If they waited another 2 years they could pack the same processing power into a desktop PC.
Why are we posting stories about companies who are just upgrading old PCs they use for their rendering farm.
Whats next? Google server farm updates? Going to start posting to us when redhat upgrades its FTP servers to faster hardware just because its cheaper than replacing the old?
I mean seriously, all they did was upgrade, and... it wasn't even a big upgrade, I've made bigger purchases than that over the phone to dell without even any written authorization.
Its a silly rendering farm. Not a super computer. Its not even an impressive rendering farm.
No, you can throw code at a computer and get it to produce something you want. Thats not impressive. The first thing your first job is going to do is break down all the bullshit you got fed in school and introduce you to the realities of real world programming.
It seems to me that developers are always looking for talented young programmers. We're out here looking for you too. Am I missing something?"
Yes, you aren't talented. You're not special. You are just like every other graduate thats had a few programming classes. Sorry, but thats just reality.
You are not going to get a 'good job' because there are FAR FAR FAR more people out there looking for those jobs right now with years of 'experience' on paper that you don't have.
The lack of experience puts you at the bottom of the food chain, you have to compete with me, and my 20 years of writing software, and the thousands of others like me.
My wife recently graduated Vet school and is upset because she couldn't go get the perfect cushie job fresh out and had to work a shitty job for a few months. Thats just reality. You went to school just to get on a level playing field with all the other people who went to school. Look at how many people graduated with you that want to do exactly what you do. Did your school produce more programmers than your locality can consume? If so, how do you expect to get a job at all if your school is producing more people to do a job than there are job slots to fill.
First step in joining the business world: Businesses lie. They aren't looking for talented developers RIGHT NOW, but if you happen to be completely kick ass and submit a resume at the right time, they might pick you up anyway. Every companies website lists job offerings, 99% of the time they have no real intention of filling them.
They are looking for experienced programmers they can hire at the rate of a entry level programmer. If they find it, they'll hire them, but they'll just turn you down unless you have something really impressive that stands out.
How are you showing them your skills? A resume? I've hired a few developers in my time, I assure you the only people that care about your resume is HR. When a potential employer asks you what you've done, are you just going to point out class projects where you were essentially spoon fed every step of the process? Thats not going to win you any points. You need something to show them you are worth hiring and nothing on a resume is going to do it.
Regardless of everything I've said above, be it right or wrong, you have one serious disadvantage. You're looking for a job at the worst possible time. For the last 10-12 years schools have been pumping out 'developers' who are just random people that signed up for CS because they thought they could get rich quick. Now you're coming into the job market, 15 years too late, with an education that was out of date before you graduated from highschool, during an economy were all the other mediocre but far more experienced 'developers' out there are looking for jobs as well.
You're only hope is to get a job from a friend of a friend of a friend. So make so friend in the right places, work some crappy job in the interim and put some effort into making a portfolio of sorts and wait for a better time to find a job or some luck.
I'd hope nobody would argue that writing a large application in a modern high level language is easier than writing it using 1970s technology in assembly.
Depends on your goals. If I were aiming for high reliability and performance, Assembly is the best way to go, but you'll be waiting years to get it done.
If I want it tomorrow in some way that works 50% of the time or more, I'll use a 'modern' language.
The more 'modern' the language, the more complex it is in and of itself. Anyone who truely understands how the GCs in the.NET runtime and Java work also know that they are extremely complex beasts and that 99.9% of the people who use them don't have a clue as to what goes on behind the scenes. This makes most modern languages in fact far more unsafe than lower level ones because while they make it easier at first glance, they are infact FAR more complex than what people think of as being 'hard'.
I've never had a problem with memory management in assembly, but a basic webserver is the most I've ever had to write. I don't think I've ever written a Java or.NET app that I haven't had circular reference issues preventing memory from getting collected or had some sort of cleanup performed on an object that was already tombstoned.
Your statement is exactly the problem with 'modern' langauges. People assume they are easier but really don't understand how they work.
The problem is people think that throwing an exception box on the screen is somehow different than a crash with no warning other than 'it broke'. The end result is the same, the program crashed. It doesn't matter if the VM is able to provide some worthless message to the user, the user is still put out. The only difference is the 'developer' (not that they should be called that) can say 'oh its a handled bug, don't do that' or some other bullshit they learned from MS.
If you're worrying about the cost of an Oracle license, what DB you use is irrelevent, you simply aren't large enough to make a wrong choice.
When you are large enough for this to matter, the cost of Oracle or the cost of a handful of DBAs is the least of your concern.
It blows my mind how much value slashdot geeks put on the cost of software. You guys have absolutely no fucking clue how much a single employee costs a company excluding salary do you? You've been spending far too much time living in the basement and drooling over free (as in no cost) software to realize that not everyone is broke like you are. Real businesses don't worry about software license costs, they are so trivial in the grand scheme of things. You realize repurchasing all the software on pretty much any workers PC will be paid off in a couple months of their salary? Do you really not have any idea how 'cheap' Oracle is when you get to that scale?
No, you don't. Clearly.
