You've completely missed the point: it's not whether the statement is infurating or outrageous, it's whether it's (protected) satire. Using Beck's own style right back at him is pretty much the definition of satire. In your example, the satire element is nonexistent.
For many news articles, the synopsis often carries 90% of the value of the article; the rest is reactions and analysis that an astute reader could provide without help.
Sadly, that's too often the case for current news outlets, but it's not what quality journalism is about. However, Murdoch isn't at all interested in quality news. He's solely interested in money and power, the latter biased heavily in his case towards techniques of information control. High quality news has no place within his goals.
I note that you over-condensed the linked article's statement to a meaning much different than your summation. Some more info from that article:
scientists have proved that it is possible to create complex financial bundles [...] that hide bad assets in such a way that no computer or human can detect the bad assets.
Even worse? Even after a buyer loses their shirt on the investment, it is impossible for the buyer to prove that they were sold junk, which makes it impossible to regulate.
This indicates against allowing complex financial bundles, as they create vulnerabilities in the financial system. More interesting details at the parent article's link, including links to other analysis as well as the original publication.
Good grief. Homophone insanity. We've got Clojure doing interesting things in the language and concurrency space. Block support in C/Objective-C reinjecting "closures" into everyone's vocabulary. And now Google jumps in with "Closure" just to make sure that no one has any idea what anyone else is talking about...
A quick surfing of the Scantegrity Wikipedia article and the links above didn't definitively answer an interesting (to me) question: can it be applied to a ranked voting system such as IRV or Condorcet?
The offhand solution would be to use Scantegrity's technology with a matrix of bubbles for ranks vs. candidates. Anyone familiar with this work know whether this has been addressed? I skimmed through the IEEE article as well, and found no mention of any ranked voting systems.
FWIW, I've been surfing forwards since Karmic alpha2. Aside from a few annoying app bugs along the way (most often upstream issues), the only thing I got bit by was the upstart changeover breakage. But that's what one gets for tracking a prerelease distro with big changes landing. Fortunately, I'd followed Debian unstable for many years previously and have good Linux experience generally, and so got myself up and running again in short order (before the repo was officially declared all-clear again).
I've had no major problems, no reboots that I didn't initiate, and frankly I'm pretty impressed with how many nettling little bugs in end-user apps vanished even between late Beta phase and the official release.
Because you somehow prefer sFir (Flash-based) headline fonts or text rendered into big headline images? Really, if a site has sucky typography (or content problems or lousy navigation or lame presentation) then just stay away. It's pretty much that easy.
WOFF, if it works, is a fine idea IMO. It's about time that typography grows up and comes to the web. Personally, I'm hoping that this succeeds wildly and increases interest in free/libre/oss fonts and font authoring tools.
Also consider that web-delivered fonts open the door to "render[ing] languages for which font support is usually lacking.". Folks in linguistic minorities can use this to share content without having to wheedle browser/OS makers for font support, and without any fiddly configuration on the part of the reader.
...when the web was more about content than fancy presentation?
No, you can't have your (ugly) static unstyled HTML back. Because the history of the web has shown that limiting technology presents no real limit to either bad presentation or awful information architecture. Web publishers who are doin' it wrong will continue to suck no matter how the medium evolves. It's the people with a clue, who create compelling new experiences, who are the ones I want to see empowered with new ways of doing things.
The people actually putting artificial intelligence into practice knew that AI, like so many other things, would benefit us in small steps.
Actually, there was a period very early on ('50s) when it was naively thought that "we'll have thinking machines within five years!" That's a paraphrase from a now-hilarious film reel interview with an MIT prof from the early 1950's. A film reel which was shown as the first thing in my graduate level AI class, I might add. Sadly, I no longer have the reference to this clip.
One major lesson was that there's an error in thinking "surely solving hard problem X must mean we've achieved artificial intelligence." As each of these problems fell (a computer passing the freshman calc exam at MIT, a computer beating a chess grandmaster, and many others), we realized that the solutions were simply due to understanding the problem and designing appropriate algorithms and/or hardware.
The other lesson from that first day of AI class was that the above properties made AI into the incredible shrinking discipline: each of its successes weren't recognized as "intelligence", but often did spawn entire new disciplines of powerful problem solving that are used everywhere today. So "AI" research gets no credit, even though its researchers have made great strides for computing in general.
