Yes and no. SVN is a lot younger and thus can more easily adapt. For instance, in 1.7, they changed from having those.svn folders in every single directory in your working copy and moved it all into a central.svn folder for the entire working copy. Which opens up some possibilities (now that the code is cleaner) that it might get some "git-like" features.
SVN isn't as fossilized as CVS, but it's still a server-centric architecture, not a distributed version control system. Which has its benefits and drawbacks, just like DCS.
(Mostly, if you have less-then-perfect employees, a central repository system is better - because you can back everything up from a central location. With a DCS, you have to trust that the important bits get pushed into a repository that does get backed up.)
You're missing out, Windows 7 is actually a lot better than XP was, Vista you have an argument on, but 7 has a lot of nice stuff, not least of which is 64 bit support which doesn't suck.
True, but upgrades are expensive. Win7 64bit professional edition is not a cheap upgrade. Plus there's the whole nonsense about the half a dozen different versions of Win7.
Win7 should have had *one* version, priced at $80.
By the time OS/2 2.1 and 3.0 came around, the compiler package was only $200 or so. But either way, it was a major stumble along the way that there was no free compiler for OS/2. Nothing to let you get your feet wet while trying it out.
Plus there was the horrid lack of applications. Open source was still in its infancy, and since the O/S didn't ship with a compiler, it wasn't exactly easy to compile something to run on it.
I think there was eventually a GCC for OS/2, but by that point Win 2000 was out and I moved back to the Windows camp. (Skipped 95/98/ME.)
I also have a 256GB SSD in the laptop for the past year. What it means to me is that a machine from mid-2007, which is functionally sound, is now very enjoyable to use. In fact, I'll probably up the memory to 8GB and toss Win7 on it later this year and keep it for another 2-3 years (assuming nothing breaks that is too expensive to fix). Sure, the CPU is only a Core2 Duo 2.5GHz, but other then more cores the new CPUs aren't all that much faster.
SSDs are wonderful for primary drives. They're just sucky for bulk storage due to cost.
But now that prices are getting below $1.25-$1.50 per GB, you can afford to put them into more and more machines. And if they wear out, just buy a newer and cheaper replacement.
The real magic number will be $1/GB. Hopefully soon.
(I absolutely despised using the laptop before I replaced the drive. It was slow and painful.)
Because Base is horrid at letting you quickly and easily connect two different data sources together and move data from A to B. In MSAccess, you simply link to the tables and can write queries to move from one to the other, or write out to a temporary table temporarily, etc.
Or the whole "can't import/export to CSV without going through Calc" nonsense?
Given how little heat is produced by a 60-watt bulb, an electric blanket would likely work just as well if not better, and be just as safe. I'm not saying the light bulb should be replaced in her use case, but if incandescent disappear, she will be just fine with the widely available replacements.
Heating with a 60W heater might be more efficient, but when it's not working it's less obvious then the light bulb not being lit. You can easily tell that the light bulb system is working from outside, without having to open the door. If someone goes in to retrieve something, they may not pay attention to "it's colder then it should be" but they will definitely complain about "it's too dark to see".
In the case where you are not paying someone to specifically check whether a particular widget is working, you need to design your system so that it is obvious that it's not working. And that, if it's not working, it impairs the user's ability to get things done without either fixing it or telling someone about it.
You'll still get the stupid people who will just bring a flashlight rather then change the bulb, but the problem is more likely to get fixed sooner if you tie "heating" in with "light to see WTF you're banging your shins on".
You may like and prefer that, but it turns out that no one else wants to even see (much less have to mod) 500 posts of your bullshit anonymous trolling. I say "your" because in this context anyone who is anonymous is basically the same shitty asshole of a person, and in "free/open" comment sections from Kalamazoo to Cucamonga the anons turn a thread into a 5 mile long shit fest before you can even blink.
The real story is that the news sites are not willing to pay to moderate / police their comments. Which requires a lot more work then simply tossing up a "comment" form protected by some brain-dead captcha or requiring people to register.
If you don't moderate your forums / comment threads, then you will get the garbage of society. If you want a higher class of posts, then you had damned well better moderate in such a way that brings about that result.