Right tool for the right job is correct, and building your own or using someone elses half assed hacked together pile of 'OSS' is generally not the way businesses care to run. They typically want to use software from someone who has some sort of vested interest in the software not sucking ass. Its far less expensive to buy from Oracle than it is to deal with a fincky OSS developer. If you're going to hire your own inhouse developer to maintain it you've instantly spent more than you would have spent just buying some software and you now have none of the advantages of such.
Stop talking about business reality when you clearly haven't even been in that part of the real world.
The person you're replying to is clueless as far as to what 'medical data' is I think.
You should have picked up on this when he starts naming books that he's read. The more name/buzzword dropping you see the more you know the person doesn't really have a clue.
He even had to do a quick google to find some old buzzwords to throw in, I almost want to give him points for throwing in CICS, almost.
Real business track their data with SQL databases, true. However, real businesses have small numbers of transactions relative to their value. If Walmart had the same revenue but the average sale was a tenth of a cent, their fancy SQL database would be smouldering rubble.
This might be true if they sold items for 1/1000th of a cent, but its simply untrue for any sale anywhere.
Twitters load isn't that impressive, its a poorly written big mess of a service. Its pretty common knowledge that it could be made far better if they would just use some untrained monkeys.
Again, facebook... bad example.
You've taken two over night one hit wonders that will be gone in a few years and used them as if they are valid examples of how to do it. They aren't, they aren't even close. They are what happens when you grow so fast you don't have a chance in hell of keeping up, so you cobble things together as best you can to survive knowing that its just a matter of time before the fad passes.
Do I think FB and twitter could survive on MySQL? Probably not, but on a real DB with real DBAs, more than likely yes.
Define irony: A guy who clearly has no experience with large scale database system telling others how bad SQL is while using a tiny fringe asstastic software package as an example.
Your entire first paragraph is based on 100% factually incorrect statements. Perhaps you should investigate the various SQL standards out there before you talk out your ass. I have a large web app that runs on Oracle, PostgreSQL and MSSQL, with the same queries. Slightly different scripts to create the database to deal with the differences in stored proceedures, so theres a little bit of truth there, but I could have moved the stored procedures to a different location if I wanted to.
Your second paragraph is clearly written by... well, again someone who has never used a high end database. Any high end database worth its salt is designed to deal with raw disk space for its tables. Again, just because you've never had any experience outside of dicking around in your basement in Linux doesn't mean you know what your talking about. And MythTV is possibly one of the biggest piles of shit in existence. It can't even detect when the database server is malfunctioning. Don't bring up some MySQL based app like its a real database app. They aren't, ever. MySQL is used by people who don't have enough experience to realize how much it sucks. And yes, I know Wikipedia uses it. And yes, MySQL is still a fucking retarded way for them to store data.
As for the last two paragraphs... why bother, you're clearly disconnected and the rest is just you talking out your ass. Perhaps one should consider that its not SQL that sucks since so many people are capable of doing things with it just fine. Perhaps you should look a little closer to home and consider that your inability to use it is what sucks.
Considering that by the time you 'need' Oracle, the price of Oracle is a drop in the bucket.
The only people that ever complain about the price of Oracle are the people who will never have the need to use it because they'll never have the traffic to it to require it.
Sorry you haven't got to play with the big boys, but in general if you spend your time worrying about how much 'software costs' your business sucks. Software costs, even for Oracle, are trivial compared to the other costs that go into it.
An Oracle DB serving internet facing customers for instance is going to cost an order of magnitude more for bandwidth in the first year than the cost of an Oracle license to deal with it.
But you go ahead, keep pretending you have some sort of clue and are witty by pointing out its expensive. If you ever make it to that scale, the last thing on your mind will be the price of an Oracle license.
Perhaps you should look up the definition of sport... I'll help, heres one that matters:
1. (General Sporting Terms) an individual or group activity pursued for exercise or pleasure, often involving the testing of physical capabilities and taking the form of a competitive game such as football, tennis, etc.
If you think there is no physical side to race car driving then I encourage you to ride as a passenger for one F1 race (not that you could)... I'd bet 2 months pay you couldn't stay conscious just being in the car for a race, let alone staying alert and driving. $50 says you couldn't sit in the car and deal with the heat alone for the length of time they do. $10 says you couldn't stand on the asphalt with the fire suit on for the 2 to 5 hour duration of a typical summer F1 in the US or Brazil or the like.
You post makes it clear that you have no clue whats involved in racing and think when you watch the Indy 500 on TV that its really as easy as it looks on camera.
Yes, high end racing such as NASCAR, F1 and IndyCar (amount other less popular ones) have a great dependency on technology. So does football even if you don't realize it cause its not as obvious. When you consider that several types of racing limit the technology to something from one vendor then the tech matters a whole shitload less. IndyCar for instance uses one engine manufacture and one chassis manufacture and one brand of tire (that may have changed this year, they haven't really figured out their plan yet). So it doesn't matter that they have outrageous technology cause everyone else has the EXACT same tech, once again putting the human perspective back into it. Indy does try a little harder than F1 to make the field more consistent where as F1 is more open and as such has more expensive cars, but you'll find far more varying technology in your local walmart parking lot than you will at any modern high end racing event short of maybe some LeMans events with multiple classes of cars in one race.
