, if your storing credit card numbers instead of a token, you're doing it wrong. And if your gateway doesn't support tokenization, get one who does. They'll meet or beat your current processing rates.
From what I've seen, most FOSS projects seem to skip the QA step unless it's a dual licensed product with a company behind it.
Depends, how much is your time worth? I worked as an IT guy for a medium sized production house that switched from a mix of PC's and Macs to all macs back in 2002 - 2004. It saved them something like $100,000 in salary costs per year because the 3 MCSE's on staff were let go. All they did was update anti-virus and then clean all the malware & viruses off the machines the AV missed.
In 2005/2006 I left the company and did some freelance editing & 3D (lightwave) work for other videographers I knew in the area. These were mostly smaller shops that maybe had a couple jobs a year that had such requirements. Between the lot of them, it was enough work to keep me busy and earning a good living while studying for the LSAT. I used a Quad Core G5 with 8GB of Ram that set me back about $12k at the time for monitor and everything. Why? FCP & Shake were big reasons. But the other reason had to do with time. I think an equivalent Windows based PC would have been around $9K and I even bought my RAM aftermarket from Crucial for the G5. I studied for the LSAT while projects were rendering. So even if I was not in front of the computer, it was still making me money. I would set some projects to render over night. So while I was sleeping, the machine was working.
Given the performance hit of AV + 3 - 4 hours of down time per week for scanning + another 2 - 3 hours a month cleaning all the crap the AV missed would cost me something like $1200 per month in opportunity loss. And I had the work to keep the machines running. In fact I bought a few Mac Mini's to use as full time rendering nodes.
Then there would have been large software purchases to switch to PC. I was used to FCP & Shake and would have had to spend $$$$ to purchase windows equivalents and then spend more time learning the new programs.....
Lot more to think about there than just the initial cost of a machine and E-peen factors of who has the latest and greatest video card.
Should have taken the blue pill.
Wrong. We shouldn't have a federally owned ISP. In fact the government shouldn't be in the ISP business. They should be in the infrastructure business and that should be done at the city/county level and always should have been. The cities should have been building this infrastructure and in rural areas maybe a county or coop agency. If our local city would have wanted to vote for a sales tax or property tax increase to build fibre to our homes and would lease the lines to whatever ISP/teleco that wanted to compete in the market, we all would have won.
File>Export>Movie to Iphone
Free speech is free speech. You can decide whether or not to listen. I don't like what these people say. I don't like them protesting the funerals, but I'll defend their right to say/do it. I'll also defend the right of Patriot Riders to drown them out with their Harley's too.
But my understanding is that Sonalysts was/is a company that does a lot of work in programing military simulations for navel warfare for the Navy. The fact that some of those skills transfer over into making games for combat game enthusiasts was secondary. But the main claim to fame was the licensing of the games under the Jane's Defense brand. Once that branding was dropped, the games pretty much fell into obscurity except amongst a niche of folks wanting accurate combat sims, specifically submarine sims. I wonder what the sales figures were like pre/post Jane's branding & promotion.
And tomorrow unemployment goes to 30% or more because then most companies would move their corporate offices to another country to escape the US laws and other companies/countries pulling out of investment and investing elsewhere.
Given the problems we've had with hardware suddenly not working in Ubuntu from versions 8 - 9 - 10 vs. not having that problem with OpenSuSE or SLED, yeah, I wouldn't run Ubuntu either. It's the flavour of the year. In another or year or two they will do something that will make it "too main stream" and the linux fans will run to another up and coming distro.
But you can do anything in perl. Problem is you can do anything in perl (doesn't mean you should.)
is not always good. If you are talking about changes like Safari 4 to 5 where nothing changed much in terms of interface and user interaction, it's just a version number. But if you start monkeying around with the UI and changing things that quickly. You make people mad.
As an example I'll use Blender 3D. I used to work as the IT guy in a post production shop that mostly used Lightwave about a decade ago. I got to learn some of the basics, but 3D was a hobby along with video editing. I did some work on the side with FCP, but all the 3D work I did was pure fun & hobby. I was no where near talented enough to do it pro and the $2000 price tag of Lightwave made it a bit pricey (especially given the rendering times). Blender became usable for my goals in the 2.3x series and best of all I could get relatively cheap distributed rendering. I forget the exact details, but it was something like $50 per month unlimited frames of Blender. And I could do it month to month. So basically I'd create my scenes. That usually would take 3 - 5 months to get a few minutes of video. Once I had enough scenes to render about 5 minutes worth of animation, I'd buy a month subscription to the service and render away with multiple passes, etc..
Well, then things started to change with the 2.4x version where it seemed like just as I got used to the new interface, boom, everything suddenly changed and I'd spent the next month trying to figure out where all the old buttons went and what the new ones did. Then the physics engine changed and all the previous scenes I had with particles effects would have to be redone and this continued it seemed like every 6 months. As someone who got to use the program a few hours a week, it seemed like every 6 months I was trying to relearn a program I had been using since 2000.
Meanwhile, in the last couple years if I had used Lightwave, I would have had to upgrade once between Lightwave 8 and 9. And frankly, the interface hasn't changed that much since I started using the application in 1999 with version 5.6. A few things have moved, a bunch of features have been added, but basically I can load up the demo of 9 and within a weekend have my first scene ready to render. The overall style of the interface hasn't changed that much.
If you reprocess the nuclear fuel and use breeder reactors you can power fission reactors for a few hundred years. At the end of it you end up with small amounts of hot material that remains dangerous for a couple hundred years. Not the couple eons of the current system of fueling reactors. And we're talking about hundreds of GW's of power for a couple hundred years with not a lot of waste.
We know what the costs are and as it stands, nuclear is really best form of energy for base load generation we have and we know it works.