After going through the Gentoo installation handbook one should acquire some basic knowledge about the inner workings of a Linux based system. Not just how to use a Linux system but also how to assemble and manage one.
Then you grow up a bit and realize it's no fun to be constantly fiddling with the machine as various packages / updates break things because Gentoo is short on QA.
Still, Slackware and Gentoo are good for teaching. But for real work, I go CentOS / RHEL (maybe Ubuntu or Mint on the desktop).
Prices are now down to about $1.50/GB for standard 2.5" SSDs. And you can sometimes find them for $1.25/GB. That's lower then the $2.50-$3.00 of 18-24 months ago.
Sure, it's expensive compared to the $0.10/GB of bulk storage like 1/2/4TB drives, but when you compare it to things like 10k RPM SATA/SAS and 15k SAS (about $1/GB) it starts to not look so expensive. The only things that make me nervous about them is that SSDs still have some controller issues and it's a younger technology compared to traditional hard drives.
At $1.50/GB, that means you can purchase a 120GB SSD for about $180. For a lot of people, that's big enough and cheap enough in exchange for vastly improved performance. And if you can keep the users from storing stuff locally, you could go with one of the 64/80GB units which are in the $100-$125 range.
I've converted a few users over to SSD over the past 2 years. It's been worth the money every time. The machines are far more responsive to user input, they don't sit there and spin, and it generally means that the CPU starts being the bottleneck again. Not all of these are power users, either.
I paid about $1.75/GB for my 250GB SSD. Do I wish it was bigger? Sometimes. But it turned a 4-year old laptop from something that I hated using due to the slowness of the old 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive into something that is fast and responsive. For work it made me much more productive.
Probably dangerous enough that if you were still using 1024 bit RSA keys, you should stop and move up to the larger key sizes above 3000 bit (and make sure that your PRNG isn't broken).
But I'm pretty sure that 1024 bit RSA has been "not recommended" for at least a few years. The ssh-keygen in modern Linux systems uses a default of 2048 bits and I think GPG also uses 2048 bits as the default for a while now. The openssl documents on their website also recommend 2048 bits as the minimum.
The 0.2% number only applied to the 1024 bit keys that the researchers looked at. I didn't find anywhere that they gave numbers for 2048 bit keys.
Does this mean that every key generated has a chance of rendering a previously existing key totally compromised? If that's the case, RSA is actually broken. There are only so many prime numbers, so as more keys are created, more keys will potentially be compromised. Please, tell me I'm wrong (using a car analogy if possible).
Just plan on using larger RSA keys (instead of 1024 bit), use the 3072 or 3200 or 4096 options when generating your RSA keys.
From a cursory glance, the 0.2% number is only for RSA 1024. They indicate that RSA 2048 also suffers the same issue, but since the numeric space is much larger the odds go way down. Look for the "12720" number and you'll see the mentions of this being a 1024bit key issue.
The other half of the issue is bad PRNGs affecting the generated keys in a bad way. Moving up to a larger key size doesn't fix this issue, so that's the more worrisome side - but can be fixed by implementation of better initialization and seeding of the PRNGs.
So unless you are guarding millions of dollars of secrets (maybe tens of millions), moving up to the larger key sizes (3000 bits or larger) is a very good idea. If you have more strict needs, then a code review of your PRNG and implementation is probably needed.
(And the general recommendation in the past few years is that it was time to move up to or past 2048 bit RSA anyway. The older 1024 bit RSA keys were very long in the tooth and could potentially be brute forced soon.)
1. Make sure that all *new* documentation is scanned in addition to being filed.
2. Start throwing out paper that aren't needed any longer.
3. Scan items that you identify in step #2, which need to be kept for at least another 5 years.
No need to dig back through 10+ years of records, scanning everything. Just scan the stuff that passes the "3+ years old, and still needed for another 5+ years" sniff test and you'll cut the workload down by 10x or more.
