I left alone my mind was blank I needed time to think to get the memories from my mind
What did I see can I believe that what I saw That night was real and not just fantasy
Just what I saw in my own dreams were they Reflections of my warped mind staring back at me
'Cause in my dreams it's always there The evil face that twists my mind and brings me to despair
Yeah... !
The night was black was no use holding back 'Cause I just had to see was someone watching me In the mist dark figures move and twist Was all this for real or some kind of hell
666 the number of the beast Hell and fire were spawned to be released
Torches blazed and sacred chants were praised As they start to cry hand held to the sky In the night the fires are burning bright The ritual has begun Satan's work is done
666 the number of the beast Sacrifice is going on tonight
This can't go on I must inform the lord Can this still be real or just some crazy dream But I feel drawn towards the evil chanting hordes They seem to mesmerize... can't avoid their eyes
666 the number of the beast 666 the one for you you and me
I'm coming back I will return And I'll possess your body and I'll make you burn I have the fire I have the force I have the power to make my evil take it's course
This is going to rub a lot of people the wrong way; just a bit of warning first. It's may sound mean, but I'm trying to help a fellow musician by snapping him out of his misguided fantasy land. Before you mod me down, think about it people: if you have access to professional tools, why would you not use them? You'd be a fool not too, correct?
Being a Linux-fanboy since the mid-nineties...
There's your first problem. Get over it; an OS is only a tool, a means to an end."I'm a Craftsman fanboy". "I'm a Snap-On fanboy." Sounds pretty silly, right? That's because it is silly. A tool is just that. It is either high-end and suitable, or it is junk and unsuitable for the task at hand.
If you're serious at all about your music, you use OS X or Windows. That's where the action is. Full stop. That's where the the real music software will be found; nowhere else. Swallow your pride, choose one of those 2 OS's, and get on with making music. Honestly, this is like GiMP vs. PhotoShop, but on a whole other level. There is NO comparison. Get on with life, and leave Linux in the server room, where it belongs. ALL of the pro-level tools (and most of the toy stuff, too) is on OS X and Windows. Why are you restricting yourself? You're killing your potential and being held back by insisting on using third-rate tools. And for what? Because you're a "fanboy"? Good God, man, grow up!
I say this as someone who makes their living as a Linux sysadmin. I use OS X at home, because I don't let a misguided sense pride get in the way of making music, among other things. You use the right tool for the job. PERIOD. Honestly, who intentionally sabotages themselves?
I've actually done one better (or worse, actually). In the data center at work, there was a rack of Linux servers running Oracle databases & apps, and 1 Windows server (the backup server). The KVM was *always* set to the Windows box, and I'd occasionally log in to it to do something or other; it was my "main" Windows box where I had all my odd & ends (jumpbox/utilities/etc).
So the routine was, pull out the KVM, flip up the screen, hit Ctl-Alt-Del, start typing my user name as the screen faded to life; it became routine.
And it was *always* set to the Windows server. Except that one time it was set to the production linux database server! As the screen faded in, I saw the dreaded message: "System going down for reboot now!". Oh. Shit.
Maybe iWatch refers to a TV (that would be a big surprise, wouldn't it--it's the sort of misdirection that I would expect from them)
I've been thinking the same thing myself re: misdirection, and it would be hilarious if true. Neither makes sense to me; a TV or a watch.
Maybe a redesigned Apple-TV type unit? The watch thing is just bizarre, especially the crap that's been rushed to market so far that really doesn't do anything useful...
Come on, this is 101 stuff, though very entertaining to see the usual geek overkill suggestions of RAID mirrors, ZFS pools, and other fun stuff. We sure love our overkill, huh? (I'm guilty too)
Anyways, what I would do is 1st ask myself "why am I watching a backup run?" Whether it takes 5 minutes or 50 minutes is irrelevant; who watches their backups run? You log the job output and email the results, or whatever your favorite technique is.
Second, set up your daily cron to launch a shell script a little before the earliest time you expect to arrive home. In this shell script you insert a simple loop that does a check to see if you're at home (more below); if you're not at home, the loop sleeps for 10 minutes (or whatever) and runs again. Set an upper bound on the cumulative total amount of time to sleep (6 hours or so); in the event you're out really late/all night, then the script exits cleanly without performing the backup and runs the next day. It can identify you are at home and ready to launch the rsync by one of several conditions: look for the presence of an NFS mount; look for a certain IP range; look for your USB drive mounted that perhaps has a file named ".backup_device"....whatever. When this condition is TRUE, break out of/exit the loop, and the next line contains the rsync command.
