There's a great article on ATA over Ethernet (AoE) and it has a story about a guy who put 2TB of RAID 10 up for $6,500. It looks like a fascinating solution for storing large volumes of data. If your data is primarily static, a couple of these machines replicating between themselves and you're good to go.
Interestingly enough, my son was "carded" the other day while purchasing (not renting) "Saving Private Ryan" down at the local supermarket. (We recorded it off the TV but it ran too long, and the tape stopped just as they were getting ready for the big battle at the end of the movie.) I was somewhat surprised that the store did this, but as a parent I'm glad to know that someone is paying attention to the ratings system. I would have been happy to make the extra trip had my son not been 17.
A great distro that was originally based off of Red Hat. Switched back to it after Red Hat instituted the new licensing structure. I still spend $120/year for MandrakeClub to support their efforts, and for that money I get access to the Powerpack DVD with all the extras on it. Uses RPM format, and virtually any Red Hat 9 RPM will run on it. More and more sites support Mandriva RPMS directly. Patch support is fabulous.
My only complaint is that they can be a little too bleeding edge. They shipped the 2.6.8 kernel with 10.1 and it totally sucked. 10.2 (now Limited Edition 2005) ships with 2.6.11 and has been very stable. I run it on everything from multiproc boxes to my laptop.
I've had real problems with AMBER alerts being filtered by SpamAssassin. I sent an email to the guys running the system and life has improved quite a bit. The bigger problem now is the noise that comes from testing the system and false alerts. For example, here in Seattle we got an alert the other day for a kid missing from a military base. It was a simple (if there is such a thing) custodial dispute and the child's life was not in danger, which is a requirement for an AMBER alert. I flamed them for sending the alert, and within 15 minutes the alert was pulled. I'm sure that I didn't singlehandedly change things, but every little bit of pushback helps.
I'm not sure that anyone said that one was more noble than another, just that the reality of the situation is that Microsoft can no longer think of this as a boxed product world. There are really two reasons for this: (1) the maturing state of the OS where most of the changes are now mostly incremental (Longhorn included), and (2) the Internet. The reason that I say "the Internet" is that free access to information changes everything. Remember when a real estate agent could get 7% commission on the sale of a home? Not any more, because they primarily made their money by controlling information. The MLS was a powerful tool that only real estate agents had direct access to. These days I can pop online and get the info directly from the MLS. Soon we'll see people bypassing the MLS altogether because they don't want to have to pay a listing fee, and agents are going to have to work for their money. My last house cost me 3% to sell, and that was 7 years ago at the beginning of these changes.
I think that Microsoft is in a similar quandry with the Internet. While it was good from a support standpoint (all those patches would cost big $ to deliver on CD), it really sucks from a software delivery standpoint. All the time and effort that they spent building a distribution network and securing shelf space at the local retailer so that they could have a strong influence on the market is now worth very little to them. I can compete head-to-head on the Internet, and while Microsoft can out-market me, I can out-service them. As my old boss at the food service company used to say, "A case of ketchup is a case of ketchup, it's the service that makes the difference."
Microsoft is too dependent on revenue from proprietary software to continue without complete reform of the company
Microsoft's problem isn't proprietary software, but rather shrink-wrapped software. There's tons of room for proprietary software in the real world (as far as I know,/. isn't open source) and there are lots of people still making money off of it. The ASP model says that it's not the software that's important, but the service that goes along with it. Ever wonder why IBM is throwing its weight behind Linux? They never made a lot of money selling OS/2, and probably even lost some money on it, but they did make money servicing it after the fact. Kind of like printers - sell the printer at cost and then sell ink cartridges at a big markup. Retailers understand the concept of "loss leader". It's better for IBM to throw a few bucks into Linux and sell support on the back end. The problem is that Microsoft just doesn't get this concept because it's never made any real money off of service. Try looking for service revenues on their yearly reports. It's a real hard number to find, and it's very, very small relative to product revenues.
My wallet doesn't need to be as big as Bill's in order to have a voice. The Internet is turning out to be the great equalizer, and politicians are beginning to fear the 'net a lot more than they do people with money. This is why you see people trying to enact laws to control it. I'm not sure how you feel about groups like MoveOn.org, but they've shown what a grass-roots campaign can do if well mobilized. No big bucks necessary, just some folks with a good idea, a couple of computers, and a big, fat pipe to the Internet. (For what it's worth, I'm not a big fan of MoveOn.org, but I still respect their activism.)
As for your comment about my wallet not counting with big corporations, don't be too quick to dismiss the small wallet. Yes, Microsoft caters to large corporations, but what ultimately drives technology are the thousands of people who use it every day and know it best. A quick look at history confirms this. Microsoft beat IBM by going to the desktop and getting those users to demand change. Now F/OSS is doing the same because people want more bang for the buck. Microsoft has pretty much abandoned the casual desktop user in favor of serving corporate interests, yet consumers are demanding sub-$100 PCs. Microsoft in it's current form can't deliver this. And as the Red Hat debacle shows, abandon your base and it will come back to haunt you. It just takes longer with companies like Microsoft.
I know a guy who uses these to measure power output of an engine in a car. Put in the accelerometer, stand on the gas pedal, compute the g forces, and work the numbers backwards. From what I hear, the problem with using very sensitive accelerometers is that they can pick up stray noise such as the moon passing overhead, so you'll need to be careful.