That depends on whether you learn best by listening, by doing, or by seeing. Folks who take information in well via aural form can generally replay entire lectures or conversations in their heads, so for them writing down the notes afterwards makes a lot of sense. Others are more visual, they can easily recall anything that was written down on the board, or shown in a slide, or seen in a book.
Then there are those of us who really can only learn by doing. Lectures are the absolute worst for us and we do best in situations that involve practical application of the concepts.
If this is pigs blood, why is this a problem? This is wholly natural material; indeed normally you'd make fertilizer out of this so it would be destined to end up on the landscape anyway. What effect does this have beyond making the downstream waters more nutrient rich for fish and plant life?
Most things are fine in moderation, but at the point where you're dumping enough of it into the river to be seen from a few hundred feet up, you've gone well past "minor issue" into "this is probably causing major problems".
Local concentrations of anything that aren't a normal part of the environment (pigs generally don't bleed themselves into the river, especially not a few hundred at a time) is problematic for the species that live in that environment.
What I want to know is why did they go to all the effort of creating a whole-new language, instead of just using some other one if they're that dissatisfied with C++. There's tons of newer, lesser-used languages out there that address deficiencies in C/C++, such as Objective-C and D, which are already in existence, have been worked on for years, have compilers available, etc. I'm not a programming language whore, so I don't really know exactly how these other minor languages compare, but it seems like one of them should have fit the bill. This seems like a case of reinventing the wheel to me.
It's pretty much an indication of either:
NIH (not invented here)
or
Our organization has grown so dysfunctional that we're branching off into dozens of directions outside of our supposed core focus (i.e. the web browser & mail client). In this particular case, we're going to chase the wild herring of creating our own language because we can't be seen as "cool" if we use an existing one that accomplishes the same things.
It's the directory stack where MS wins currently. While Novell's eDirectory is fine, in a mixed environment, I may as well just pay for Microsoft's Active Directory and get things that pretty much "just work".
I keep hoping that Red Hat will wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that an easy to administer open-source directory service needs to happen.
(Admittedly, I have not had time to look at RHEL6.)
The problem with your approach is that you're depending on a blacklist to block bad content. Which leaves you especially vulnerable to infectious content like trojans / viruses / malware.
Blacklists (just like anti-virus signatures) are reactive in nature and are horrid at stopping zero-day threats before they become widespread.
The reason NoScript is so popular is because it operates on a whitelist approach. Only the sites that you have specifically cleared are allowed to run scripts. Which means that, in order to be infected, one of the dozens / hundreds of sites on your whitelist would have to be hijacked to serve up malware.
Which is a few orders of magnitude safer then letting every site you visit, except for those on some outdated blacklist, run scripts in your browser.
(Nothing is perfectly safe, but whitelisting is the only sane approach in an environment where there are hostile sites.)
Being that I'm slowly getting into Java/Spring (along with Roo, Maven, Eclipse, Hibernate and either Spring Security or Shiro), I know that pain.
The biggest problem in Java land for a new player is that there are a zillion choices, a zillion different project names, and it's very hard to figure out how things fit together. Which server do I use? Which application server goes with that? How do I link Apache to Tomcat? Do I need Websphere or Geronimo or something else? Spring? Grails? Something else? What's a JPA? Do I need to learn JSFs? Where do the JSPs get stored? The alphabet soup is very overwhelming in J2EE land.
Things definitely clicked a lot faster once I got SpringSource's STS installed and figured out Spring Roo. But I'm about 2 months in to a lot of book reading, a lot of online tutorial videos and trying to learn the intricacies of Eclipse and Subclipse.
When the cost per GB become cheaper than what's available in an HDD.
For laptops, it happens once SSDs get cheap enough for large enough that you don't feel like you're trying to live with a gold-plated shoebox sized amount of storage.
By a lot of metrics, we've hit that point with it being possible to pickup 128GB SSDs for about $1.50/GB. That's plenty for most machines and the responsiveness puts it far ahead of the competition.
Once it drops below $1/GB and starts heading down to about $0.50/GB, you're going to see more and more mass adoption for cases where you just don't need a few TB of storage.