Easy!
One of the most important aspects of a backup job is that it is scheduled and runs automatically. If you have to rely on a person to manually start it, then sooner or later (like, within a week) you'll start putting it off or simply forget to do it.
I know this is way way off-topic, but that's probably my favorite DS9 episode; certainly in the top 5. As usual, Garak steals the show, but Sisko does an awesome job as well...
So, here's some random, somewhat connected ideas. This is a long winded post, but please bear with me. First, take a look look at the buzzwords, and you can tell where the money will be flowing. Several years ago, the big thing was "Green" right? Then came "Big Data", and the last 2 or 3 years have been all "Cloud". Now if you've been paying attention, this year's buzzword is "Software Defined $TECHNOLOGY", which of course was kicked off with "Software Defined Networking" (SDN).
This is my notion of what we'll be seeing tons and tons of this year and for the next couple of years until the Next Big Thing hits, and if you move fast, you've got a great chance to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, and sell a shit-ton of product to big, dumb enterprise. Here's the premise: Think of a general area of technology, and try to apply the VMware approach to it; that is, decouple, generalize, pool resources, and rename your tech "Software Defined $TECHNOLOGY". Gold mine.
So, among other players and products, VMware took x86 virtualization from an obscure tech to an every day item that most of us use on a daily basis, whether you're an SA, developer, whatever. If you work in a medium to large shop, you're using VMware. Great (but vastly overrated) product, great timing, these guys really shook things up. So take that same method, that shim (hypervisor) that slipped between the hardware and the OS allowing us to do all kinds of cool stuff: consolidation, live workload migrations, live storage migrations. Take that methodology, that concept, and apply it do different parts of the stack.
Storage: this has been going on in the mid-range and enterprise storage space for several years already. In the past we'd have an array w/hundreds of drives which we'd group into RAID groups, the type and sizes dictated by workload (space, IOP requirements, etc), then from our RAID groups we'd carve the LUNs and present them to the servers. The only issues with this were those of flexibility after the LUNs were presented and what do you know, you need more space, IO, whatever, then you need to do a LUN migration to bigger/faster. Or a more common case is the people asking for disk don't know what they really need, so they way overshoot the space/IO req's and you deliver way more than they end up using, and you just wasted tons of premium disk.
So the 'fix' the storage vendors came up with is the first small step into virtualizing storage: instead of rigid RAID groups and having to have a somewhat knowledgeable storage guy on staff, the storage vendors came up with storage pools. You take a hundred or a few hundred spindles and toss 'em into the pool, and carve LUNs from there. It's like this monstrous RAID group that can absorb 20,000 IOPs (or some crazy number depending on how you slice and dice your array.) Instead of RAID groups dedicated to each application, you now have all of your low-end and mid range applications sharing the same storage pool. Sort of how like you can run 100 OS instances on a small VMware setup. Instead of buying 100 servers, you buy 4 or 5 and dump all of those Windows boxes that that average less than 1% utilization into the VMware cluster, and save a mint on hardware and data center rack space, right? Same idea w/the storage pools. The only problem is you're still dealing with the same vendors and buying tons of overpriced spindles; not as many, but still a lot and you're paying dearly for it.
So the next step is to get away from the arrays that cost $100k's/$megabucks, mix in some scale out mojo (GlusterFS, whatever), add a dash of pooling, use off the shelf servers stuffed w/cheap disk perhaps fronted with some SSD/flash, and voila: "Software Defined Storage". You heard it here first! Or maybe not, you probably thought of this as well. (I was daydreaming this stuff a while ago, and the next day went to a local VMware conference, and no shit, an EMC guy had this same idea and terminology on one of his PowerPoint slides.)
The Idiocracy has won; take a look at what passes for news, it's just junk. Let's see, the standard "Cure for (insert horrible disease) is close at hand!". That's always popular. Or how about "West coast whore and her baby-daddy blah blah blah". And so on.
These "news" organizations have cut their own throats by cutting their staff, killing investigative journalism, and subscribing to the Idiocracy news feeds.