CSV is kinda evil (see my post above), but it's better for tabular data than JSON or XML. Again, a tabular serialization format such as Avro, Thrift, or Protocol Buffers might well be far better than CSV for tabular data. JSON has quite a bit of format bloat, and would need some standardized way to explain the data's schema for further analysis. XML is the king of format bloat, but at least has standard schema representations. XML is far better for semi-structured or unstructured data than tables.
It's easy to generate beautiful PDFs from well-structured data but it's much harder to go the other way. Would you rather have budget figures (for example) as a CSV file in a well-defined format or as a PDF of tables and graphs?
More importantly, it's then easy to import that data for visualization and analysis purposes. Data presented as a PDF file is effectively so inaccessible that it will rarely be extracted for further analysis, meaning that some gov't functionary becomes responsible for the presentation and analysis instead of members of the public. Then a panoply of tools become available for finding out things from that data that no one ever knew were there. Something like Tableau Desktop can slurp in CSV data (or data imported to a slew of OSS or commercial DBs) and allow very rapid exploration.
As an aside, I will point out that CSV is an _evil_ format. Did you know it can be generated in localized forms (without any distinguishing metadata), that mean comma is supplanted for use as a thousands separator? Oops. Really, what idiot thought it was a good idea to have a localized data format... Much better to use a serialization format like Avro which uses a compact serialization for tabular data (akin to Protocol Buffers or Thrift) and the schema data (i.e. the description of the table's structure: columns, types, etc.) as a sidecar file in JSON.
but in the cold hard truth of reality, Pages.app is no where near the sophistication of Word for Mac.
So freaking what? It would take years of team development effort to build an app as "sophisticated" as Word. Waiting until such a project was "finished" before releasing would be insane for two key reasons: 1) you'd be withholding a perfectly usable application from making revenue to support its development, and 2) you'd be depriving the product team of vital customer feedback in the interim. More to the point: perhaps, just perhaps, completely displacing Word isn't the point of the iWork suite.
Better still, Pages.app is one of the very few recent word processing/publishing type apps that has visibly rejected many absolute stupidities of the Word editing model. As compared to Word, Pages has truly usable document styles, no "invisible intangible turtles of formatting" (ever have the entire document's formatting go wonky in Word because you hit backspace? Talk about PCs flying out of highrise windows...), and is generally has much more modern design and usability throughout the features it does have. And I really, really pity folk who have to deal with writing academic papers to Word templates. Every one of them I've known (and this includes some intelligent, thoughtful, mild-mannered folks) end up *screaming* at their computer somewhere in the process.
This also gets to a big beef I have with some OSS document apps, e.g. OpenOffice, Thunderbird's email editing, etc. They bloody well just copied Word, including the major warts it has. In contrast to these, href="http://www.lyx.org/">LyX is a great example of providing a nice UI, hiding the complexities of the underlying TeX-based engine, yet still allowing rich access to that engine for power-users.
They don't want to open source it because they don't believe in open source.
Right. That's unfortunate for the various open source platforms. Perhaps I've not read the right sources, but I've seen little advice to help companies like NVidia come to grips with how open source policies help them. That second point, "We have developed substantial IP in our graphics driver that we do not want to expose." is very telling, and one for which Free/Libre/Open/etc. proponents seem to have no coherent response: what to do when a company doesn't understand a path to a successful business model involving open source. Hand-waving about principles isn't enough. By evidence so far, whining that the drivers aren't open isn't enough either. So where's that convincing argument?
Stallman, FSF, et. al. have raised awareness on the risks of proprietary software. However, without a practical means to support the creation of said software the risk of the proprietary becomes less than the risk of not having the software at all.
Apple's page on the Mac Mini Server specifically references the USB SuperDrive for the Macbook Air, but I presume that other USB (or Firewire?) drive solutions would work as well.
The usual: Wooden stake, cold steel, silver chaingun ammo, The Sun, a blast furnace, that garlic bread I made back in grad school, and so forth, depending on just which kind of "no life" we're talking 'bout here.
Next thing you know, you'd have to hold your competitor's hand, work together on some product, watch your own share evaporate....
