The free market doesn't pay for education, or highways, or national defense, or any of a number of things that benefit everyone. Doesn't pay for trauma centers, so even if you were willing to pay for your own medical care, there would be no guarantee that it would exist in any kind of proximity to you.
I love the free market. But I don't use the free market as an excuse for not wanting to pay taxes.
It's an automatic update watcher that runs all the time in your taskbar and keeps your JRE up to date.
It's an optional feature that is required by absolutely nothing, and one of the things it does is updates your browser. Apparently now it adds an extra update that does some prefetching that makes java load faster, and we must all riot because we didn't specifically ask for that one.
It's automatically updating the entire JRE, and you're worried about some little plugin? That's like opting in to unprotected anal sex and then freaking out at the post-coital cuddling.
I don't really have a use for mac server hardware, but even if I did, I'd say I didn't just to watch the fanboi's foam at the mouth.
That xgrid is the best thing you can offer only proves my point. If you want to use OSS, and you don't want to spend your whole live building from source, might as well use linux.
Meh. Apple uses Samba for the Linux/Windows sharing, and then the mac sharing is native...Hard to beat that.
In a big network setting, Mac was always the hard one. Windows and Linux play much better together than either do with macs. Not such a big deal with OS X, obviously, but the appletalk crap was a nightmare.
Mac servers are pretty. They do okay, they have nice swanky data enclosures, and the form factor is roughly the same as anyone elses.
It's just whether or not you want to use OS X. I disagree that OS X is "just unix," however. It's not even "just linux" or "just bsd". OS X has it's own warts, and while it may be stable and friendly, I'd rather have a real *nix running on less pretty hardware.
The best use I've ever had for the big Mac servers is running as a file server in a windows/mac environment. If you still have any pre-OS X machines around, that's about the only way to get them all on the same machine (If you say windows mac volume, I'm mailing a dead fish to your house).
Otherwise, you know, you can install apache, whatever, but it's not any different from using a regular linux server in terms of increased functionality, and there are some significant OS update issues that can cause problems. Mac updates are of the all or nothing school, and they WILL break stuff, so you need to be careful.
The thing is, if you could launch something up there that would mine the gold and lob it at the planet with little parachutes attached for the next few decades, it would be worth it. Sending the same stuff up over and over again is where the waste occurs (I'm looking at you, space shuttle).
Don't believe it. Losses through transmission are very low. The length of the longest cost-effective wire-based transmission is about 4000 miles...The US is only about 2,600 miles across. A centrally located power generation station would be able to supply the entire US with a reasonable degree of efficiency.
The cost of putting down the wire is the actual burden. You can only send so much power through a line without it either melting, or discharging too much power through the corona effect.
33% on top of 100% peak output. The fact that the satellite can maintain a sun-synchronous orbit, so it can be in full sunlight all the time, is not insignificant.
I find the "Well this won't solve all of our energy needs so why bother?" response to any new energy technology to be really irritating.
Why does everything have to be a holy war? Can't this just be a tech that could add a few percent to global energy generation? It doesn't have to be "The one true solution to all energy problems everywhere forever" to be worth pursuing.
Orbiting solar tech is a good idea, one that people have been thinking about for decades. We may or may not be there yet, but it's certainly worth study even though it isn't going to solve all our energy problems overnight, and even though there will be hazards with the energy transfer.
All the information is "free" but it's not put together anywhere. So you're depending on your local news organ to get the information, and publish it. Most papers put it in the actual paper.
I agree though, it should end up online either through local government or a local watchdog news organization.
350,000 virtual desktops is as meaningful as "The equivalent of 421 CD burners." Nowhere in the article does it actually give meaningful numbers like the maximum number of concurrent users, or the actual amount of server hardware, or what sort of workstations will be hosting those virtual desktops.
I am an anti-fanatic. I use the best tools for whatever job I may be doing. I program in Java, Perl, Php, Python, C++, C#, and, when I must, Cobol. I make fun of everyone who claims that their tool is the best tool in every situation.
I'll tell you exactly what Twitter's problem is: Ruby is a shitty database interface. That's it. So is PHP, so is Perl, so is VB.Net. I don't even like Java and C# for that stuff, though they're a whole lot better. Python is, but you can write a C lib to do it for Python, so it isn't (though I still wouldn't use Django). For this volume of data you need something lean and close to the hardware.