Or we went back to EVE, which, as much as it can be a cess-pool of griefing, also has its fine share of upstanding members. And since there is no "level to 85, win arena matches, get I WIN button to use in world PvP or BGs", the short-attention-span folks don't last long enough in EVE to be more then a mosquito bite.
I think EVE's crowning achievement is that it introduced pay-to-win in such an obfuscated jargon laden way that to this day, players still won't admit even to themselves that there are super-capitals out there that were flat out bought with credit cards.
Yawn, mostly we don't care, because we can band together and blow up those scaps. Made even easier after the coming nerfs to super-caps.
At the same time, the other reason we don't care is because PLEX does not magically add ISK to the game. So it has zilch effect on inflation (except that it makes large sums of ISK more likely to move from older to newer players).
Plus, CCP got their cut, which means more money for dev salaries and maybe improved content.
PLEX takes a lot of the wind out of RMT sails, now CCP just needs to get better about banning the botters (who do cause inflation by getting NPC bounties or mission rewards non-stop 23x7).
You could argue that money for RMT gained through auctions can possibly increase the gold supply (as players may farm stuff that creates gold just to buy the stuff off the auctions) but that is an indirect increase in supply at best.
Not unless those items can be sold to vendors.
Money being transferred from a NPC (who has limitless funds) to you is a "faucet".
Money transferred from a player to a NPC is a "drain" or "sink".
Money transferred between players has zilch all effect on the total amount of money in circulation. At best, it can be a minor sink due to fees.
If faucet money is greater then sink money, you get inflation. If sink quantity is greater then faucet quantity, you get deflation. Deflation is much less likely then inflation because players will simply go run do more faucet activities to pay for the money sinks. So over time, inflation tends to be how things usually go as higher tiers of content have to reward more money/effort over lower tier content (otherwise players will not migrate to the new content).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. SVN is a lot younger and thus can more easily adapt. For instance, in 1.7, they changed from having those .svn folders in every single directory in your working copy and moved it all into a central .svn folder for the entire working copy. Which opens up some possibilities (now that the code is cleaner) that it might get some "git-like" features.
SVN isn't as fossilized as CVS, but it's still a server-centric architecture, not a distributed version control system. Which has its benefits and drawbacks, just like DCS.
(Mostly, if you have less-then-perfect employees, a central repository system is better - because you can back everything up from a central location. With a DCS, you have to trust that the important bits get pushed into a repository that does get backed up.)
You're missing out, Windows 7 is actually a lot better than XP was, Vista you have an argument on, but 7 has a lot of nice stuff, not least of which is 64 bit support which doesn't suck.
True, but upgrades are expensive. Win7 64bit professional edition is not a cheap upgrade. Plus there's the whole nonsense about the half a dozen different versions of Win7.
Win7 should have had *one* version, priced at $80.
By the time OS/2 2.1 and 3.0 came around, the compiler package was only $200 or so. But either way, it was a major stumble along the way that there was no free compiler for OS/2. Nothing to let you get your feet wet while trying it out.
Plus there was the horrid lack of applications. Open source was still in its infancy, and since the O/S didn't ship with a compiler, it wasn't exactly easy to compile something to run on it.
I think there was eventually a GCC for OS/2, but by that point Win 2000 was out and I moved back to the Windows camp. (Skipped 95/98/ME.)
I also have a 256GB SSD in the laptop for the past year. What it means to me is that a machine from mid-2007, which is functionally sound, is now very enjoyable to use. In fact, I'll probably up the memory to 8GB and toss Win7 on it later this year and keep it for another 2-3 years (assuming nothing breaks that is too expensive to fix). Sure, the CPU is only a Core2 Duo 2.5GHz, but other then more cores the new CPUs aren't all that much faster.
SSDs are wonderful for primary drives. They're just sucky for bulk storage due to cost.
But now that prices are getting below $1.25-$1.50 per GB, you can afford to put them into more and more machines. And if they wear out, just buy a newer and cheaper replacement.
The real magic number will be $1/GB. Hopefully soon.
(I absolutely despised using the laptop before I replaced the drive. It was slow and painful.)
Why would I want base to be Access?