I call B.S. We're talking about commodity storage hardware; there's no excuse. MS is going out of their way to shut off access to otherwise compatible and standards compliant storage options. Moreover, there's a long history of third party storage for various platforms, e.g. the various "multi-memory" cartridges for the PS1, etc. In this case, these are bog-standard memory cards and drives, not even the proprietary exotica that third-party PS1 memory makers had to contend with.
As to the comments that "it's a locked down console platform", the digital camera market (esp. pro- and semi-pro dSLRs) is probably more mission-critical in terms of stability expectations than the console market. Yet the major digicam makers haven't done anything so daft as to lock themselves down to a few SKUs of memory cards.
Waah! And it'll save all of those regions (and the people in them) more than those few dollars by way of additional power capacity they didn't have to build out. The poor bastards! Oh, and this way of investing in additional effective capacity also means a lower ongoing carbon footprint. Damn those interfering gov't fsckers!
Thanks for the non-sequitur rant. In this case, it's probably a fine idea for a bunch of reasons. First off, I expect there will be a ton of low hanging fruit by way of energy efficiency gains in non-portable consumer electronics. Techniques that we take for granted in cellphones, laptops, etc. simply aren't applied to most devices hanging off of a wall-outlet. E.g. idle power draw (e.g. during "soft off") is often appaling, sometimes nearly as high as full-draw when "on". Why? Because no one bothered to do any basic power management work.
Now companies at many levels in the production chain will have incentive to get their act together as regards power draw.
The word we're looking for here is "estoppel". He has now publicly stated that he won't sue. If he tries to renege and sue he could be estopped from doing so.
I one instant I just went from "moderate democrat" to "conservative republican", too. Interesting.
Given how incredibly conservative Nevada is, I find that an amazingly ironic statement. Your "conservative republican" buddies have already done well by you, it seems.
As someone who has known many folks, myself included, who have benefited (i.e. avoided being completely screwed over by layoffs, etc) from having unemployment support.. I think this is a damned stupid statement. Your state has some bureaucratic asshattery going on. That's reason to fix matters, not dump out the baby with the bathwater. Look to other states for models that suck less. Or maybe just move to one. In my state (WA), I'm fairly certain the unemployment insurance system is structured so that the blogger in TFA wouldn't have had any cuts at all (or at most that ~ $1/day).
These benefits enable people to support their families, keep them from becoming homeless, keep some people from entering a downward spiral of poverty, and enables them to reenter and remain a productive part of the workforce. Does it stop all financial damage? Hell no, not in the USA anyways. But it helps out a lot.
Heck, I know folks who've lost entire well-known (hobbyist) web-portals some years back due to provider server failures. It was a harsh lesson for those involved. So much for the provider's backup policies. The real solution is to have multiple copies of the data, ideally in different formats. For example, when I was in grad school the University had (for the time) a huge email installation, basically full email hosting for the entire institution. The server and storage spec was excellent -- a big SAN-like dual storage array that could handle failures at multiple levels, including one entire half of the storage system. Turns out they got hit by a nasty filesystem corruption bug, which nuked the whole array. Oops. Their bacon was saved because they also had regular verified tape backups (IIRC, it took many, many weeks to fully restore archived mail to the cluster).
These problems really have little to do with the computing models involved. There's a misperception that the "cloud" provides some sort of data robustness beyond what mere mortals can accomplish, but the reality is that valuable data just needs more copies. Perhaps their backup strategies are layered and awesome, but you never really know where the weak links are. One remote service provider really only ever counts as one copy. And so it's useful to consider a service like GitHub. The fundamental model of the service is to encourage folks to share and copy their data around, because that's a prime goal of the supporting software: git. If a git-based service goes down, there should be many copies of the repository data, and the various users will regroup, republish, and move on. No single user has to be overly conscious of maintaining lots of backups, because copying is the basic working model.
There's a lesson there for those of us working in software: design for subversive backup, where critical data is backed up/synced/secured as a normal part of day-to-day workflow. Make sure that failure in any one point doesn't induce the others to similarly fail or become corrupt. Think through and verify the recovery schemes. Imagine that it's your data going down the tubes...
