The problem with Sun hardware is that it's too awesome. Where I work we have two sun mainframes; nice and all, and I can occasionally blow peoples minds regarding the things that you can do with the system, but they cost more than all the rest of the crap in the server room combined, without providing the same level of performance.
I once applied for a job whose sole perk was that the site was a huge testbed for Sun hardware, and I'd have the ability to just play with it...To play with big iron.
But I can't imagine trying to cost justify it for anything other than a mission critical financial application. Even there it'd be hard; you really need to be dealing with more than 7 figures a week to justify that sort of system...Even our antiquated Sun servers run almost 6 figures a year between software and hardware support.
Do you think that they made a black hole in the lab to "test" these theories?
Tracing the fossil record, and mapping historical changes in various genomes would be enough solid evidence for anyone who didn't have an irrational bias.
Like it or not, evolution through natural selection is a robust, predictive theory. So far we've only successfully applied it to things that have extremely fast reproductive cycles (e.g bacteria) but, again, that's good evidence.
Until you can actually produce a good argument based on actual evidence that there is something wrong with the theory of evolution as it is currently understood, you're effectively arguing that the world is flat. It is a crackpot position, and the only people who will take it seriously are themselves crackpots.
The lesson here is: If you're going to try to court people active in OSS development, then you're going to have to be nice to them, and you're going to have to let them take some ownership.
IBM is being smart; they're reaping rewards far in excess of their investment. Effectively they've outsourced their development, and while the terms of the "outsourcing" say that they have to share everything that comes out of the project, they're still in a position to steer, and support the product.
I'm not sure how you equate that with "control"; sounds just like more FUD to me.
I suggest you read this. To sum it up, that tax loophole is gone now, so he will have to get money like everyone else, and I think this petition is a way for him to do just that.
There ARE NO REVENUES. These companies aren't posting losses. They're speculating on the money that they would have made if it wasn't for MySQL and Postgres.
That is no different than me speculating on money I would have made if I'd won the lottery or cured cancer, or developed perpetual motion. It is a pipe dream.
No, it's not. He can take that petition with 8 hundred thousand signatures with him to his next movie pitch, and say, "Do you really think no one cares about my movies?"
The only people who drop out of sight in the movie biz are the people that no-one cares about one way or the other. 20 years from now people will still be watching his movies for their awfullness, and famous talented actors will be doing the story of his life in movie form a laEd Wood.
I don't know...I can't even imagine how boring the movie would be.
"Now we go to fight the ultimate evil!" "Wait, we don't have the key to his front door." "Who cares? Can't we break in?" "No! The door is too powerful! We have to spend days of our lives getting the parts of the key and forging them together!" "The door is too powerful? Fine. You guys go get the key..." "Sorry, sir, we ALL need a key. So we each have to go on the key quest separately, though of course we can help each other." "WHAT? That doesn't make any sense!" "The door works in mysterious ways, sir."
You're proving to the producers that 1,000,000 people know who he is...and care. That tells the money guys that giving him a pile of cash and the rights to a some beloved IP will capture the attention of 1,000,000 people at a minimum.
Seriously, the best thing you could have done was start a petition and have like 3 people sign it. I would show the people in charge that no one cares about him.
That's like saying that the 60,000,000 dollar hole in my bank account which exists because I didn't win the lottery is a something rather than a nothing.
MySQL, Postgres and similar are filling a need for the sort of free database systems that are required to support web 2.0ish applications; if those programs didn't exist, people wouldn't be buying MSSQL or Oracle instead. Those applications are predicated on a low development and deployment cost, and without the no cost alternatives to big RDMS' they simply wouldn't exist.
Some of that stuff is just undoing stupid changes they made in the past...Confirmation on criticals, Magical Items costing experience (wtf was that about anyway? Nothing irritates me more than the idea that I get dumber by practicing something).
