This page provides a much better starting point. "Snazzy web hit counter" doesn't even begin to describe what it is. A hit counter is extremely simple and doesn't require a lot of resources in terms of minds or hardware. What they've done requires both.
What they've apparently built (I wish I had access so I could check it out) is a standard analytics model based on click stream traffic for websites and an infrastructure to support distributed web reports. Click stream analyisis for websites is not a trivial problem. The hardware required to host this given the reports they're generating and the data sizes they're working with has got to be huge. What they've built is probably pretty simple since the type of data they're tracking about your customers (whether the page was clicked) is pretty limited. I'm curious as to what exactly their script does - is it solely clicks or is tracking users over a session?
Of course if you subscribe to the google really is evil (or they want to make money) what they're going to eventually do is merge all of their traffic data (including gmail, google videos, etc.) to provide analytics on the customer the clickstream stuff is definately interesting, but the customer profile would be a lot more valuable.
They may even provide the click stream data for free and offer all of their services as well as consultation for developing custom data models for the merchant. This is a stretch but given their areas of expertise would make some sort of sense.
I think our major disagreement stems from our preferred definition of hacker. You seem to think that hacker means sumpreme uber UNIX geek. I have no doubt that you're a good sysadmin but I think that you really have no idea what the "Real World" is when it comes to programming.
My definition (and I believe it's fairly close to what the article author meant) was that a hacker was someone who used a programming langauge to solve hard problems. Under my definition you're clearly not a hacker. Sure you use perl to help automate your every day tasks, but these are certainly not "hard" problems. The mere fact that you can get the job done with a few hundred lines of code is adequate proof that these problems aren't hard. Hard problems take a lot of smart people working together to solve.
I dare you to write an application that is scalable, secure, accesses data of a variety of types, sends instructions across the network, maintains transactional integrity, and more in perl. I'm sure you could do it, but I certainly wouldn't want to maintain it. Besides that you'd have to start from scratch and create a bunch of library code before you could even think of starting.
This is why a lot of people use java to solve hard problems. Its large user base ensures a gigantic amount of reusable code in the form of extremely robust libraries and frameworks that have already been created. The language itself is not really anything special, but the ability to solve hard problems with the language is pretty impressive.
In that sense (b) java programmers are far and away the most likely people to be hackers in your list. Just because you don't understand what they're doing doesn't mean they aren't hacking.
If you've had lasik you can't join the army. I guess if you're worried that the world is going to hell and we're all going to be drafted you might want to get it.
And we did it because businesses wanted to make a LOT MORE money than before. We've traded our country's economy in for a pyramid scheme for corporate stockholders and the men who run the executive suites.
The flaw in this argument is that you assume that stockholders are some priveleged class, and that company ownership is out of reach of the average American. Over the past few decades stock ownership has exploded, "drastically increasing profits" benefit all stock owners which happen to be almost all Americans.
One way that we could guarantee that all American's had a stake in these "drastically increasing profits" would be to privatize social security and allow people to make their own retirement decisions. Most people have 401k's, but if you're really that concerned that the average American is being screwed by big evil corporations, than align everyone's interests with these corporations.
I'm guessing you've never worked with a large database. I would guess that there are less than 100 million different liscense plates in the US, though it could be a little more. 100 million records is peanuts when it comes to large databases (teradata in particular).
The data is also really lumpy, and could be denormalized around the state. What I'm saying is that you in no way need some fancy distributed database to do what you're talking about, its actually fairly trivial. At the data warehouse I used to work at we had over 200 gigs of data and ran extremely complex queries (much, much more complex than SELECT FROM liscense_table WHERE liscense_table.no = **) on one pretty paltry box. It was running teradata as the software, though.
I'm not associated with O'Reilly in any shape or form but a lot of like minded geeks have never heard of safari. For $15 bucks a month you get access to an amazing number of technical books. You can keep 10 books on your "bookshelf" at a time and can remove a book from your bookshelf after you've kept it for a month.