They need a better caching system, period. If they're going to try and do the whole thing in Ruby, more power to 'em. But they damn well shouldn't be surprised when obvious crap like this rears up later.
The man who ate 100,000,000 jelly beans did do less than the man who ate 10,000,000 burritos. Not all data is created equal. There are whole worlds of complexity that come in when you have to deal with small data (like text) and large data (like images). You have to separate the handling of the files as much as possible.
Twitters position, where their transactions are always the same types of data in the same amount...Those are very easy to abstract and scale. True scaling problems come in when you're hitting multiple different tables for multiple different types of queries. Reading, writing, and updating, all at the same time. The semaphore and data integrity problems get way ugly.
If their system was well designed, they could simply throw more hardware at the problem, and the problem would go away...That's what "scalable" means, it means your process demands increase at the same rate (or lower) as your utilization increases.
Look at how fast some of the other sites mentioned scaled up. Myspace and Facebook both exploded in popularity and grew extremely rapidly, and both of those applications scaled exceedingly well, and both of them have much more difficult problems to solve.
Facebook in particular, Jesus, it's built out of every damn kinda crap imaginable. Php, java, python, C+, fucking perl. They claim they use Erlang too. You know why? Because they saw they had specific problems to solve, and they solved them with the best tool for that problem. They didn't insist one tool was all they needed.
Note, there is no Ruby in that list. Maybe, like me, they never came across a problem for which it was the best solution.
Well, since we agree that the Twitter people are incompetent, why should their opinion matter? Maybe their love of Rails is the root of the whole problem, and they're just to wedded to the environment to see it.
I personally think it is part of the problem. Development/deployment frameworks add a non-trivial amount of overhead, which is something that cannot be spared on a high volume applications.
Aside from all that, I just love tormenting Ruby fanatics. They're as defensive and strident as any C geek, though, unlike the C geeks, Ruby/Rails people can't point to any performance increases to justify their fanaticism.
If you drop to 98% availability...Jesus. It sounds good in a non-internet context, but the standard is 3 9's (99.9% uptime) at least. We're not talking 4 9's (99.99%, what you'd expect from your bank) here. We're talking about a site that's pushing 1 9. ONE. 98%!!!
If they were your webhost, they'd be fired. It's just not an acceptable performance number for a big modern site.
Oh BS. A huge volume of extremely easy data. No images, no War & Peace length text posts. Just a lot of short, sweet, and simple text.
I want you to say with a straight face that it's really just the amazing volume of data that separates a highly reliable and available site like Facebook from a constantly failing jumped up IRC client like Twitter.
Twitter is a dog. And because it's written in Rails, it's a special needs dog that has to go to the vet a lot.
Oh, I agree. But when people say "satire" in this case, they're trying to link it to certain protections satire traditionally enjoys in our legal system, and I was making a point that it's really unlikely they would apply here.
There actually is such a thing as criminal libel, even in the US.
According to Libel and the First Amendment (by Richard Labunski) "...judges in Pennsylvania were left substantial discretion to punish criminal libel because the (state) constitution left unresolved a standard for determining what publications were proper for public information (pg. 55)" (parenthetical notation on/., fuck yea).
Sounds like that judge could do pretty much whatever he wanted. Newspapers are the ones who put backbone into first amendment law; they have money, and they have self-interest at stake. Without them threatening (or MySpace doing it) there would be no reason why the judge couldn't sentence her.
Can't be "strictly satire" in this case. You can make fun of your principal, but if you make actionable assertions, there is nothing to protect you from getting charged with/sued for libel.
Don't buy it. You can't really "satire" your high school principle; they're unlikely to meet the "public figure" criteria that would protect the person who is making fun of them from legal repercussions if anything strayed over the line.
That being said, the sentence in this case was wildly inappropriate. The page could never have been mistaken for real libel due to the inclusion of text explicitly stating that the page is a joke. On top of that, jail time? For a juvenile?
Amusingly, it's high profile, geek-enraging cases like this that probably got him caught. If he'd kept sending kids to juvy for misdemeanors, it wouldn't have been covered so widely, and we wouldn't have given a damn.
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The free market doesn't pay for education, or highways, or national defense, or any of a number of things that benefit everyone. Doesn't pay for trauma centers, so even if you were willing to pay for your own medical care, there would be no guarantee that it would exist in any kind of proximity to you.