Some of the other stuff is just making up for stupid DMs, and that irritates me. Monsters can be scaled down? So? A good DM should be able to come up with an easy or hard encounter with any sort of monster anyway, and relying on the "book difficulty" with monsters means you run out of monsters that your PCs can't beat around lvl 15.
Likewise magic items and buffs; if I decide that they're spending too long on their buffs, I start throwing random encounters at them. If they keep going into combat, blowing all their spells/abilities, and trying to rest, I make resting very difficult.
Some of the other stuff I like; level drain is awesome...It forces players to pay attention when certain undead are on the loose. Spell preperation, while I never really liked it, forces a certain amount of tactical thinking that is completely removed by unlimited spells. Can't rest? Who cares!
But I've done tons and tons of that development as well, and it's all been in the form of a few dozen friends sitting around eating pizza and beating out the rules over the course of playing. Obviously we weren't getting paid, but it's hard to imagine where that sort of cost could rack up into the multi-millions.
If their development has moved over to that sort of dynamic, if their process has grown that expensive and bloated, I can't conceive of a worthwhile product coming out the other side.
This kind of "Look how much money we're not making" is stupid regardless of who is espousing it. They're trying to prove a negative, and monetize a handful of nothing, and the sick part about it is that they honestly think that they're not completely crazy.
This is just like the RIAA trying to put a dollar figure on money lost to filesharing, or the press trying to put a dollar figure on "productivity loss" based on this or that sports event. They just need to get a freaking life, and start trying to measure things that exist.
Spending "multiple 7 figures" on making a new edition of D&D makes my brain hurt. Doesn't everyone who seriously plays spend half their time beating on the rules until they make sense for their player group?
From everything I've read about 4th edition, I think that money has been ill-spent, and to take that wasted money, and compound your crime by not allowing people to release their mods and make a few bucks off of them is obscene.
I doubt it'll ever taste 3 times as good, but if it was even close, I'd be on it like a bun. Sterile environment for growth and processing, no methane or other associated pollution, lower transport costs...Sounds like a winner if they can make it work.
Jesus, it's not about being a liberal. The problem with GM plants is that they still throw out a bunch of pollen, and pollute existing seed lines. It's just bad science.
When the GM meat gets out of the tank and starts humping un-gm'd cows, I'll have problems with it. Otherwise, hell, if it tastes good, I'm there.
There are actually some really good medical reasons for not being a cannibal...Basically you're probably not going to catch anything from the cow, because it's a cow, but a human? Make sure yours is extra well-done.
Cloned meat is all about tissue...The root of the economic justification is that all the other crap that gets built to make the animal is wasted anyway, so why not just make a huge tank of filet mignon? (Using beef as an example, because bigger animals are less efficient to grow)
Sadly, right now, probably the best they can do is clone hamburger, which means that if they do make it marketable, it'll drive the cost of all other cuts of beef through the roof.
Agreed with the sibling post. I've known vegetarians who were vegetarians for health reasons, but never vegans who were vegan for health reasons...Lot of the vegans I know won't eat anything that was remotely an animal byproduct, to the point of only eating certain M&M's because one of the dyes isn't completely animal-free.
Most people just don't rank their health that highly. I am glad to see PETA finally doing something productive however...If your real goal is to prevent animal suffering, then this is actually a good method.
Most prior research with this stuff has shown that it is easier to learn a "new" set of patterns than it is to try and figure out what the impulses for the old set were.
As long as the sensors are able to recognize specific thought patterns, it's reasonable to expect that an unimpaired brain could learn to generate the appropriate signals to produce the desired effect.
Slashdot Mirror
I did actually. WTF? I imagine its due to a certain amount of outsourcing, and possibly the maintenance of legacy apps.
The problem with Sun hardware is that it's too awesome. Where I work we have two sun mainframes; nice and all, and I can occasionally blow peoples minds regarding the things that you can do with the system, but they cost more than all the rest of the crap in the server room combined, without providing the same level of performance.