Being interested in what one does is all fine and well. But living the coding life to the exclusion of other activities eventually will incur major costs. As a colleague put it: "Remember, work won't love you back." Aside from the broad benefits of having a balance of kinds of activities in one's life, there are direct benefits to the dedicated software developer to be had from stepping away from the keyboard regularly. Virtually all of us need time to allow the brain to unspool, to relax that death-grip focus that so many of us have honed. Otherwise, creativity drops off and focus gets harder and harder. This also lets the brain work in various other ways on problems both professional and personal that are on our minds.
Frankly, I'm much more interested in hiring someone who is interested, generally speaking, in life, the universe, and everything. It's that broad passion that is valuable IMO, not a tendency to make oneself perpetually overworked.
So I'm going to trot out a different perspective; enough others will thrash through the personalities under discussion here. In my view, Mono is essentially irrelevant. Some folks will use it to bridge apps around platforms, instead of Qt or a handful of other approaches. Yawn. Internally, Microsoft has done some pretty neat things with their various implementations of the CLR (the VM underlying C#). This is unsurprising, as they're well capable of hiring some pretty bright folks. But I doubt that any of that will ever really inform the broader computing community.
In contrast, the JVM seems to be undergoing a renaissance. There's tons of programming language work on the JVM these days: Scala, JRuby, Clojure, Jython, etc. Each of these are bringing their own communities and problem domains to the JVM, and have already broken new ground in language implementation and design. As for new frameworks, there's scalable computing work going on under the Hadoop project (Google filesystem, Bigtable, and map-reduce for-the-rest-of-us) and the really interesting related framework Cascading. With the JVM as an interoperability platform, these languages and various new frameworks all get to be combined together in fascinating new ways.
I'll put my 2 cents on the economics of the matter, rather than "vendor lock-in" or whatever. The platform gaming networks provide frameworks for the game developers plus the operational infrastructure (servers, server-side software, bandwidth, ops staff, etc.) and distributes that cost across all of the games on the platform that utilize it. This is likely to be far more economical for the publisher, as compared to coding and testing the client and server side code and paying the capital and upkeep costs of the network infrastructure. Also, the players may benefit further in that I suspect platform-wide backends will probably have a longer supported lifespan than game-specific backends. Time will tell.
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You've completely missed the point: it's not whether the statement is infurating or outrageous, it's whether it's (protected) satire. Using Beck's own style right back at him is pretty much the definition of satire. In your example, the satire element is nonexistent.
For many news articles, the synopsis often carries 90% of the value of the article; the rest is reactions and analysis that an astute reader could provide without help.
Sadly, that's too often the case for current news outlets, but it's not what quality journalism is about. However, Murdoch isn't at all interested in quality news. He's solely interested in money and power, the latter biased heavily in his case towards techniques of information control. High quality news has no place within his goals.
I note that you over-condensed the linked article's statement to a meaning much different than your summation. Some more info from that article:
scientists have proved that it is possible to create complex financial bundles [...] that hide bad assets in such a way that no computer or human can detect the bad assets.
Even worse? Even after a buyer loses their shirt on the investment, it is impossible for the buyer to prove that they were sold junk, which makes it impossible to regulate.
This indicates against allowing complex financial bundles, as they create vulnerabilities in the financial system. More interesting details at the parent article's link, including links to other analysis as well as the original publication.
Good grief. Homophone insanity. We've got Clojure doing interesting things in the language and concurrency space. Block support in C/Objective-C reinjecting "closures" into everyone's vocabulary. And now Google jumps in with "Closure" just to make sure that no one has any idea what anyone else is talking about...
A quick surfing of the Scantegrity Wikipedia article and the links above didn't definitively answer an interesting (to me) question: can it be applied to a ranked voting system such as IRV or Condorcet?
The offhand solution would be to use Scantegrity's technology with a matrix of bubbles for ranks vs. candidates. Anyone familiar with this work know whether this has been addressed? I skimmed through the IEEE article as well, and found no mention of any ranked voting systems.
FWIW, I've been surfing forwards since Karmic alpha2. Aside from a few annoying app bugs along the way (most often upstream issues), the only thing I got bit by was the upstart changeover breakage. But that's what one gets for tracking a prerelease distro with big changes landing. Fortunately, I'd followed Debian unstable for many years previously and have good Linux experience generally, and so got myself up and running again in short order (before the repo was officially declared all-clear again).
I've had no major problems, no reboots that I didn't initiate, and frankly I'm pretty impressed with how many nettling little bugs in end-user apps vanished even between late Beta phase and the official release.