Because Base is horrid at letting you quickly and easily connect two different data sources together and move data from A to B. In MSAccess, you simply link to the tables and can write queries to move from one to the other, or write out to a temporary table temporarily, etc.
Or the whole "can't import/export to CSV without going through Calc" nonsense?
Base is a toy, and a not very useful one at that.
Given how little heat is produced by a 60-watt bulb, an electric blanket would likely work just as well if not better, and be just as safe. I'm not saying the light bulb should be replaced in her use case, but if incandescent disappear, she will be just fine with the widely available replacements.
Heating with a 60W heater might be more efficient, but when it's not working it's less obvious then the light bulb not being lit. You can easily tell that the light bulb system is working from outside, without having to open the door. If someone goes in to retrieve something, they may not pay attention to "it's colder then it should be" but they will definitely complain about "it's too dark to see".
In the case where you are not paying someone to specifically check whether a particular widget is working, you need to design your system so that it is obvious that it's not working. And that, if it's not working, it impairs the user's ability to get things done without either fixing it or telling someone about it.
You'll still get the stupid people who will just bring a flashlight rather then change the bulb, but the problem is more likely to get fixed sooner if you tie "heating" in with "light to see WTF you're banging your shins on".
If you don't like it, meta-moderate.
You may like and prefer that, but it turns out that no one else wants to even see (much less have to mod) 500 posts of your bullshit anonymous trolling. I say "your" because in this context anyone who is anonymous is basically the same shitty asshole of a person, and in "free/open" comment sections from Kalamazoo to Cucamonga the anons turn a thread into a 5 mile long shit fest before you can even blink.
The real story is that the news sites are not willing to pay to moderate / police their comments. Which requires a lot more work then simply tossing up a "comment" form protected by some brain-dead captcha or requiring people to register.
If you don't moderate your forums / comment threads, then you will get the garbage of society. If you want a higher class of posts, then you had damned well better moderate in such a way that brings about that result.
After going through the Gentoo installation handbook one should acquire some basic knowledge about the inner workings of a Linux based system. Not just how to use a Linux system but also how to assemble and manage one.
Then you grow up a bit and realize it's no fun to be constantly fiddling with the machine as various packages / updates break things because Gentoo is short on QA.
Still, Slackware and Gentoo are good for teaching. But for real work, I go CentOS / RHEL (maybe Ubuntu or Mint on the desktop).
Prices haven't dropped in a couple years.
Prices are now down to about $1.50/GB for standard 2.5" SSDs. And you can sometimes find them for $1.25/GB. That's lower then the $2.50-$3.00 of 18-24 months ago.
Sure, it's expensive compared to the $0.10/GB of bulk storage like 1/2/4TB drives, but when you compare it to things like 10k RPM SATA/SAS and 15k SAS (about $1/GB) it starts to not look so expensive. The only things that make me nervous about them is that SSDs still have some controller issues and it's a younger technology compared to traditional hard drives.
At $1.50/GB, that means you can purchase a 120GB SSD for about $180. For a lot of people, that's big enough and cheap enough in exchange for vastly improved performance. And if you can keep the users from storing stuff locally, you could go with one of the 64/80GB units which are in the $100-$125 range.
I've converted a few users over to SSD over the past 2 years. It's been worth the money every time. The machines are far more responsive to user input, they don't sit there and spin, and it generally means that the CPU starts being the bottleneck again. Not all of these are power users, either.
I paid about $1.75/GB for my 250GB SSD. Do I wish it was bigger? Sometimes. But it turned a 4-year old laptop from something that I hated using due to the slowness of the old 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive into something that is fast and responsive. For work it made me much more productive.
And just how dangerous is it in the real world?
Probably dangerous enough that if you were still using 1024 bit RSA keys, you should stop and move up to the larger key sizes above 3000 bit (and make sure that your PRNG isn't broken).
But I'm pretty sure that 1024 bit RSA has been "not recommended" for at least a few years. The ssh-keygen in modern Linux systems uses a default of 2048 bits and I think GPG also uses 2048 bits as the default for a while now. The openssl documents on their website also recommend 2048 bits as the minimum.