I once applied for a job whose sole perk was that the site was a huge testbed for Sun hardware, and I'd have the ability to just play with it...To play with big iron.
But I can't imagine trying to cost justify it for anything other than a mission critical financial application. Even there it'd be hard; you really need to be dealing with more than 7 figures a week to justify that sort of system...Even our antiquated Sun servers run almost 6 figures a year between software and hardware support.
Do you think that they made a black hole in the lab to "test" these theories?
Tracing the fossil record, and mapping historical changes in various genomes would be enough solid evidence for anyone who didn't have an irrational bias.
Like it or not, evolution through natural selection is a robust, predictive theory. So far we've only successfully applied it to things that have extremely fast reproductive cycles (e.g bacteria) but, again, that's good evidence.
Until you can actually produce a good argument based on actual evidence that there is something wrong with the theory of evolution as it is currently understood, you're effectively arguing that the world is flat. It is a crackpot position, and the only people who will take it seriously are themselves crackpots.
Thank you, come again.
Actually, no.
The lesson here is: If you're going to try to court people active in OSS development, then you're going to have to be nice to them, and you're going to have to let them take some ownership.
IBM is being smart; they're reaping rewards far in excess of their investment. Effectively they've outsourced their development, and while the terms of the "outsourcing" say that they have to share everything that comes out of the project, they're still in a position to steer, and support the product.
I'm not sure how you equate that with "control"; sounds just like more FUD to me.
The answer is: "They acted like a bunch of dicks."
OSS is a labor of love. You've got to want to work on the project, and you've got to be able to work on the project.
If you put a big chunk of your time into something and get rudely dismissed, then its hardly likely that you'll continue to contribute.
I suggest you read this. To sum it up, that tax loophole is gone now, so he will have to get money like everyone else, and I think this petition is a way for him to do just that.
Citation. What you say is not reflected in the article or in my experience.
There ARE NO REVENUES. These companies aren't posting losses. They're speculating on the money that they would have made if it wasn't for MySQL and Postgres.
That is no different than me speculating on money I would have made if I'd won the lottery or cured cancer, or developed perpetual motion. It is a pipe dream.
No, it's not. He can take that petition with 8 hundred thousand signatures with him to his next movie pitch, and say, "Do you really think no one cares about my movies?"
The only people who drop out of sight in the movie biz are the people that no-one cares about one way or the other. 20 years from now people will still be watching his movies for their awfullness, and famous talented actors will be doing the story of his life in movie form a la Ed Wood.
I don't know...I can't even imagine how boring the movie would be.
"Now we go to fight the ultimate evil!"
"Wait, we don't have the key to his front door."
"Who cares? Can't we break in?"
"No! The door is too powerful! We have to spend days of our lives getting the parts of the key and forging them together!"
"The door is too powerful? Fine. You guys go get the key..."
"Sorry, sir, we ALL need a key. So we each have to go on the key quest separately, though of course we can help each other."
"WHAT? That doesn't make any sense!"
"The door works in mysterious ways, sir."
You're proving to the producers that 1,000,000 people know who he is...and care. That tells the money guys that giving him a pile of cash and the rights to a some beloved IP will capture the attention of 1,000,000 people at a minimum.
Seriously, the best thing you could have done was start a petition and have like 3 people sign it. I would show the people in charge that no one cares about him.
That's like saying that the 60,000,000 dollar hole in my bank account which exists because I didn't win the lottery is a something rather than a nothing.
MySQL, Postgres and similar are filling a need for the sort of free database systems that are required to support web 2.0ish applications; if those programs didn't exist, people wouldn't be buying MSSQL or Oracle instead. Those applications are predicated on a low development and deployment cost, and without the no cost alternatives to big RDMS' they simply wouldn't exist.
If the open standard is bloated and buggy, then people will keep using the closed formats.
Microsoft has zero percentage in having a good, workable, open format.