Where there are large sums of money involved there are going to be people trying to maximize their portion of those large sums of money however they can and technology is a good reliable starting point for that. Of course its far easier on slashdot to read some article and start proclaiming things like your an expert about something you really don't understand at all. Congrats, you got that part down perfect!
This would be in all caps if the filter didn't stop me...
WHY THE FUCK DOES YOUR SCHOOL KID NEED A CELL PHONE?!
Thats right, he/she doesn't, and thats how you block facebook on the phone. Why the fuck are parents letting their children go to school with fucking phones? They don't actually have any reason to need to be that contactable.
Heck when I was in high school I had a teacher use a wireless air card to get onto youtube since the district tech staff were blocking so many websites for no reason whatsoever.
So you just got out of school... let me how tell you how high I rank the opinion of a school kid telling me about how it should be for school kids... You might want to leave that part out next time.
There is a time and place for everything, and random browsing of whatever you want is not something that you do at school.
If you think keeping students focused on school work and not dicking off reading slashdot, digg, or screwing with facebook is censorship then you are, in fact, a freaking moron.
Stop calling everything censorship just because you don't get your way.
There was a time when saying something was censored meant something, now it just means some douche bag on the Internet could spout his mouth off or do whatever he/she wanted to someone else.
When you run into someones house and call them a cock sucking faggot and then you get your ass beat by him and his boyfriend, you didn't get censored, you get your ass beat for being a fucking moron, and thats exactly what this is.
1) Make a sensible AUP for school computers. No Porn, etc.
Uhm, already done... everywhere... and it pretty much limits access to school computers to school related purposes.
2) Have sensible punishments for breaking the AUP. (No cops, no expulsions. Detention sure, suspension/parental notification, if you have to.)
And since parents don't actually punish their kids anymore... what do you do when no 'sensible' punishment works?
3) Leave the net _wide open_ for each student.
No this is retarded, no student needs to get everywhere. The computers at school are there to facilitate progress in school. Not for you to checkout slashdot or the latest news from Valve. Its not your computer, its not your network, its not playtime for little Billy while mommy and daddy go to work. Its school for learning, and contrary to popular belief, just dicking around on the Internet really doesn't result in a whole lot of learning for 99.999999% of the population. Geeks are unique in that respect, what applies to geeks doesn't apply to 99.9999999999999999999% of the school students of any age.
4) Log all activity so that in the event it is suspected a student broke the AUP you can verify the infringement took place and apply a sensible punishment.
And tomorrow you'll be in here ranting about privacy of the students and how its wrong that they get logged and how it can be used for bad things blah blah blah
5) Break the AUP too many times and you can only use school computers under strict filters, or under direct supervision (read: someone watching over your shoulder) in addition to normal punishment.
WTF, stop being such a fucking pussy. They break the rules, their done. You know why they keep breaking the rules? You keep letting them. They break them, you say 'no!' and thats the end of it, so they have no real reason to not do anything. You're trying to treat school students as responsible mature adults when in reality you can't treat most adults that way, the idea of trying to do it on children is just retarded and I'd be willing to bet comes from someone with no children, probably just fresh out of school.
Don't coddle. Don't expell. Don't freak out. Just teach the kids what is and isn't acceptable and let them learn how to deal with rules and sensible punishments.
They aren't going to learn from you because even when you sit down to write a post on slashdot you get confused in your own post about punishing them or not. You can't expect them to learn what to do when you haven't even figured it out yet.
But in my opinion. School is there to learn, not stifle. Teach and use the full brunt of the tools we have to do it.
Yes, school is there to learn, but most of the learning isn't about what you can read in a book its about growing up and learning to be a responsible productive member of society. You're going to forget the other 95% of what you learn at the party after graduation. You need to come about with the ability to solve problems where you DON'T know the answer and you need to be able to function in the real world. Knowing when Columbus discovered America is irrelevant to everyone except about 8 archeologist who would have learned that even if they never heard of him in grade school.
If you think the point of school is to come out with a bunch of information stored in your brain that you've memorized from books than you have gotten the raw end of the deal in your education and I'm afraid you've utterly missed the point of it, I'm sorry for you.
Sadly, probably won't happen because little miss perfect's perfect mother will sue the school because her daughter heard that another student might have seen a naked pic
Aren't you witty and complex... this most certainly backs up your conspiracy theory, whatever retarded one it is this week, I'm sure the government is out to get you and this is obviously proof!
Just because you and a couple other people who are above the mildly retarded rating figured out how easy it was to get around a few filters doesn't mean the majority of the students will.
Heres a better idea, how about teaching your kid that occasionally he/she has to follow the fucking rules, like it or not rather than going along and letting them think they should get their way all the freaking time.
You're going to stop using Java because you just heard about someone making malware that pretends to be the updater...
If you're going to stop using any software package that has been used as a facade for a malware infection that you probably just need to stop using your computer now, I don't know of an OS that hasn't been attacked with a fake dialog trying to trick a user.
You mean after at least 15 years of popup ups on web pages trying to appear to be desktop applications for 'cleaning your registry' or 'defragmenting your system'... that you JUST NOW realized they might actually do it with real desktop apps....