Some people might not like reading the books on your monitor, but it doesn't bother me. I think the electronic search features (in a specific book, across all books, etc.) really makes the service much more useful.
Again, I'm not trying to plug, but after years of spending at least $50 a month on books I'm really satisfied with safari.
But instead of paying $23.7 million for the Microsoft solution, Munich's city council opted to spend roughly $35.7 million to switch to open source, saying that the higher price would be offset by lower costs and more flexibility in licensing fees and software choices over the long run.
That's an initial difference of $12.5 million, or $892 per system. They say that they'll make it up in the long run, but they must really mean long term.
I love linux as much as the next guy, but the duty of this agency is to provide the cheapest solution to server their constinuents. This whole project smells to me like the council had a beef with Microsoft, and allowed that bias to lead to a poor business decision. Now they're trying to justify it so they don't have to admit that they made a mistake.
There are probably organizations that are ready for a wholesale ms to linux migration, but this doesn't look to be one. All of their staff have to be retrained, the price is more expensive, and a considerable custom windows application base seem to make this a bad idea. The linux community can only be hurt by a square peg linux solution being shoved into a circle microsoft hole.
Microsoft is loving this, and preparing marketing material right now that shows that replacing Microsoft with Linux doesn't make business sense. Business realities, not propoganda, should dictate migration to linux. Forcing the issue (as it appears they are doing) only hurts linux in the long run.
i was thinking the same thing. whats the point of having internet going at 70+mbps. it gets to be a moot point when you're downloading a few 50k jpeg files and some text.
You're not thinking big enough. I think the key word here is convergence. At really high speeds, 50 mbps for example, everything comes through the internet. Voice over ip is the first example as it requires relatively little bandwidth. Television and on demand movies are real bandwidth hogs, and will not be delivered over the internet in any meaningful fashion until bandwidth is increased greatly. When super high speed bandwidth is available, however, your telephone, radio, and tv are all going to come from the same place: the internet.
This is a very laudable goal, because democratizing the transmission medium (there will likely be lots of competition) will drive down prices on the bandwidth as well as the content. Things like customized tv packages, and niche tv offerings will take off when the internet is the transmission medium.
I know that on slashdot google == double-plus-good, but I've been incresingly frustrated with it. Google is especially poor at finding research material as opposed to commercial material. The nature of pagerank leaves it wide open to manipulation, and the problem is only going to get worse.
I like google, and I think that Microsoft's search really sucks, but google is not the be all end all of search engines. There are areas that could be improved and if Microsoft actually improves those areas I'll switch.
So He-3 provides 1000 times the energy of coal. Exactly how much more costly is extracting a pound of He-3 from the moon than extracting a pound of coal from a hill in America?
A million times more expensive? Ten million times more expensive?
I'm no economist, but that sounds like the most retarded business plan I've ever heard. Ohh ya, maybe we should worry about making fusion reactions a net energy creator before we start talking about mining the moon for fuel.
For those who won't read the article, here's the the most important part:
"The FCC should ignore pleas about national security and sophisticated criminals because sophisticated parties will use noncompliant VoIP, available open source and offshore," said Jim Harper of Privacilla.org, a privacy advocacy Web site. "CALEA for VoIP will only be good for busting small-time bookies, small-time potheads and other nincompoops."
Mr. Harper is absolutely correct, anyone with a little bit of sophistication can think of numerous ways around this legislation. Sorry Unlce Sam but the cat's out of the bag and there is no putting it back. Of course this will still be useful at catching small time drug dealers/users, and is another example of the drug war eating away at civil liberties.
I thought you thought the AC was me, but now I see that you don't even bother to look at the user id before flaming and adding me to your freak list. You know Scallion != Michael Crutcher.
That wasn't me, man. You're right; I asked if I was ignorant about the subject and you responded I was. You presented a valid reason, and that was what I was asking for. I now consider myself more educated about the question which was my purpose.