Because you somehow prefer sFir (Flash-based) headline fonts or text rendered into big headline images? Really, if a site has sucky typography (or content problems or lousy navigation or lame presentation) then just stay away. It's pretty much that easy.
WOFF, if it works, is a fine idea IMO. It's about time that typography grows up and comes to the web. Personally, I'm hoping that this succeeds wildly and increases interest in free/libre/oss fonts and font authoring tools.
Also consider that web-delivered fonts open the door to "render[ing] languages for which font support is usually lacking.". Folks in linguistic minorities can use this to share content without having to wheedle browser/OS makers for font support, and without any fiddly configuration on the part of the reader.
...when the web was more about content than fancy presentation?
No, you can't have your (ugly) static unstyled HTML back. Because the history of the web has shown that limiting technology presents no real limit to either bad presentation or awful information architecture. Web publishers who are doin' it wrong will continue to suck no matter how the medium evolves. It's the people with a clue, who create compelling new experiences, who are the ones I want to see empowered with new ways of doing things.
The people actually putting artificial intelligence into practice knew that AI, like so many other things, would benefit us in small steps.
Actually, there was a period very early on ('50s) when it was naively thought that "we'll have thinking machines within five years!" That's a paraphrase from a now-hilarious film reel interview with an MIT prof from the early 1950's. A film reel which was shown as the first thing in my graduate level AI class, I might add. Sadly, I no longer have the reference to this clip.
One major lesson was that there's an error in thinking "surely solving hard problem X must mean we've achieved artificial intelligence." As each of these problems fell (a computer passing the freshman calc exam at MIT, a computer beating a chess grandmaster, and many others), we realized that the solutions were simply due to understanding the problem and designing appropriate algorithms and/or hardware.
The other lesson from that first day of AI class was that the above properties made AI into the incredible shrinking discipline: each of its successes weren't recognized as "intelligence", but often did spawn entire new disciplines of powerful problem solving that are used everywhere today. So "AI" research gets no credit, even though its researchers have made great strides for computing in general.
CSV is kinda evil (see my post above), but it's better for tabular data than JSON or XML. Again, a tabular serialization format such as Avro, Thrift, or Protocol Buffers might well be far better than CSV for tabular data. JSON has quite a bit of format bloat, and would need some standardized way to explain the data's schema for further analysis. XML is the king of format bloat, but at least has standard schema representations. XML is far better for semi-structured or unstructured data than tables.
It's easy to generate beautiful PDFs from well-structured data but it's much harder to go the other way. Would you rather have budget figures (for example) as a CSV file in a well-defined format or as a PDF of tables and graphs?
More importantly, it's then easy to import that data for visualization and analysis purposes. Data presented as a PDF file is effectively so inaccessible that it will rarely be extracted for further analysis, meaning that some gov't functionary becomes responsible for the presentation and analysis instead of members of the public. Then a panoply of tools become available for finding out things from that data that no one ever knew were there. Something like Tableau Desktop can slurp in CSV data (or data imported to a slew of OSS or commercial DBs) and allow very rapid exploration.
As an aside, I will point out that CSV is an _evil_ format. Did you know it can be generated in localized forms (without any distinguishing metadata), that mean comma is supplanted for use as a thousands separator? Oops. Really, what idiot thought it was a good idea to have a localized data format... Much better to use a serialization format like Avro which uses a compact serialization for tabular data (akin to Protocol Buffers or Thrift) and the schema data (i.e. the description of the table's structure: columns, types, etc.) as a sidecar file in JSON.
but in the cold hard truth of reality, Pages.app is no where near the sophistication of Word for Mac.
So freaking what? It would take years of team development effort to build an app as "sophisticated" as Word. Waiting until such a project was "finished" before releasing would be insane for two key reasons: 1) you'd be withholding a perfectly usable application from making revenue to support its development, and 2) you'd be depriving the product team of vital customer feedback in the interim. More to the point: perhaps, just perhaps, completely displacing Word isn't the point of the iWork suite.