Seriously? Is this your first day on the Internet?
You register the code with an account on the publishers system, so people selling their games will just need to create bs accounts to go with each game they intend to sell rather than tying the DLC to their own personal account.
When you sell the game, you sell the account username/password.
That'll solve the problem for a few more years.
But really, just stop buying the games, there are plenty of games out there that don't have Nazi DRM schemes or depend on DLC access codes to prevent reselling.
If you don't like what they are doing... stop giving them your business, but if you aren't actually going to make a stand, and you don't really care enough to do it... please shut the fuck up about it, I'm sick of seeing/hearing about it.
Copyright doesn't 'end', eventually it will expire (maybe) and content can be sold or licensed... but... by your account when you transfer a copy of Linux to me, the copyright ends and I can do whatever I want if I get it over http.
Clearly that is not the case.
Facebook may not authorize you to connect to their webservers with anything other than a specific piece of software. The most certainly can consider access using another application, such as telnet an unauthorized access to the system, whats better is that if you've got a facebook account, you've agreed to these rules and have been made aware of them.
You are going there as their guest, they do have a fair amount of control over what you are allowed to do with their content, regardless of how much you like it, you can't go into someone elses home and start telling them what to do. The law can, but you can't. This really isn't any different.
Solution? Don't go into their home if you don't like it. And more importantly, don't agree to go into their home by their rules then tell them to fuck off and do whatever you want anyway.
What you're doing is basically saying Facebook is a bunch of assholes and I don't like what their doing, but rather than not using their service, I'm just going to be an asshole too!. At least where I grew up, that wasn't considered acceptable behavior.
Whats not a solution is sitting around trying to figure out ways to force them do what you want, but just admit that the relationship didn't work out and move on to the next party. If they decide they'd rather have you at their party than show the crap that this script blocks then maybe you can come back then.
Can they sue the maker of some script that screws with their pages? Most certainly, you can sue anyone when you feel wronged, and then someone will have to sit down and figure out which one of you is really wrong and how much so and finally, if something can actually be done about it.
Will they win? Muh, probably not. Even if they did there aren't going to be 'massive implications!@$!%$!@%' from it. Its not going to suddenly result in every greasemonkey script becoming an outlaw because this is one specific case with a specific situation and the next lawsuit will be different.
In short... I see two groups of people/parasites who rely on each other to survive and are completely unwilling to do anything more than bitch and moan to change the situation. You've got the money grubbing facebook doing whatever they can to make a buck off you versus the attention whoring facebook user base doing whatever they can to make sure they get the absolutely most attention possible.
I could give a shit who wins, Facebook and its users, in my experience are just douche bags who deserve each other.
Its being distributed to you under an agreement with Facebook. Breaking that agreement could consitute copyright infringement since the license has been broken.
Not sure how you can get 'no distribution is happening' when you're talking to a content distribution network.
God, this doesn't even require anything more than common sense to know thats a retarded statement... and it gets marked informative? Really?
Too bad you 'web developers' don't understand that it has one particular 'web developer' (Facebook) acting like a douche bag to web users.
Greasemonkey is a client side extension that allows a user to script the browser to do neat modifications of web pages that douche bags such as yourself (and facebook) create that piss us users off.
Its an extension that lets us users tell you to take your freedom as a web developer and shove it up your ass because our freedom is more important than whatever retarded thing you're trying to cram down our throats today, regardless of how 'cool' you think the blink tag is, or how 'awesome' the ads you throw at us are, or how 'modern' the retarded noisy CPU hogging flash game is. Greasemonkey lets us give you the finger. You might want to know which group you belong too before you try to jump on the bandwagon.
I have a sneaking suspecion however that you're definition of being a web developer means you've clicked the view source menu item by the sound of your post and lack of understanding which group you fall into in this case. Next time instead of trying to be all angsty and get your OMG IPOD CLOSED, XBOX SO BIG, EVIL IF NOT GPL!@#!@$!@$ ignorance all out at once, perhaps you should slow down a little, get a clue, and try to form a coherent thought before showing everyone what they acted like when they were 16.
Finally...
Facebook 'dev community'... seriously... did you really just say that?
On their scale, all data storage requirments cost them pennies per user. Saving every change every user ever makes isn't really a big deal.
GMail is over 7G at least of storage for free accounts... do you realize how many 'facebook changes' can be stored in 7G.
I'd bet a months pay they use more disk space for table indexes than active data for profiles.
All of that information can be sold to dataminers.
So what cost them pennies per user can be sold, to multiple organizations for profit.
For them to delete data or not record changes is like me throwing $100 bills on a fire because it makes my wallet to thick. The cost of the space consumed is insignificant in relation to its value.
If you actually read their privacy statements you'll find that FaceBook never deletes any data. Ever.
The best you get is a deleted flag on your data. That may be rolled back during that 14 day period you refer to. After that however they just might not let you toggle to deleted flag off. I assure you the data is never ever deleted and this fact is documented on their own site buried deep in a nest of unintuitive links.
Perhaps I should turn in my geek card for not knowing or caring who he is but...