Jesus Christ man! Not all AC's that respond to reply's to the parent are the parent.
Why the hell does the asian market need its own linux distros? Isn't there asian character support in current linux distros?
Is this just a national pride thing designed as a big middle finger towards western development? Wouldn't they be better served if they helped make current distros better?
Looks to me like this article is saying that microsoft is looking to Linux development not because they believe that linux has technical aspects that they'd like to emulate (as many here might comment), but because they want to learn how to structure their organization to best develop the new OS core.
Microsoft might say that they admire the way that linux contributors interract, but I think it will be a cold day in hell before the admit that they're implementing technical features of linux.
Slashdot Mirror
What they've apparently built (I wish I had access so I could check it out) is a standard analytics model based on click stream traffic for websites and an infrastructure to support distributed web reports. Click stream analyisis for websites is not a trivial problem. The hardware required to host this given the reports they're generating and the data sizes they're working with has got to be huge. What they've built is probably pretty simple since the type of data they're tracking about your customers (whether the page was clicked) is pretty limited. I'm curious as to what exactly their script does - is it solely clicks or is tracking users over a session?
Of course if you subscribe to the google really is evil (or they want to make money) what they're going to eventually do is merge all of their traffic data (including gmail, google videos, etc.) to provide analytics on the customer the clickstream stuff is definately interesting, but the customer profile would be a lot more valuable.
They may even provide the click stream data for free and offer all of their services as well as consultation for developing custom data models for the merchant. This is a stretch but given their areas of expertise would make some sort of sense.
I think our major disagreement stems from our preferred definition of hacker. You seem to think that hacker means sumpreme uber UNIX geek. I have no doubt that you're a good sysadmin but I think that you really have no idea what the "Real World" is when it comes to programming.
My definition (and I believe it's fairly close to what the article author meant) was that a hacker was someone who used a programming langauge to solve hard problems. Under my definition you're clearly not a hacker. Sure you use perl to help automate your every day tasks, but these are certainly not "hard" problems. The mere fact that you can get the job done with a few hundred lines of code is adequate proof that these problems aren't hard. Hard problems take a lot of smart people working together to solve.
I dare you to write an application that is scalable, secure, accesses data of a variety of types, sends instructions across the network, maintains transactional integrity, and more in perl. I'm sure you could do it, but I certainly wouldn't want to maintain it. Besides that you'd have to start from scratch and create a bunch of library code before you could even think of starting.
This is why a lot of people use java to solve hard problems. Its large user base ensures a gigantic amount of reusable code in the form of extremely robust libraries and frameworks that have already been created. The language itself is not really anything special, but the ability to solve hard problems with the language is pretty impressive.
In that sense (b) java programmers are far and away the most likely people to be hackers in your list. Just because you don't understand what they're doing doesn't mean they aren't hacking.
Then again, maybe you're a pussy.
Maybe you should add frickin sharks to your lasers.
The current issue of Discover magizine has a much longer and more informative writeup.
Here's were I found it referenced: Marijuana rescheduling denied (pdf)
Of course we do. What did you think we would be doing, going on dates with women?
The number of ethereal recommendations is ridiculous, yet telling.
The flaw in this argument is that you assume that stockholders are some priveleged class, and that company ownership is out of reach of the average American. Over the past few decades stock ownership has exploded, "drastically increasing profits" benefit all stock owners which happen to be almost all Americans.
One way that we could guarantee that all American's had a stake in these "drastically increasing profits" would be to privatize social security and allow people to make their own retirement decisions. Most people have 401k's, but if you're really that concerned that the average American is being screwed by big evil corporations, than align everyone's interests with these corporations.
The data is also really lumpy, and could be denormalized around the state. What I'm saying is that you in no way need some fancy distributed database to do what you're talking about, its actually fairly trivial. At the data warehouse I used to work at we had over 200 gigs of data and ran extremely complex queries (much, much more complex than SELECT FROM liscense_table WHERE liscense_table.no = **) on one pretty paltry box. It was running teradata as the software, though.