I love the free market. But I don't use the free market as an excuse for not wanting to pay taxes.
You're downloading the wrong packages. If you download from the main java download page it doesn't include the extra crapware.
It will still show a splashscreen for OpenOffice though. Shocking. Quite shocking.
It's an automatic update watcher that runs all the time in your taskbar and keeps your JRE up to date.
It's an optional feature that is required by absolutely nothing, and one of the things it does is updates your browser. Apparently now it adds an extra update that does some prefetching that makes java load faster, and we must all riot because we didn't specifically ask for that one.
It's automatically updating the entire JRE, and you're worried about some little plugin? That's like opting in to unprotected anal sex and then freaking out at the post-coital cuddling.
In order to have this happen to you, you have to install a completely optional automatic update package from Java, so you are opting in.
That it doesn't ask you again later doesn't mean much.
I don't really have a use for mac server hardware, but even if I did, I'd say I didn't just to watch the fanboi's foam at the mouth.
That xgrid is the best thing you can offer only proves my point. If you want to use OSS, and you don't want to spend your whole live building from source, might as well use linux.
Meh. Apple uses Samba for the Linux/Windows sharing, and then the mac sharing is native...Hard to beat that.
In a big network setting, Mac was always the hard one. Windows and Linux play much better together than either do with macs. Not such a big deal with OS X, obviously, but the appletalk crap was a nightmare.
Mac servers are pretty. They do okay, they have nice swanky data enclosures, and the form factor is roughly the same as anyone elses.
It's just whether or not you want to use OS X. I disagree that OS X is "just unix," however. It's not even "just linux" or "just bsd". OS X has it's own warts, and while it may be stable and friendly, I'd rather have a real *nix running on less pretty hardware.
The best use I've ever had for the big Mac servers is running as a file server in a windows/mac environment. If you still have any pre-OS X machines around, that's about the only way to get them all on the same machine (If you say windows mac volume, I'm mailing a dead fish to your house).
Otherwise, you know, you can install apache, whatever, but it's not any different from using a regular linux server in terms of increased functionality, and there are some significant OS update issues that can cause problems. Mac updates are of the all or nothing school, and they WILL break stuff, so you need to be careful.
The thing is, if you could launch something up there that would mine the gold and lob it at the planet with little parachutes attached for the next few decades, it would be worth it. Sending the same stuff up over and over again is where the waste occurs (I'm looking at you, space shuttle).
Don't believe it. Losses through transmission are very low. The length of the longest cost-effective wire-based transmission is about 4000 miles...The US is only about 2,600 miles across. A centrally located power generation station would be able to supply the entire US with a reasonable degree of efficiency.
The cost of putting down the wire is the actual burden. You can only send so much power through a line without it either melting, or discharging too much power through the corona effect.
33% on top of 100% peak output. The fact that the satellite can maintain a sun-synchronous orbit, so it can be in full sunlight all the time, is not insignificant.
I find the "Well this won't solve all of our energy needs so why bother?" response to any new energy technology to be really irritating.
Why does everything have to be a holy war? Can't this just be a tech that could add a few percent to global energy generation? It doesn't have to be "The one true solution to all energy problems everywhere forever" to be worth pursuing.
Orbiting solar tech is a good idea, one that people have been thinking about for decades. We may or may not be there yet, but it's certainly worth study even though it isn't going to solve all our energy problems overnight, and even though there will be hazards with the energy transfer.
All the information is "free" but it's not put together anywhere. So you're depending on your local news organ to get the information, and publish it. Most papers put it in the actual paper.
I agree though, it should end up online either through local government or a local watchdog news organization.
350,000 virtual desktops is as meaningful as "The equivalent of 421 CD burners." Nowhere in the article does it actually give meaningful numbers like the maximum number of concurrent users, or the actual amount of server hardware, or what sort of workstations will be hosting those virtual desktops.
Lucky she didn't get corporal punishment: that phone might have ended up in a very uncomfortable place...
I am an anti-fanatic. I use the best tools for whatever job I may be doing. I program in Java, Perl, Php, Python, C++, C#, and, when I must, Cobol. I make fun of everyone who claims that their tool is the best tool in every situation.
I'll tell you exactly what Twitter's problem is: Ruby is a shitty database interface. That's it. So is PHP, so is Perl, so is VB.Net. I don't even like Java and C# for that stuff, though they're a whole lot better. Python is, but you can write a C lib to do it for Python, so it isn't (though I still wouldn't use Django). For this volume of data you need something lean and close to the hardware.