Really, sounds like the guy just wants to be left alone... bugging him really isn't going to do anyone any good and he seems to be being awfully nice to people bugging the shit out of him and being otherwise very inconsiderate (stereotypical of reporters and the public at large).
Stereotypical of geeks it may be, but I can certainly sympathize with him.
Slashdot Mirror
There comes a point when you pass the point of cramming too much heat in a case and the whole system rapidly becomes unstable.
Shoving 16 cores into a single 1U case, without doing the numbers, safely bypasses any sane risk.
Great, you can get that many in one U... Dell doesn't want to deal with the supporting of such hardware and dealing with all the heat issues.
Theres more to a data center than how much you can stuff into the racks, its actually got to work when its in there.
If they waited another 2 years they could pack the same processing power into a desktop PC.
Why are we posting stories about companies who are just upgrading old PCs they use for their rendering farm.
Whats next? Google server farm updates? Going to start posting to us when redhat upgrades its FTP servers to faster hardware just because its cheaper than replacing the old?
I mean seriously, all they did was upgrade, and ... it wasn't even a big upgrade, I've made bigger purchases than that over the phone to dell without even any written authorization.
Its a silly rendering farm. Not a super computer. Its not even an impressive rendering farm.
Self reply but I have to ...
No, you can throw code at a computer and get it to produce something you want. Thats not impressive. The first thing your first job is going to do is break down all the bullshit you got fed in school and introduce you to the realities of real world programming.
Yes, you aren't talented. You're not special. You are just like every other graduate thats had a few programming classes. Sorry, but thats just reality.
You are not going to get a 'good job' because there are FAR FAR FAR more people out there looking for those jobs right now with years of 'experience' on paper that you don't have.
The lack of experience puts you at the bottom of the food chain, you have to compete with me, and my 20 years of writing software, and the thousands of others like me.
My wife recently graduated Vet school and is upset because she couldn't go get the perfect cushie job fresh out and had to work a shitty job for a few months. Thats just reality. You went to school just to get on a level playing field with all the other people who went to school. Look at how many people graduated with you that want to do exactly what you do. Did your school produce more programmers than your locality can consume? If so, how do you expect to get a job at all if your school is producing more people to do a job than there are job slots to fill.
First step in joining the business world: Businesses lie. They aren't looking for talented developers RIGHT NOW, but if you happen to be completely kick ass and submit a resume at the right time, they might pick you up anyway. Every companies website lists job offerings, 99% of the time they have no real intention of filling them.
They are looking for experienced programmers they can hire at the rate of a entry level programmer. If they find it, they'll hire them, but they'll just turn you down unless you have something really impressive that stands out.
How are you showing them your skills? A resume? I've hired a few developers in my time, I assure you the only people that care about your resume is HR. When a potential employer asks you what you've done, are you just going to point out class projects where you were essentially spoon fed every step of the process? Thats not going to win you any points. You need something to show them you are worth hiring and nothing on a resume is going to do it.
Regardless of everything I've said above, be it right or wrong, you have one serious disadvantage. You're looking for a job at the worst possible time. For the last 10-12 years schools have been pumping out 'developers' who are just random people that signed up for CS because they thought they could get rich quick. Now you're coming into the job market, 15 years too late, with an education that was out of date before you graduated from highschool, during an economy were all the other mediocre but far more experienced 'developers' out there are looking for jobs as well.
You're only hope is to get a job from a friend of a friend of a friend. So make so friend in the right places, work some crappy job in the interim and put some effort into making a portfolio of sorts and wait for a better time to find a job or some luck.
And stop expecting a big salary shiny salary to do what is essentially the work of a computer janitor.
As soon as you lower your expectations to reality you'll find 'entry level' jobs are almost as common as now-hiring signs at McDonalds.
Depends on your goals. If I were aiming for high reliability and performance, Assembly is the best way to go, but you'll be waiting years to get it done.
If I want it tomorrow in some way that works 50% of the time or more, I'll use a 'modern' language.
The more 'modern' the language, the more complex it is in and of itself. Anyone who truely understands how the GCs in the .NET runtime and Java work also know that they are extremely complex beasts and that 99.9% of the people who use them don't have a clue as to what goes on behind the scenes. This makes most modern languages in fact far more unsafe than lower level ones because while they make it easier at first glance, they are infact FAR more complex than what people think of as being 'hard'.
I've never had a problem with memory management in assembly, but a basic webserver is the most I've ever had to write. I don't think I've ever written a Java or .NET app that I haven't had circular reference issues preventing memory from getting collected or had some sort of cleanup performed on an object that was already tombstoned.
Your statement is exactly the problem with 'modern' langauges. People assume they are easier but really don't understand how they work.
The problem is people think that throwing an exception box on the screen is somehow different than a crash with no warning other than 'it broke'. The end result is the same, the program crashed. It doesn't matter if the VM is able to provide some worthless message to the user, the user is still put out. The only difference is the 'developer' (not that they should be called that) can say 'oh its a handled bug, don't do that' or some other bullshit they learned from MS.
If you're worrying about the cost of an Oracle license, what DB you use is irrelevent, you simply aren't large enough to make a wrong choice.