Better still, Pages.app is one of the very few recent word processing/publishing type apps that has visibly rejected many absolute stupidities of the Word editing model. As compared to Word, Pages has truly usable document styles, no "invisible intangible turtles of formatting" (ever have the entire document's formatting go wonky in Word because you hit backspace? Talk about PCs flying out of highrise windows...), and is generally has much more modern design and usability throughout the features it does have. And I really, really pity folk who have to deal with writing academic papers to Word templates. Every one of them I've known (and this includes some intelligent, thoughtful, mild-mannered folks) end up *screaming* at their computer somewhere in the process.
This also gets to a big beef I have with some OSS document apps, e.g. OpenOffice, Thunderbird's email editing, etc. They bloody well just copied Word, including the major warts it has. In contrast to these, href="http://www.lyx.org/">LyX is a great example of providing a nice UI, hiding the complexities of the underlying TeX-based engine, yet still allowing rich access to that engine for power-users.
They don't want to open source it because they don't believe in open source.
Right. That's unfortunate for the various open source platforms. Perhaps I've not read the right sources, but I've seen little advice to help companies like NVidia come to grips with how open source policies help them. That second point, "We have developed substantial IP in our graphics driver that we do not want to expose." is very telling, and one for which Free/Libre/Open/etc. proponents seem to have no coherent response: what to do when a company doesn't understand a path to a successful business model involving open source. Hand-waving about principles isn't enough. By evidence so far, whining that the drivers aren't open isn't enough either. So where's that convincing argument?
Stallman, FSF, et. al. have raised awareness on the risks of proprietary software. However, without a practical means to support the creation of said software the risk of the proprietary becomes less than the risk of not having the software at all.
Apple's page on the Mac Mini Server specifically references the USB SuperDrive for the Macbook Air, but I presume that other USB (or Firewire?) drive solutions would work as well.
How do you kill that which has no life?
The usual: Wooden stake, cold steel, silver chaingun ammo, The Sun, a blast furnace, that garlic bread I made back in grad school, and so forth, depending on just which kind of "no life" we're talking 'bout here.
Next thing you know, you'd have to hold your competitor's hand, work together on some product, watch your own share evaporate....
I call B.S. We're talking about commodity storage hardware; there's no excuse. MS is going out of their way to shut off access to otherwise compatible and standards compliant storage options. Moreover, there's a long history of third party storage for various platforms, e.g. the various "multi-memory" cartridges for the PS1, etc. In this case, these are bog-standard memory cards and drives, not even the proprietary exotica that third-party PS1 memory makers had to contend with.
As to the comments that "it's a locked down console platform", the digital camera market (esp. pro- and semi-pro dSLRs) is probably more mission-critical in terms of stability expectations than the console market. Yet the major digicam makers haven't done anything so daft as to lock themselves down to a few SKUs of memory cards.
Waah! And it'll save all of those regions (and the people in them) more than those few dollars by way of additional power capacity they didn't have to build out. The poor bastards! Oh, and this way of investing in additional effective capacity also means a lower ongoing carbon footprint. Damn those interfering gov't fsckers!
Thanks for the non-sequitur rant. In this case, it's probably a fine idea for a bunch of reasons. First off, I expect there will be a ton of low hanging fruit by way of energy efficiency gains in non-portable consumer electronics. Techniques that we take for granted in cellphones, laptops, etc. simply aren't applied to most devices hanging off of a wall-outlet. E.g. idle power draw (e.g. during "soft off") is often appaling, sometimes nearly as high as full-draw when "on". Why? Because no one bothered to do any basic power management work.
Now companies at many levels in the production chain will have incentive to get their act together as regards power draw.
The word we're looking for here is "estoppel". He has now publicly stated that he won't sue. If he tries to renege and sue he could be estopped from doing so.
I one instant I just went from "moderate democrat" to "conservative republican", too. Interesting.
Given how incredibly conservative Nevada is, I find that an amazingly ironic statement. Your "conservative republican" buddies have already done well by you, it seems.
As someone who has known many folks, myself included, who have benefited (i.e. avoided being completely screwed over by layoffs, etc) from having unemployment support .. I think this is a damned stupid statement. Your state has some bureaucratic asshattery going on. That's reason to fix matters, not dump out the baby with the bathwater. Look to other states for models that suck less. Or maybe just move to one. In my state (WA), I'm fairly certain the unemployment insurance system is structured so that the blogger in TFA wouldn't have had any cuts at all (or at most that ~ $1/day).