Some of that stuff is just undoing stupid changes they made in the past...Confirmation on criticals, Magical Items costing experience (wtf was that about anyway? Nothing irritates me more than the idea that I get dumber by practicing something).
Some of the other stuff is just making up for stupid DMs, and that irritates me. Monsters can be scaled down? So? A good DM should be able to come up with an easy or hard encounter with any sort of monster anyway, and relying on the "book difficulty" with monsters means you run out of monsters that your PCs can't beat around lvl 15.
Likewise magic items and buffs; if I decide that they're spending too long on their buffs, I start throwing random encounters at them. If they keep going into combat, blowing all their spells/abilities, and trying to rest, I make resting very difficult.
Some of the other stuff I like; level drain is awesome...It forces players to pay attention when certain undead are on the loose. Spell preperation, while I never really liked it, forces a certain amount of tactical thinking that is completely removed by unlimited spells. Can't rest? Who cares!
Just doesn't sound like fun to me.
No doubt, no doubt.
But I've done tons and tons of that development as well, and it's all been in the form of a few dozen friends sitting around eating pizza and beating out the rules over the course of playing. Obviously we weren't getting paid, but it's hard to imagine where that sort of cost could rack up into the multi-millions.
If their development has moved over to that sort of dynamic, if their process has grown that expensive and bloated, I can't conceive of a worthwhile product coming out the other side.
That stuff's what makes it so tasty!
This kind of "Look how much money we're not making" is stupid regardless of who is espousing it. They're trying to prove a negative, and monetize a handful of nothing, and the sick part about it is that they honestly think that they're not completely crazy.
This is just like the RIAA trying to put a dollar figure on money lost to filesharing, or the press trying to put a dollar figure on "productivity loss" based on this or that sports event. They just need to get a freaking life, and start trying to measure things that exist.
Spending "multiple 7 figures" on making a new edition of D&D makes my brain hurt. Doesn't everyone who seriously plays spend half their time beating on the rules until they make sense for their player group?
From everything I've read about 4th edition, I think that money has been ill-spent, and to take that wasted money, and compound your crime by not allowing people to release their mods and make a few bucks off of them is obscene.
I doubt it'll ever taste 3 times as good, but if it was even close, I'd be on it like a bun. Sterile environment for growth and processing, no methane or other associated pollution, lower transport costs...Sounds like a winner if they can make it work.
Jesus, it's not about being a liberal. The problem with GM plants is that they still throw out a bunch of pollen, and pollute existing seed lines. It's just bad science.
When the GM meat gets out of the tank and starts humping un-gm'd cows, I'll have problems with it. Otherwise, hell, if it tastes good, I'm there.
There are actually some really good medical reasons for not being a cannibal...Basically you're probably not going to catch anything from the cow, because it's a cow, but a human? Make sure yours is extra well-done.
Cloned meat is all about tissue...The root of the economic justification is that all the other crap that gets built to make the animal is wasted anyway, so why not just make a huge tank of filet mignon? (Using beef as an example, because bigger animals are less efficient to grow)
Sadly, right now, probably the best they can do is clone hamburger, which means that if they do make it marketable, it'll drive the cost of all other cuts of beef through the roof.
Agreed with the sibling post. I've known vegetarians who were vegetarians for health reasons, but never vegans who were vegan for health reasons...Lot of the vegans I know won't eat anything that was remotely an animal byproduct, to the point of only eating certain M&M's because one of the dyes isn't completely animal-free.
Most people just don't rank their health that highly. I am glad to see PETA finally doing something productive however...If your real goal is to prevent animal suffering, then this is actually a good method.
Most prior research with this stuff has shown that it is easier to learn a "new" set of patterns than it is to try and figure out what the impulses for the old set were.
As long as the sensors are able to recognize specific thought patterns, it's reasonable to expect that an unimpaired brain could learn to generate the appropriate signals to produce the desired effect.
With most of the dixiecrats having finally died off, there really isn't much of a difference between republican and baptist.