Great example: I always enjoyed reading a Wall Street Journal when I saw one laying around, so I looked into a subscription and see they have an online version. Cool, I thought, a bit pricey but what the hell. So I give it a try, and then start noticing stories about, for example, how so-and-so's new workout routine got her this fabulous bikini-body that will look great in her wedding dress.
Fuck me. Subscription: CANCELLED! The idiots have spoken, and what they demand is idiocy. Count me out.
Why the surprise? Not to imply VLC is in any way, shape or form bad or illegal, but why does it surprise you that the largest, most sophisticated organized crime syndicate this planet has ever know (U.S. Fed) endorses this product?
I mean criminals, gangsters and their ilk are ordinary people just like you and me; they just have a different line of business and shall we say questionable judgement. But they need a good media player like anyone else.
You want some transparency? So do we. Dump it all. Dump fucking everything. Expose this piece of shit government utterly and completely for every last request, letter and shady program.
You spineless twits, you have utterly and completely shattered the trust you had. Fuck you and fuck your cloud; I hope this exposure of your complicity with the criminal organizations in D.C. costs you billions in lost business. I don't care how you do it; leak information, "oops we were hacked", whatever. Dump it all.
The fact that there is 1 person, 1 guy out of >300 million in this country who has the balls to stand up speaks volumes to who the true enemy and threat to the American people, hell the people of Earth FFS, are: the U.S. Federal government.
So either these spineless companies are trying to save face, or Snowden has still got some really juicy dirt left up his sleeve.
Oh noes, think of teh childrens! Oh my, a child has becomes missing.
You know what dude, just because you've bred and your brain chemistry has changed and in the process has removed rationality from you, means exactly jack shit to the rest of the population.
So take your guilt trips and your pathetic emotional pandering, and fuck right off.
Sorry about the tone, and I don't normally post this stuff, but this "think of the children" shit has turned this country into a giant, paralyzed cunt.
WTF makes the Music Companies such a protected species in business anyway?
I'll re-phrase your question, and it might make a bit more sense to you: "WTF makes the Banking Industry such a protected species in business anyway?"
The answer: Money. As in, how to turn other people's money into THEIR money. And once you have have money, you can buy power and legislation.
You see, the "Music Industry" has never been about music at all; that's just the advertising end of it really. Think of the music as the commercials, the suckers (the fans) pay to buy the advertising, and the TRUE SUCKERS, a.k.a. the musicians who sign with these labels, are the source of the money so to speak. Stay with me, now.
The "record labels" are analogous to banks who give out extremely high risk, high interest predatory loans. (Go to your bank and ask for a $100,000 loan to record a music album, and you'll be laughed at or escorted out). The labels act as the banks for the musicians, providing the loan. These loans are known as "advances" to the musicians. And this is where it gets really good.
The labels just happen to have all manner of management and production people and studio engineers and studios and pressing plants and distribution networks and advertising channels (and on and on) at the "musicians disposal" for the marks ( a.k.a. the musicians) to "utilize". The musicians shop at the company store, so to speak, and poof, the loan (advance) is gone. In other words, they record their album, get CD's pressed and get airplay (this is all the company store, remember), and the money is all returned back to it's source, the record label (the bank).
But wait! You see, that advance money is still owed from the marks back to the company at this point, AND the company now owns the music, distribution rights, etc, etc at this point, AND has the marks on the hook for their loan, AND has their original money back as well.
And this is how the "music industry" works. You see, it's not about music at all, it's about running naive musicians through the wringer for everything they have, and then everything they can then earn, until this loan is paid off. That original loan (say, $100,000) is turned into millions, and the marks see not one cent of it.
And all along the way, the skids are greased by the record labels with outright bribery using cash, drugs, prostitutes, you name it. Whatever it takes.
The money is multiplied by working the indentured servants to the bone, politicians are lobbied (bribed/blackmailed/whatever), laws are passed, and we end up with the current state of affairs.
The real cost of these BS authoritarian programs, as far as dollar figures go: First, we all get to fund these despicable agencies via our tax dollars. If that's not bad enough, then the drag on the economy manifested through situations such as the one described in TFS.
Everybody loses.
Not even taking into account the corrosive effects of these programs on our freedoms and rights.
Oracle has a huge, HUGE product portfolio. ERP, middle-ware, you name it.