Some people might not like reading the books on your monitor, but it doesn't bother me. I think the electronic search features (in a specific book, across all books, etc.) really makes the service much more useful.
Again, I'm not trying to plug, but after years of spending at least $50 a month on books I'm really satisfied with safari.
If I can devise a Lurch filter I might be able to avoid any messages from Kerry too.
Just to inject a little sanity, at 2 million a month that's $142.85 per system. I know microsoft sucks, but they don't suck that bad.
But instead of paying $23.7 million for the Microsoft solution, Munich's city council opted to spend roughly $35.7 million to switch to open source, saying that the higher price would be offset by lower costs and more flexibility in licensing fees and software choices over the long run.
That's an initial difference of $12.5 million, or $892 per system. They say that they'll make it up in the long run, but they must really mean long term.
I love linux as much as the next guy, but the duty of this agency is to provide the cheapest solution to server their constinuents. This whole project smells to me like the council had a beef with Microsoft, and allowed that bias to lead to a poor business decision. Now they're trying to justify it so they don't have to admit that they made a mistake.
There are probably organizations that are ready for a wholesale ms to linux migration, but this doesn't look to be one. All of their staff have to be retrained, the price is more expensive, and a considerable custom windows application base seem to make this a bad idea. The linux community can only be hurt by a square peg linux solution being shoved into a circle microsoft hole.
Microsoft is loving this, and preparing marketing material right now that shows that replacing Microsoft with Linux doesn't make business sense. Business realities, not propoganda, should dictate migration to linux. Forcing the issue (as it appears they are doing) only hurts linux in the long run.
You're not thinking big enough. I think the key word here is convergence. At really high speeds, 50 mbps for example, everything comes through the internet. Voice over ip is the first example as it requires relatively little bandwidth. Television and on demand movies are real bandwidth hogs, and will not be delivered over the internet in any meaningful fashion until bandwidth is increased greatly. When super high speed bandwidth is available, however, your telephone, radio, and tv are all going to come from the same place: the internet.
This is a very laudable goal, because democratizing the transmission medium (there will likely be lots of competition) will drive down prices on the bandwidth as well as the content. Things like customized tv packages, and niche tv offerings will take off when the internet is the transmission medium.
I like google, and I think that Microsoft's search really sucks, but google is not the be all end all of search engines. There are areas that could be improved and if Microsoft actually improves those areas I'll switch.
A million times more expensive? Ten million times more expensive?
I'm no economist, but that sounds like the most retarded business plan I've ever heard. Ohh ya, maybe we should worry about making fusion reactions a net energy creator before we start talking about mining the moon for fuel.
.. but they used Bart's diamond earing, right?
"The FCC should ignore pleas about national security and sophisticated criminals because sophisticated parties will use noncompliant VoIP, available open source and offshore," said Jim Harper of Privacilla.org, a privacy advocacy Web site. "CALEA for VoIP will only be good for busting small-time bookies, small-time potheads and other nincompoops."
Mr. Harper is absolutely correct, anyone with a little bit of sophistication can think of numerous ways around this legislation. Sorry Unlce Sam but the cat's out of the bag and there is no putting it back. Of course this will still be useful at catching small time drug dealers/users, and is another example of the drug war eating away at civil liberties.
I thought you thought the AC was me, but now I see that you don't even bother to look at the user id before flaming and adding me to your freak list. You know Scallion != Michael Crutcher.
Jesus Christ man! Not all AC's that respond to reply's to the parent are the parent.
Is this just a national pride thing designed as a big middle finger towards western development? Wouldn't they be better served if they helped make current distros better?
Aren't you tired of stupid questions?
Microsoft might say that they admire the way that linux contributors interract, but I think it will be a cold day in hell before the admit that they're implementing technical features of linux.
As the linked page doth say:
SmoothTeddy is a successor to Teddy and Chameleon
You know, like maybe he's been working on it for a while and stuff.
mmm... baked chips