When you are large enough for this to matter, the cost of Oracle or the cost of a handful of DBAs is the least of your concern.
It blows my mind how much value slashdot geeks put on the cost of software. You guys have absolutely no fucking clue how much a single employee costs a company excluding salary do you? You've been spending far too much time living in the basement and drooling over free (as in no cost) software to realize that not everyone is broke like you are. Real businesses don't worry about software license costs, they are so trivial in the grand scheme of things. You realize repurchasing all the software on pretty much any workers PC will be paid off in a couple months of their salary? Do you really not have any idea how 'cheap' Oracle is when you get to that scale?
No, you don't. Clearly.
Right tool for the right job is correct, and building your own or using someone elses half assed hacked together pile of 'OSS' is generally not the way businesses care to run. They typically want to use software from someone who has some sort of vested interest in the software not sucking ass. Its far less expensive to buy from Oracle than it is to deal with a fincky OSS developer. If you're going to hire your own inhouse developer to maintain it you've instantly spent more than you would have spent just buying some software and you now have none of the advantages of such.
Stop talking about business reality when you clearly haven't even been in that part of the real world.
The person you're replying to is clueless as far as to what 'medical data' is I think.
You should have picked up on this when he starts naming books that he's read. The more name/buzzword dropping you see the more you know the person doesn't really have a clue.
He even had to do a quick google to find some old buzzwords to throw in, I almost want to give him points for throwing in CICS, almost.
This might be true if they sold items for 1/1000th of a cent, but its simply untrue for any sale anywhere.
Twitters load isn't that impressive, its a poorly written big mess of a service. Its pretty common knowledge that it could be made far better if they would just use some untrained monkeys.
Again, facebook ... bad example.
You've taken two over night one hit wonders that will be gone in a few years and used them as if they are valid examples of how to do it. They aren't, they aren't even close. They are what happens when you grow so fast you don't have a chance in hell of keeping up, so you cobble things together as best you can to survive knowing that its just a matter of time before the fad passes.
Do I think FB and twitter could survive on MySQL? Probably not, but on a real DB with real DBAs, more than likely yes.
Define irony: A guy who clearly has no experience with large scale database system telling others how bad SQL is while using a tiny fringe asstastic software package as an example.
Your entire first paragraph is based on 100% factually incorrect statements. Perhaps you should investigate the various SQL standards out there before you talk out your ass. I have a large web app that runs on Oracle, PostgreSQL and MSSQL, with the same queries. Slightly different scripts to create the database to deal with the differences in stored proceedures, so theres a little bit of truth there, but I could have moved the stored procedures to a different location if I wanted to.
Your second paragraph is clearly written by ... well, again someone who has never used a high end database. Any high end database worth its salt is designed to deal with raw disk space for its tables. Again, just because you've never had any experience outside of dicking around in your basement in Linux doesn't mean you know what your talking about. And MythTV is possibly one of the biggest piles of shit in existence. It can't even detect when the database server is malfunctioning. Don't bring up some MySQL based app like its a real database app. They aren't, ever. MySQL is used by people who don't have enough experience to realize how much it sucks. And yes, I know Wikipedia uses it. And yes, MySQL is still a fucking retarded way for them to store data.
As for the last two paragraphs ... why bother, you're clearly disconnected and the rest is just you talking out your ass. Perhaps one should consider that its not SQL that sucks since so many people are capable of doing things with it just fine. Perhaps you should look a little closer to home and consider that your inability to use it is what sucks.
Considering that by the time you 'need' Oracle, the price of Oracle is a drop in the bucket.
The only people that ever complain about the price of Oracle are the people who will never have the need to use it because they'll never have the traffic to it to require it.
Sorry you haven't got to play with the big boys, but in general if you spend your time worrying about how much 'software costs' your business sucks. Software costs, even for Oracle, are trivial compared to the other costs that go into it.
An Oracle DB serving internet facing customers for instance is going to cost an order of magnitude more for bandwidth in the first year than the cost of an Oracle license to deal with it.
But you go ahead, keep pretending you have some sort of clue and are witty by pointing out its expensive. If you ever make it to that scale, the last thing on your mind will be the price of an Oracle license.
Perhaps you should look up the definition of sport ... I'll help, heres one that matters:
1. (General Sporting Terms) an individual or group activity pursued for exercise or pleasure, often involving the testing of physical capabilities and taking the form of a competitive game such as football, tennis, etc.
If you think there is no physical side to race car driving then I encourage you to ride as a passenger for one F1 race (not that you could) ... I'd bet 2 months pay you couldn't stay conscious just being in the car for a race, let alone staying alert and driving. $50 says you couldn't sit in the car and deal with the heat alone for the length of time they do. $10 says you couldn't stand on the asphalt with the fire suit on for the 2 to 5 hour duration of a typical summer F1 in the US or Brazil or the like.
You post makes it clear that you have no clue whats involved in racing and think when you watch the Indy 500 on TV that its really as easy as it looks on camera.