My opinion is that they bought Sun to gain ownership and control of Java, period. Full stop. Tons of their software relies heavily on it.
I also think they will eventually discard or sell off every last bit of the former Sun properties/technologies (other than Java) not only because very little of it is relevant or profitable anymore, but also to discard the employees who develop and support these items.
I have an S3 and have seen the S4. Instead of just making the thing bigger, then bigger, I think Samsung should focus on quality and usability. It's almost like they design it w/a computer but never do a physical mock-up to see how usable the units are.
Button placement is just bad: the power button is opposite the volume rocker, so when you (awkwardly) shut it off w/the side button, the tendency is to cancel out the button press by hitting the volume rocker. Dumb. The 4 words I utter most often when using my S3: "F&^%ing P.O.S."
Too thin. Way too thin. Very awkward to hold when talking on it. Double the thickness and use it for a better battery and use some better materials (aluminum).
Cheap, plastic-y look and feel. This is again, really bad. Just looks and feels cheap, especially compared to the newer iPhones and HTC One. You're charging us a small fortune for these things; how about spending more than 2 cents on the case?
Actually a pretty well written piece, if a bit wordy. I see a lot of people commenting here are perhaps missing the point, thinking that the author's angle was JS=BAD. Not at all. My take was his issue was not so much with JavaScript, but with Garbage Collected languages in general.
An important point he made regarding GC routines and how they tend to be unpredictable in terms of when and how long they run. Also, much was discussed on his observations that, if you have several times more memory available than what your app needs, the GC routines are very non-intrusive. However, when you get into a low memory situation, the performance hit from GC is huge and causes obvious stutters in the application and/or it's UI.
Also, some discussion on the irony of working around (or trying to "spoof") the GC by using various manual techniques, and how that almost amounts to manual memory management. All in all, a really interesting read.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, some secret. Who'd they hire to keep this data "secret"? The fuckin' NSA?
Zing!
I left alone my mind was blank
I needed time to think to get the memories from my mind
What did I see can I believe that what I saw
That night was real and not just fantasy
Just what I saw in my own dreams were they
Reflections of my warped mind staring back at me
'Cause in my dreams it's always there
The evil face that twists my mind and brings me to despair
Yeah... !
The night was black was no use holding back
'Cause I just had to see was someone watching me
In the mist dark figures move and twist
Was all this for real or some kind of hell
666 the number of the beast
Hell and fire were spawned to be released
Torches blazed and sacred chants were praised
As they start to cry hand held to the sky
In the night the fires are burning bright
The ritual has begun Satan's work is done
666 the number of the beast
Sacrifice is going on tonight
This can't go on I must inform the lord
Can this still be real or just some crazy dream
But I feel drawn towards the evil chanting hordes
They seem to mesmerize... can't avoid their eyes
666 the number of the beast
666 the one for you you and me
I'm coming back I will return
And I'll possess your body and I'll make you burn
I have the fire I have the force
I have the power to make my evil take it's course
Being a Linux-fanboy since the mid-nineties...
There's your first problem. Get over it; an OS is only a tool, a means to an end."I'm a Craftsman fanboy". "I'm a Snap-On fanboy." Sounds pretty silly, right? That's because it is silly. A tool is just that. It is either high-end and suitable, or it is junk and unsuitable for the task at hand.
If you're serious at all about your music, you use OS X or Windows. That's where the action is. Full stop. That's where the the real music software will be found; nowhere else. Swallow your pride, choose one of those 2 OS's, and get on with making music. Honestly, this is like GiMP vs. PhotoShop, but on a whole other level. There is NO comparison. Get on with life, and leave Linux in the server room, where it belongs. ALL of the pro-level tools (and most of the toy stuff, too) is on OS X and Windows. Why are you restricting yourself? You're killing your potential and being held back by insisting on using third-rate tools. And for what? Because you're a "fanboy"? Good God, man, grow up!
I say this as someone who makes their living as a Linux sysadmin. I use OS X at home, because I don't let a misguided sense pride get in the way of making music, among other things. You use the right tool for the job. PERIOD. Honestly, who intentionally sabotages themselves?
Mod me down, boys...
Attention sheep:
The truth is offensive.
Lying is Truth.
Consume.
Conform.