These benefits enable people to support their families, keep them from becoming homeless, keep some people from entering a downward spiral of poverty, and enables them to reenter and remain a productive part of the workforce. Does it stop all financial damage? Hell no, not in the USA anyways. But it helps out a lot.
Heck, I know folks who've lost entire well-known (hobbyist) web-portals some years back due to provider server failures. It was a harsh lesson for those involved. So much for the provider's backup policies. The real solution is to have multiple copies of the data, ideally in different formats. For example, when I was in grad school the University had (for the time) a huge email installation, basically full email hosting for the entire institution. The server and storage spec was excellent -- a big SAN-like dual storage array that could handle failures at multiple levels, including one entire half of the storage system. Turns out they got hit by a nasty filesystem corruption bug, which nuked the whole array. Oops. Their bacon was saved because they also had regular verified tape backups (IIRC, it took many, many weeks to fully restore archived mail to the cluster).
These problems really have little to do with the computing models involved. There's a misperception that the "cloud" provides some sort of data robustness beyond what mere mortals can accomplish, but the reality is that valuable data just needs more copies. Perhaps their backup strategies are layered and awesome, but you never really know where the weak links are. One remote service provider really only ever counts as one copy. And so it's useful to consider a service like GitHub. The fundamental model of the service is to encourage folks to share and copy their data around, because that's a prime goal of the supporting software: git. If a git-based service goes down, there should be many copies of the repository data, and the various users will regroup, republish, and move on. No single user has to be overly conscious of maintaining lots of backups, because copying is the basic working model.
There's a lesson there for those of us working in software: design for subversive backup, where critical data is backed up/synced/secured as a normal part of day-to-day workflow. Make sure that failure in any one point doesn't induce the others to similarly fail or become corrupt. Think through and verify the recovery schemes. Imagine that it's your data going down the tubes...
Being interested in what one does is all fine and well. But living the coding life to the exclusion of other activities eventually will incur major costs. As a colleague put it: "Remember, work won't love you back." Aside from the broad benefits of having a balance of kinds of activities in one's life, there are direct benefits to the dedicated software developer to be had from stepping away from the keyboard regularly. Virtually all of us need time to allow the brain to unspool, to relax that death-grip focus that so many of us have honed. Otherwise, creativity drops off and focus gets harder and harder. This also lets the brain work in various other ways on problems both professional and personal that are on our minds.
Frankly, I'm much more interested in hiring someone who is interested, generally speaking, in life, the universe, and everything. It's that broad passion that is valuable IMO, not a tendency to make oneself perpetually overworked.
So I'm going to trot out a different perspective; enough others will thrash through the personalities under discussion here. In my view, Mono is essentially irrelevant. Some folks will use it to bridge apps around platforms, instead of Qt or a handful of other approaches. Yawn. Internally, Microsoft has done some pretty neat things with their various implementations of the CLR (the VM underlying C#). This is unsurprising, as they're well capable of hiring some pretty bright folks. But I doubt that any of that will ever really inform the broader computing community.
In contrast, the JVM seems to be undergoing a renaissance. There's tons of programming language work on the JVM these days: Scala, JRuby, Clojure, Jython, etc. Each of these are bringing their own communities and problem domains to the JVM, and have already broken new ground in language implementation and design. As for new frameworks, there's scalable computing work going on under the Hadoop project (Google filesystem, Bigtable, and map-reduce for-the-rest-of-us) and the really interesting related framework Cascading. With the JVM as an interoperability platform, these languages and various new frameworks all get to be combined together in fascinating new ways.
PS3s are big endian machines.
Xbox 360s are little endian.
Q.E.D They can't talk to each other.
Epic failure to grok network byte order seen on Slashdot. Film at 11.
I'll put my 2 cents on the economics of the matter, rather than "vendor lock-in" or whatever. The platform gaming networks provide frameworks for the game developers plus the operational infrastructure (servers, server-side software, bandwidth, ops staff, etc.) and distributes that cost across all of the games on the platform that utilize it. This is likely to be far more economical for the publisher, as compared to coding and testing the client and server side code and paying the capital and upkeep costs of the network infrastructure. Also, the players may benefit further in that I suspect platform-wide backends will probably have a longer supported lifespan than game-specific backends. Time will tell.