They need a better caching system, period. If they're going to try and do the whole thing in Ruby, more power to 'em. But they damn well shouldn't be surprised when obvious crap like this rears up later.
The man who ate 100,000,000 jelly beans did do less than the man who ate 10,000,000 burritos. Not all data is created equal. There are whole worlds of complexity that come in when you have to deal with small data (like text) and large data (like images). You have to separate the handling of the files as much as possible.
Twitters position, where their transactions are always the same types of data in the same amount...Those are very easy to abstract and scale. True scaling problems come in when you're hitting multiple different tables for multiple different types of queries. Reading, writing, and updating, all at the same time. The semaphore and data integrity problems get way ugly.
If their system was well designed, they could simply throw more hardware at the problem, and the problem would go away...That's what "scalable" means, it means your process demands increase at the same rate (or lower) as your utilization increases.
Look at how fast some of the other sites mentioned scaled up. Myspace and Facebook both exploded in popularity and grew extremely rapidly, and both of those applications scaled exceedingly well, and both of them have much more difficult problems to solve.
Facebook in particular, Jesus, it's built out of every damn kinda crap imaginable. Php, java, python, C+, fucking perl. They claim they use Erlang too. You know why? Because they saw they had specific problems to solve, and they solved them with the best tool for that problem. They didn't insist one tool was all they needed.
Note, there is no Ruby in that list. Maybe, like me, they never came across a problem for which it was the best solution.
Well, since we agree that the Twitter people are incompetent, why should their opinion matter? Maybe their love of Rails is the root of the whole problem, and they're just to wedded to the environment to see it.
I personally think it is part of the problem. Development/deployment frameworks add a non-trivial amount of overhead, which is something that cannot be spared on a high volume applications.
Aside from all that, I just love tormenting Ruby fanatics. They're as defensive and strident as any C geek, though, unlike the C geeks, Ruby/Rails people can't point to any performance increases to justify their fanaticism.
If you drop to 98% availability...Jesus. It sounds good in a non-internet context, but the standard is 3 9's (99.9% uptime) at least. We're not talking 4 9's (99.99%, what you'd expect from your bank) here. We're talking about a site that's pushing 1 9. ONE. 98%!!!
If they were your webhost, they'd be fired. It's just not an acceptable performance number for a big modern site.
Oh BS. A huge volume of extremely easy data. No images, no War & Peace length text posts. Just a lot of short, sweet, and simple text.
I want you to say with a straight face that it's really just the amazing volume of data that separates a highly reliable and available site like Facebook from a constantly failing jumped up IRC client like Twitter.
Twitter is a dog. And because it's written in Rails, it's a special needs dog that has to go to the vet a lot.
Yea, I guess I should have posted a long-winded, well-sourced explanation of criminal libel 15 minutes before you posted your comment...Or something.
Oh, I agree. But when people say "satire" in this case, they're trying to link it to certain protections satire traditionally enjoys in our legal system, and I was making a point that it's really unlikely they would apply here.
There actually is such a thing as criminal libel, even in the US.
According to Libel and the First Amendment (by Richard Labunski) "...judges in Pennsylvania were left substantial discretion to punish criminal libel because the (state) constitution left unresolved a standard for determining what publications were proper for public information (pg. 55)" (parenthetical notation on /., fuck yea).
Sounds like that judge could do pretty much whatever he wanted. Newspapers are the ones who put backbone into first amendment law; they have money, and they have self-interest at stake. Without them threatening (or MySpace doing it) there would be no reason why the judge couldn't sentence her.
Can't be "strictly satire" in this case. You can make fun of your principal, but if you make actionable assertions, there is nothing to protect you from getting charged with/sued for libel.
Don't buy it. You can't really "satire" your high school principle; they're unlikely to meet the "public figure" criteria that would protect the person who is making fun of them from legal repercussions if anything strayed over the line.
That being said, the sentence in this case was wildly inappropriate. The page could never have been mistaken for real libel due to the inclusion of text explicitly stating that the page is a joke. On top of that, jail time? For a juvenile?
Amusingly, it's high profile, geek-enraging cases like this that probably got him caught. If he'd kept sending kids to juvy for misdemeanors, it wouldn't have been covered so widely, and we wouldn't have given a damn.