I've actually done one better (or worse, actually). In the data center at work, there was a rack of Linux servers running Oracle databases & apps, and 1 Windows server (the backup server). The KVM was *always* set to the Windows box, and I'd occasionally log in to it to do something or other; it was my "main" Windows box where I had all my odd & ends (jumpbox/utilities/etc).
So the routine was, pull out the KVM, flip up the screen, hit Ctl-Alt-Del, start typing my user name as the screen faded to life; it became routine.
And it was *always* set to the Windows server. Except that one time it was set to the production linux database server! As the screen faded in, I saw the dreaded message: "System going down for reboot now!". Oh. Shit.
Lesson learned. I had fun explaining that one.
I've been thinking the same thing myself re: misdirection, and it would be hilarious if true. Neither makes sense to me; a TV or a watch.
Maybe a redesigned Apple-TV type unit? The watch thing is just bizarre, especially the crap that's been rushed to market so far that really doesn't do anything useful...
With Dice in charge of Slashdot, has Slashdot's head disappeared up it's own asshole?
Come on, this is 101 stuff, though very entertaining to see the usual geek overkill suggestions of RAID mirrors, ZFS pools, and other fun stuff. We sure love our overkill, huh? (I'm guilty too)
Anyways, what I would do is 1st ask myself "why am I watching a backup run?" Whether it takes 5 minutes or 50 minutes is irrelevant; who watches their backups run? You log the job output and email the results, or whatever your favorite technique is.
Second, set up your daily cron to launch a shell script a little before the earliest time you expect to arrive home. In this shell script you insert a simple loop that does a check to see if you're at home (more below); if you're not at home, the loop sleeps for 10 minutes (or whatever) and runs again. Set an upper bound on the cumulative total amount of time to sleep (6 hours or so); in the event you're out really late/all night, then the script exits cleanly without performing the backup and runs the next day. It can identify you are at home and ready to launch the rsync by one of several conditions: look for the presence of an NFS mount; look for a certain IP range; look for your USB drive mounted that perhaps has a file named ".backup_device"....whatever. When this condition is TRUE, break out of/exit the loop, and the next line contains the rsync command. Easy!
One of the most important aspects of a backup job is that it is scheduled and runs automatically. If you have to rely on a person to manually start it, then sooner or later (like, within a week) you'll start putting it off or simply forget to do it.
I know this is way way off-topic, but that's probably my favorite DS9 episode; certainly in the top 5. As usual, Garak steals the show, but Sisko does an awesome job as well...
So, here's some random, somewhat connected ideas. This is a long winded post, but please bear with me. First, take a look look at the buzzwords, and you can tell where the money will be flowing. Several years ago, the big thing was "Green" right? Then came "Big Data", and the last 2 or 3 years have been all "Cloud". Now if you've been paying attention, this year's buzzword is "Software Defined $TECHNOLOGY", which of course was kicked off with "Software Defined Networking" (SDN).
This is my notion of what we'll be seeing tons and tons of this year and for the next couple of years until the Next Big Thing hits, and if you move fast, you've got a great chance to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, and sell a shit-ton of product to big, dumb enterprise. Here's the premise: Think of a general area of technology, and try to apply the VMware approach to it; that is, decouple, generalize, pool resources, and rename your tech "Software Defined $TECHNOLOGY". Gold mine.
So, among other players and products, VMware took x86 virtualization from an obscure tech to an every day item that most of us use on a daily basis, whether you're an SA, developer, whatever. If you work in a medium to large shop, you're using VMware. Great (but vastly overrated) product, great timing, these guys really shook things up. So take that same method, that shim (hypervisor) that slipped between the hardware and the OS allowing us to do all kinds of cool stuff: consolidation, live workload migrations, live storage migrations. Take that methodology, that concept, and apply it do different parts of the stack.
Storage: this has been going on in the mid-range and enterprise storage space for several years already. In the past we'd have an array w/hundreds of drives which we'd group into RAID groups, the type and sizes dictated by workload (space, IOP requirements, etc), then from our RAID groups we'd carve the LUNs and present them to the servers. The only issues with this were those of flexibility after the LUNs were presented and what do you know, you need more space, IO, whatever, then you need to do a LUN migration to bigger/faster. Or a more common case is the people asking for disk don't know what they really need, so they way overshoot the space/IO req's and you deliver way more than they end up using, and you just wasted tons of premium disk.