Yes, high end racing such as NASCAR, F1 and IndyCar (amount other less popular ones) have a great dependency on technology. So does football even if you don't realize it cause its not as obvious. When you consider that several types of racing limit the technology to something from one vendor then the tech matters a whole shitload less. IndyCar for instance uses one engine manufacture and one chassis manufacture and one brand of tire (that may have changed this year, they haven't really figured out their plan yet). So it doesn't matter that they have outrageous technology cause everyone else has the EXACT same tech, once again putting the human perspective back into it. Indy does try a little harder than F1 to make the field more consistent where as F1 is more open and as such has more expensive cars, but you'll find far more varying technology in your local walmart parking lot than you will at any modern high end racing event short of maybe some LeMans events with multiple classes of cars in one race.
Where there are large sums of money involved there are going to be people trying to maximize their portion of those large sums of money however they can and technology is a good reliable starting point for that. Of course its far easier on slashdot to read some article and start proclaiming things like your an expert about something you really don't understand at all. Congrats, you got that part down perfect!
This would be in all caps if the filter didn't stop me ...
WHY THE FUCK DOES YOUR SCHOOL KID NEED A CELL PHONE?!
Thats right, he/she doesn't, and thats how you block facebook on the phone. Why the fuck are parents letting their children go to school with fucking phones? They don't actually have any reason to need to be that contactable.
So you just got out of school ... let me how tell you how high I rank the opinion of a school kid telling me about how it should be for school kids ... You might want to leave that part out next time.
Stop fucking calling it that.
There is a time and place for everything, and random browsing of whatever you want is not something that you do at school.
If you think keeping students focused on school work and not dicking off reading slashdot, digg, or screwing with facebook is censorship then you are, in fact, a freaking moron.
Stop calling everything censorship just because you don't get your way.
There was a time when saying something was censored meant something, now it just means some douche bag on the Internet could spout his mouth off or do whatever he/she wanted to someone else.
When you run into someones house and call them a cock sucking faggot and then you get your ass beat by him and his boyfriend, you didn't get censored, you get your ass beat for being a fucking moron, and thats exactly what this is.
Uhm, already done ... everywhere ... and it pretty much limits access to school computers to school related purposes.
And since parents don't actually punish their kids anymore ... what do you do when no 'sensible' punishment works?
No this is retarded, no student needs to get everywhere. The computers at school are there to facilitate progress in school. Not for you to checkout slashdot or the latest news from Valve. Its not your computer, its not your network, its not playtime for little Billy while mommy and daddy go to work. Its school for learning, and contrary to popular belief, just dicking around on the Internet really doesn't result in a whole lot of learning for 99.999999% of the population. Geeks are unique in that respect, what applies to geeks doesn't apply to 99.9999999999999999999% of the school students of any age.
And tomorrow you'll be in here ranting about privacy of the students and how its wrong that they get logged and how it can be used for bad things blah blah blah
WTF, stop being such a fucking pussy. They break the rules, their done. You know why they keep breaking the rules? You keep letting them. They break them, you say 'no!' and thats the end of it, so they have no real reason to not do anything. You're trying to treat school students as responsible mature adults when in reality you can't treat most adults that way, the idea of trying to do it on children is just retarded and I'd be willing to bet comes from someone with no children, probably just fresh out of school.
They aren't going to learn from you because even when you sit down to write a post on slashdot you get confused in your own post about punishing them or not. You can't expect them to learn what to do when you haven't even figured it out yet.
Yes, school is there to learn, but most of the learning isn't about what you can read in a book its about growing up and learning to be a responsible productive member of society. You're going to forget the other 95% of what you learn at the party after graduation. You need to come about with the ability to solve problems where you DON'T know the answer and you need to be able to function in the real world. Knowing when Columbus discovered America is irrelevant to everyone except about 8 archeologist who would have learned that even if they never heard of him in grade school.
If you think the point of school is to come out with a bunch of information stored in your brain that you've memorized from books than you have gotten the raw end of the deal in your education and I'm afraid you've utterly missed the point of it, I'm sorry for you.
Aren't you witty and complex ... this most certainly backs up your conspiracy theory, whatever retarded one it is this week, I'm sure the government is out to get you and this is obviously proof!
Just because you and a couple other people who are above the mildly retarded rating figured out how easy it was to get around a few filters doesn't mean the majority of the students will.
Heres a better idea, how about teaching your kid that occasionally he/she has to follow the fucking rules, like it or not rather than going along and letting them think they should get their way all the freaking time.
You're going to stop using Java because you just heard about someone making malware that pretends to be the updater ...
If you're going to stop using any software package that has been used as a facade for a malware infection that you probably just need to stop using your computer now, I don't know of an OS that hasn't been attacked with a fake dialog trying to trick a user.
You mean after at least 15 years of popup ups on web pages trying to appear to be desktop applications for 'cleaning your registry' or 'defragmenting your system' ... that you JUST NOW realized they might actually do it with real desktop apps ....
Seriously? Is this your first day on the Internet?
You register the code with an account on the publishers system, so people selling their games will just need to create bs accounts to go with each game they intend to sell rather than tying the DLC to their own personal account.
When you sell the game, you sell the account username/password.
That'll solve the problem for a few more years.