The 0.2% number only applied to the 1024 bit keys that the researchers looked at. I didn't find anywhere that they gave numbers for 2048 bit keys.
Does this mean that every key generated has a chance of rendering a previously existing key totally compromised? If that's the case, RSA is actually broken. There are only so many prime numbers, so as more keys are created, more keys will potentially be compromised. Please, tell me I'm wrong (using a car analogy if possible).
Just plan on using larger RSA keys (instead of 1024 bit), use the 3072 or 3200 or 4096 options when generating your RSA keys.
From a cursory glance, the 0.2% number is only for RSA 1024. They indicate that RSA 2048 also suffers the same issue, but since the numeric space is much larger the odds go way down. Look for the "12720" number and you'll see the mentions of this being a 1024bit key issue.
The other half of the issue is bad PRNGs affecting the generated keys in a bad way. Moving up to a larger key size doesn't fix this issue, so that's the more worrisome side - but can be fixed by implementation of better initialization and seeding of the PRNGs.
So unless you are guarding millions of dollars of secrets (maybe tens of millions), moving up to the larger key sizes (3000 bits or larger) is a very good idea. If you have more strict needs, then a code review of your PRNG and implementation is probably needed.
(And the general recommendation in the past few years is that it was time to move up to or past 2048 bit RSA anyway. The older 1024 bit RSA keys were very long in the tooth and could potentially be brute forced soon.)
Which doesn't change the math much.
1. Make sure that all *new* documentation is scanned in addition to being filed.
2. Start throwing out paper that aren't needed any longer.
3. Scan items that you identify in step #2, which need to be kept for at least another 5 years.
No need to dig back through 10+ years of records, scanning everything. Just scan the stuff that passes the "3+ years old, and still needed for another 5+ years" sniff test and you'll cut the workload down by 10x or more.
That depends on whether you learn best by listening, by doing, or by seeing. Folks who take information in well via aural form can generally replay entire lectures or conversations in their heads, so for them writing down the notes afterwards makes a lot of sense. Others are more visual, they can easily recall anything that was written down on the board, or shown in a slide, or seen in a book.
Then there are those of us who really can only learn by doing. Lectures are the absolute worst for us and we do best in situations that involve practical application of the concepts.
If this is pigs blood, why is this a problem? This is wholly natural material; indeed normally you'd make fertilizer out of this so it would be destined to end up on the landscape anyway. What effect does this have beyond making the downstream waters more nutrient rich for fish and plant life?
Most things are fine in moderation, but at the point where you're dumping enough of it into the river to be seen from a few hundred feet up, you've gone well past "minor issue" into "this is probably causing major problems".
Local concentrations of anything that aren't a normal part of the environment (pigs generally don't bleed themselves into the river, especially not a few hundred at a time) is problematic for the species that live in that environment.
What I want to know is why did they go to all the effort of creating a whole-new language, instead of just using some other one if they're that dissatisfied with C++. There's tons of newer, lesser-used languages out there that address deficiencies in C/C++, such as Objective-C and D, which are already in existence, have been worked on for years, have compilers available, etc. I'm not a programming language whore, so I don't really know exactly how these other minor languages compare, but it seems like one of them should have fit the bill. This seems like a case of reinventing the wheel to me.
It's pretty much an indication of either:
NIH (not invented here)
or
Our organization has grown so dysfunctional that we're branching off into dozens of directions outside of our supposed core focus (i.e. the web browser & mail client). In this particular case, we're going to chase the wild herring of creating our own language because we can't be seen as "cool" if we use an existing one that accomplishes the same things.
It's the directory stack where MS wins currently. While Novell's eDirectory is fine, in a mixed environment, I may as well just pay for Microsoft's Active Directory and get things that pretty much "just work".
I keep hoping that Red Hat will wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that an easy to administer open-source directory service needs to happen.
(Admittedly, I have not had time to look at RHEL6.)
The problem with your approach is that you're depending on a blacklist to block bad content. Which leaves you especially vulnerable to infectious content like trojans / viruses / malware.