So the 'fix' the storage vendors came up with is the first small step into virtualizing storage: instead of rigid RAID groups and having to have a somewhat knowledgeable storage guy on staff, the storage vendors came up with storage pools. You take a hundred or a few hundred spindles and toss 'em into the pool, and carve LUNs from there. It's like this monstrous RAID group that can absorb 20,000 IOPs (or some crazy number depending on how you slice and dice your array.) Instead of RAID groups dedicated to each application, you now have all of your low-end and mid range applications sharing the same storage pool. Sort of how like you can run 100 OS instances on a small VMware setup. Instead of buying 100 servers, you buy 4 or 5 and dump all of those Windows boxes that that average less than 1% utilization into the VMware cluster, and save a mint on hardware and data center rack space, right? Same idea w/the storage pools. The only problem is you're still dealing with the same vendors and buying tons of overpriced spindles; not as many, but still a lot and you're paying dearly for it.
So the next step is to get away from the arrays that cost $100k's/$megabucks, mix in some scale out mojo (GlusterFS, whatever), add a dash of pooling, use off the shelf servers stuffed w/cheap disk perhaps fronted with some SSD/flash, and voila: "Software Defined Storage". You heard it here first! Or maybe not, you probably thought of this as well. (I was daydreaming this stuff a while ago, and the next day went to a local VMware conference, and no shit, an EMC guy had this same idea and terminology on one of his PowerPoint slides.)
OK, so that's storage. What else can w
And behind every great woman, there's a man. Staring at her ass.
The Idiocracy has won; take a look at what passes for news, it's just junk. Let's see, the standard "Cure for (insert horrible disease) is close at hand!". That's always popular. Or how about "West coast whore and her baby-daddy blah blah blah". And so on.
These "news" organizations have cut their own throats by cutting their staff, killing investigative journalism, and subscribing to the Idiocracy news feeds.
Great example: I always enjoyed reading a Wall Street Journal when I saw one laying around, so I looked into a subscription and see they have an online version. Cool, I thought, a bit pricey but what the hell. So I give it a try, and then start noticing stories about, for example, how so-and-so's new workout routine got her this fabulous bikini-body that will look great in her wedding dress.
Fuck me. Subscription: CANCELLED! The idiots have spoken, and what they demand is idiocy. Count me out.
Why the surprise? Not to imply VLC is in any way, shape or form bad or illegal, but why does it surprise you that the largest, most sophisticated organized crime syndicate this planet has ever know (U.S. Fed) endorses this product?
I mean criminals, gangsters and their ilk are ordinary people just like you and me; they just have a different line of business and shall we say questionable judgement. But they need a good media player like anyone else.
I am dead serious, and this is NOT a troll.
You want some transparency? So do we. Dump it all. Dump fucking everything. Expose this piece of shit government utterly and completely for every last request, letter and shady program.
You spineless twits, you have utterly and completely shattered the trust you had. Fuck you and fuck your cloud; I hope this exposure of your complicity with the criminal organizations in D.C. costs you billions in lost business. I don't care how you do it; leak information, "oops we were hacked", whatever. Dump it all.
The fact that there is 1 person, 1 guy out of >300 million in this country who has the balls to stand up speaks volumes to who the true enemy and threat to the American people, hell the people of Earth FFS, are: the U.S. Federal government.
So either these spineless companies are trying to save face, or Snowden has still got some really juicy dirt left up his sleeve.
I really, really hope it's the latter.
Microsoft is evil.... good thing I use Apple!
(Looks at parent's linked list of sell-out whores)
FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUCK.
Well, at least I don't use Verizon (whimper)
Oh noes, think of teh childrens! Oh my, a child has becomes missing.
You know what dude, just because you've bred and your brain chemistry has changed and in the process has removed rationality from you, means exactly jack shit to the rest of the population.
So take your guilt trips and your pathetic emotional pandering, and fuck right off.
Sorry about the tone, and I don't normally post this stuff, but this "think of the children" shit has turned this country into a giant, paralyzed cunt.
Good stuff, man; interesting read. Thanks for posting.
And someone mod this guy up for coining the term "bonii"!
I'll re-phrase your question, and it might make a bit more sense to you: "WTF makes the Banking Industry such a protected species in business anyway?"
The answer: Money. As in, how to turn other people's money into THEIR money. And once you have have money, you can buy power and legislation.