But really, just stop buying the games, there are plenty of games out there that don't have Nazi DRM schemes or depend on DLC access codes to prevent reselling.
If you don't like what they are doing ... stop giving them your business, but if you aren't actually going to make a stand, and you don't really care enough to do it ... please shut the fuck up about it, I'm sick of seeing/hearing about it.
You could not possibly be more wrong.
Copyright doesn't 'end', eventually it will expire (maybe) and content can be sold or licensed ... but ... by your account when you transfer a copy of Linux to me, the copyright ends and I can do whatever I want if I get it over http.
Clearly that is not the case.
Facebook may not authorize you to connect to their webservers with anything other than a specific piece of software. The most certainly can consider access using another application, such as telnet an unauthorized access to the system, whats better is that if you've got a facebook account, you've agreed to these rules and have been made aware of them.
You are going there as their guest, they do have a fair amount of control over what you are allowed to do with their content, regardless of how much you like it, you can't go into someone elses home and start telling them what to do. The law can, but you can't. This really isn't any different.
Solution? Don't go into their home if you don't like it. And more importantly, don't agree to go into their home by their rules then tell them to fuck off and do whatever you want anyway.
What you're doing is basically saying Facebook is a bunch of assholes and I don't like what their doing, but rather than not using their service, I'm just going to be an asshole too!. At least where I grew up, that wasn't considered acceptable behavior.
Whats not a solution is sitting around trying to figure out ways to force them do what you want, but just admit that the relationship didn't work out and move on to the next party. If they decide they'd rather have you at their party than show the crap that this script blocks then maybe you can come back then.
Can they sue the maker of some script that screws with their pages? Most certainly, you can sue anyone when you feel wronged, and then someone will have to sit down and figure out which one of you is really wrong and how much so and finally, if something can actually be done about it.
Will they win? Muh, probably not. Even if they did there aren't going to be 'massive implications!@$!%$!@%' from it. Its not going to suddenly result in every greasemonkey script becoming an outlaw because this is one specific case with a specific situation and the next lawsuit will be different.
In short ... I see two groups of people/parasites who rely on each other to survive and are completely unwilling to do anything more than bitch and moan to change the situation. You've got the money grubbing facebook doing whatever they can to make a buck off you versus the attention whoring facebook user base doing whatever they can to make sure they get the absolutely most attention possible.
I could give a shit who wins, Facebook and its users, in my experience are just douche bags who deserve each other.
Its being distributed to you under an agreement with Facebook. Breaking that agreement could consitute copyright infringement since the license has been broken.
Not sure how you can get 'no distribution is happening' when you're talking to a content distribution network.
God, this doesn't even require anything more than common sense to know thats a retarded statement ... and it gets marked informative? Really?
Too bad you 'web developers' don't understand that it has one particular 'web developer' (Facebook) acting like a douche bag to web users.
Greasemonkey is a client side extension that allows a user to script the browser to do neat modifications of web pages that douche bags such as yourself (and facebook) create that piss us users off.
Its an extension that lets us users tell you to take your freedom as a web developer and shove it up your ass because our freedom is more important than whatever retarded thing you're trying to cram down our throats today, regardless of how 'cool' you think the blink tag is, or how 'awesome' the ads you throw at us are, or how 'modern' the retarded noisy CPU hogging flash game is. Greasemonkey lets us give you the finger. You might want to know which group you belong too before you try to jump on the bandwagon.
I have a sneaking suspecion however that you're definition of being a web developer means you've clicked the view source menu item by the sound of your post and lack of understanding which group you fall into in this case. Next time instead of trying to be all angsty and get your OMG IPOD CLOSED, XBOX SO BIG, EVIL IF NOT GPL!@#!@$!@$ ignorance all out at once, perhaps you should slow down a little, get a clue, and try to form a coherent thought before showing everyone what they acted like when they were 16.
Finally ...
Facebook 'dev community' ... seriously ... did you really just say that?
On their scale, all data storage requirments cost them pennies per user. Saving every change every user ever makes isn't really a big deal.
GMail is over 7G at least of storage for free accounts ... do you realize how many 'facebook changes' can be stored in 7G.
I'd bet a months pay they use more disk space for table indexes than active data for profiles.
All of that information can be sold to dataminers.
So what cost them pennies per user can be sold, to multiple organizations for profit.
For them to delete data or not record changes is like me throwing $100 bills on a fire because it makes my wallet to thick. The cost of the space consumed is insignificant in relation to its value.
If you actually read their privacy statements you'll find that FaceBook never deletes any data. Ever.
The best you get is a deleted flag on your data. That may be rolled back during that 14 day period you refer to. After that however they just might not let you toggle to deleted flag off. I assure you the data is never ever deleted and this fact is documented on their own site buried deep in a nest of unintuitive links.
Perhaps I should turn in my geek card for not knowing or caring who he is but ...
Really, sounds like the guy just wants to be left alone ... bugging him really isn't going to do anyone any good and he seems to be being awfully nice to people bugging the shit out of him and being otherwise very inconsiderate (stereotypical of reporters and the public at large).
Stereotypical of geeks it may be, but I can certainly sympathize with him.