Blacklists (just like anti-virus signatures) are reactive in nature and are horrid at stopping zero-day threats before they become widespread.
The reason NoScript is so popular is because it operates on a whitelist approach. Only the sites that you have specifically cleared are allowed to run scripts. Which means that, in order to be infected, one of the dozens / hundreds of sites on your whitelist would have to be hijacked to serve up malware.
Which is a few orders of magnitude safer then letting every site you visit, except for those on some outdated blacklist, run scripts in your browser.
(Nothing is perfectly safe, but whitelisting is the only sane approach in an environment where there are hostile sites.)
If this is the case, whats the fucking point really?
Mostly that it's not ready for production use, and if you do use it, you darn well better make sure to have a generational backup strategy in place.
You know, similar to how ext4 was a few years ago, and ext3 before that, and (insert other FS names)...
Being that I'm slowly getting into Java/Spring (along with Roo, Maven, Eclipse, Hibernate and either Spring Security or Shiro), I know that pain.
The biggest problem in Java land for a new player is that there are a zillion choices, a zillion different project names, and it's very hard to figure out how things fit together. Which server do I use? Which application server goes with that? How do I link Apache to Tomcat? Do I need Websphere or Geronimo or something else? Spring? Grails? Something else? What's a JPA? Do I need to learn JSFs? Where do the JSPs get stored? The alphabet soup is very overwhelming in J2EE land.
Things definitely clicked a lot faster once I got SpringSource's STS installed and figured out Spring Roo. But I'm about 2 months in to a lot of book reading, a lot of online tutorial videos and trying to learn the intricacies of Eclipse and Subclipse.
Starship Troopers?
Not really. There were some very big changes between the book and the movie, (like the unnecessary romance scene in the movie).
When the cost per GB become cheaper than what's available in an HDD.
For laptops, it happens once SSDs get cheap enough for large enough that you don't feel like you're trying to live with a gold-plated shoebox sized amount of storage.
By a lot of metrics, we've hit that point with it being possible to pickup 128GB SSDs for about $1.50/GB. That's plenty for most machines and the responsiveness puts it far ahead of the competition.
Once it drops below $1/GB and starts heading down to about $0.50/GB, you're going to see more and more mass adoption for cases where you just don't need a few TB of storage.
Most of us have quit already, I know I have.
Or we went back to EVE, which, as much as it can be a cess-pool of griefing, also has its fine share of upstanding members. And since there is no "level to 85, win arena matches, get I WIN button to use in world PvP or BGs", the short-attention-span folks don't last long enough in EVE to be more then a mosquito bite.
I think EVE's crowning achievement is that it introduced pay-to-win in such an obfuscated jargon laden way that to this day, players still won't admit even to themselves that there are super-capitals out there that were flat out bought with credit cards.
Yawn, mostly we don't care, because we can band together and blow up those scaps. Made even easier after the coming nerfs to super-caps.
At the same time, the other reason we don't care is because PLEX does not magically add ISK to the game. So it has zilch effect on inflation (except that it makes large sums of ISK more likely to move from older to newer players).
Plus, CCP got their cut, which means more money for dev salaries and maybe improved content.
PLEX takes a lot of the wind out of RMT sails, now CCP just needs to get better about banning the botters (who do cause inflation by getting NPC bounties or mission rewards non-stop 23x7).
You could argue that money for RMT gained through auctions can possibly increase the gold supply (as players may farm stuff that creates gold just to buy the stuff off the auctions) but that is an indirect increase in supply at best.
Not unless those items can be sold to vendors.
Money being transferred from a NPC (who has limitless funds) to you is a "faucet".
Money transferred from a player to a NPC is a "drain" or "sink".
Money transferred between players has zilch all effect on the total amount of money in circulation. At best, it can be a minor sink due to fees.
If faucet money is greater then sink money, you get inflation. If sink quantity is greater then faucet quantity, you get deflation. Deflation is much less likely then inflation because players will simply go run do more faucet activities to pay for the money sinks. So over time, inflation tends to be how things usually go as higher tiers of content have to reward more money/effort over lower tier content (otherwise players will not migrate to the new content).