You see, the "Music Industry" has never been about music at all; that's just the advertising end of it really. Think of the music as the commercials, the suckers (the fans) pay to buy the advertising, and the TRUE SUCKERS, a.k.a. the musicians who sign with these labels, are the source of the money so to speak. Stay with me, now.
The "record labels" are analogous to banks who give out extremely high risk, high interest predatory loans. (Go to your bank and ask for a $100,000 loan to record a music album, and you'll be laughed at or escorted out). The labels act as the banks for the musicians, providing the loan. These loans are known as "advances" to the musicians. And this is where it gets really good.
The labels just happen to have all manner of management and production people and studio engineers and studios and pressing plants and distribution networks and advertising channels (and on and on) at the "musicians disposal" for the marks ( a.k.a. the musicians) to "utilize". The musicians shop at the company store, so to speak, and poof, the loan (advance) is gone. In other words, they record their album, get CD's pressed and get airplay (this is all the company store, remember), and the money is all returned back to it's source, the record label (the bank).
But wait! You see, that advance money is still owed from the marks back to the company at this point, AND the company now owns the music, distribution rights, etc, etc at this point, AND has the marks on the hook for their loan, AND has their original money back as well.
And this is how the "music industry" works. You see, it's not about music at all, it's about running naive musicians through the wringer for everything they have, and then everything they can then earn, until this loan is paid off. That original loan (say, $100,000) is turned into millions, and the marks see not one cent of it.
And all along the way, the skids are greased by the record labels with outright bribery using cash, drugs, prostitutes, you name it. Whatever it takes.
The money is multiplied by working the indentured servants to the bone, politicians are lobbied (bribed/blackmailed/whatever), laws are passed, and we end up with the current state of affairs.
Neat, huh?
Three words seems a bit excessive when it can be easily done with two words.
Earth's A$$hole = New Jersey
Thanks! I'll be here all week...
The real cost of these BS authoritarian programs, as far as dollar figures go: First, we all get to fund these despicable agencies via our tax dollars. If that's not bad enough, then the drag on the economy manifested through situations such as the one described in TFS.
Everybody loses.
Not even taking into account the corrosive effects of these programs on our freedoms and rights.
Oracle has a huge, HUGE product portfolio. ERP, middle-ware, you name it.
My opinion is that they bought Sun to gain ownership and control of Java, period. Full stop. Tons of their software relies heavily on it.
I also think they will eventually discard or sell off every last bit of the former Sun properties/technologies (other than Java) not only because very little of it is relevant or profitable anymore, but also to discard the employees who develop and support these items.
Oracle: Where Technology Goes to Die.
I have an S3 and have seen the S4. Instead of just making the thing bigger, then bigger, I think Samsung should focus on quality and usability. It's almost like they design it w/a computer but never do a physical mock-up to see how usable the units are.
Button placement is just bad: the power button is opposite the volume rocker, so when you (awkwardly) shut it off w/the side button, the tendency is to cancel out the button press by hitting the volume rocker. Dumb. The 4 words I utter most often when using my S3: "F&^%ing P.O.S."
Too thin. Way too thin. Very awkward to hold when talking on it. Double the thickness and use it for a better battery and use some better materials (aluminum).
Cheap, plastic-y look and feel. This is again, really bad. Just looks and feels cheap, especially compared to the newer iPhones and HTC One. You're charging us a small fortune for these things; how about spending more than 2 cents on the case?
Come on Samsung, this isn't rocket science...
Actually a pretty well written piece, if a bit wordy. I see a lot of people commenting here are perhaps missing the point, thinking that the author's angle was JS=BAD. Not at all. My take was his issue was not so much with JavaScript, but with Garbage Collected languages in general.
An important point he made regarding GC routines and how they tend to be unpredictable in terms of when and how long they run. Also, much was discussed on his observations that, if you have several times more memory available than what your app needs, the GC routines are very non-intrusive. However, when you get into a low memory situation, the performance hit from GC is huge and causes obvious stutters in the application and/or it's UI.
Also, some discussion on the irony of working around (or trying to "spoof") the GC by using various manual techniques, and how that almost amounts to manual memory management. All in all, a really interesting read.
But it didn't teach you how to spell it...
Sort of like programmers or developers referring to themselves as engineers, eh?