This really gives me quite a bit of insight into where you are coming from. I can certainly understand why you feel the way that do about this issue. I've never really been in a situation where I've seen firsthand someone being beaten up for their views, and I'll be the first to stand up and say that we shouldn't tolerate that kind of behavior from anyone. A core principle of freedom is that oppression of any kind can't be tolerated. Although I'm socially and economically conservative, I have this real mean streak of libertarianism that runs deep. The founding fathers had it right - give people the freedom to live without oppression of any form.
I'm kind of curious as to how you've managed to draw a parallel between the status of gays and blacks. I'd like to think that I'm a pretty tough guy and that there are few things that really bother me that much, but I'm nearly brought to tears when I think of how aweful slavery really is. I watched a story on TV about a guy who collected items of slavery (shackles, whips, etc) and used them to tell the story of slavery in the US. It was sickening to say the least. It's virtually impossible to imagine that there are people out there who are sick enough to pull this off.
So getting back to the parallel, do you really see this same kind of oppression of gays today? I don't know any oppressed gays - in fact it's quite the opposite. Virtually everyone I know who is gay has a very comfortable lifestyle. Although I'm sure that they experience some level of discrimination, I'm not seeing anything near the level that blacks have had to suffer for hundreds of years. If there were, I'd wouldn't be here writing this today. I'd be down in the streets doing what I could to change the system.
What concerns me when I see the parallel drawn between the black and gays is that feels like we're trivializing the suffering of blacks throughout history. It's important to honor the memory of those who died in support of a cause and to put them in a very special category. By respecting them in this way we send a very powerful message that slavery is unacceptable in any form. (The sad fact is that slavery is still alive and well today throughout the world, even here in the US. If you're looking for a social justice cause then this would be a great place to start.)
Your "do unto others" quote is probably what drives me to be a libertarian at heart. There are thought police on both the conservative and liberal sides of the aisle who want to tell you what you should or shouldn't do or think. Personally I don't think that what people do in their own bedroom with another consenting adult is anyone else's business, but in the same regard I think that it's no one else's business how I feel about that kind of activity. To pass legislation as a way of telling me that I'm wrong to believe that homosexuality is a sin just isn't going to work. I derive my views from reading my Bible, and if someone else reads something different than I do then I can respect their opinion yet disagree with them on their belief. Ultimately I believe that God will hold us all accountable for our own individual sins, and I know that I've got a lot of answering to do for what I've done in my life, including how I've treated other people around me. It's the recognition of our own faults that can really make a permanent change our behavior.
I'd be more than happy to someday tell you all about my sexual conquests, but I don't think that there's enough storage on the/. servers for that.:-)
You're assuming here that I'm trying to find a "safe" position, meaning that by coming up with some combination of laws (or non-laws) that we can establish a complete set of protections. But that's not my point. The whole point here is that life doesn't work like that. In this specific case, unless you're willing to abandon the First Ammendment protections on freedom of association, there will always be a mechanism for employers to fire employees at will. You might make it a little harder to do the firing, but it can still be done nonetheless. It happens all the time to people who are currently in protected classes, and the current law (the EEOC site I posted earlier) even allows for it. Maybe I'm wrong, but my assumption was that the purpose behind the legislation proposal was to eliminate discrimination, and I'm saying that it takes a lot more than a law to change people's behavior.
Let me use another example to help you understand my point. On 9/12/2001, were you any less safe than you were on 9/10/2001? Some people would say that 9/11 changed things, but in reality all that changed was our perception of the threats. Most of us lived in a bubble thinking the world was a safe place. By accepting the reality of the situtation, we were able to deal with those threats. You can argue whether the solution was the right one or not (and I'd prefer not to do that here), but very few people would have said "Yup, everything's still ok here. Move along. Nothing to see." What's helped keep the country safe since then isn't that we passed a bunch of laws telling terrorists that they could no longer fly airplanes into buildings, but rather that we became aware of the situation and took action to help prevent future problems.
Does this make more sense now, or am I just rambling at this point?:-)
And I vote for corporations all the time with my wallet. If I don't like their services then I switch. I'm never forced to use any platform that I don't want, even if it doesn't have the software I like. I can either learn to live without, or I can use that platform just for what I need it to do and no more. For many people, the days of being locked into a single vendor solution are over.
On a somewhat related note, I find it interesting that there are people who actually buy stocks and then do things like vote at the company meetings. I guess if you're interested in that kind of thing then it's probably a lot of fun, but if you purchase shares to make money then you should be voting with your wallet. Companies know that they need to attract investors and customers, which is why they're so worried about their stock price. It also forces them to be somewhere near neutral when it comes to social issues, as we've seen recently with Microsoft.
Actually, the point here is that fair is fair. If you want to pass legislation that says that companies can't discriminate based on sexual orientation then you'd better be prepared to have the same set of rules applied to you that are applied to everyone else who falls into a legally protected class. That means that your personal activities will be scrutinized as far as they apply to your work activities. Given that set of rules, no one should be surprised when their boss makes up a reason to fire them for a reason that fits well within EEOC guidelines but probably has more to do with their personal lifestyle.
You're right, it does. So can you honestly tell me that this has made any real difference in how people treat each other in the workplace?
While you're pondering that question, consider this - According to the EEOC web site, employers can indeed discriminate on a religious basis if they can prove undue burden in accomodating an employee's religious needs. This means that my employer can restrict my activities if, for example, I come to work with a handful of flyers for my church, pass them out to my coworkers, and another employee complains that my activities are interfering with their ability to work. If I fail to follow my employers wishes then they are free to fire me. I guess that what I'm saying is that it appears to me that the law gives a lot of discretion to the employer in these matters, and that anyone determined to fire someone can come up with virtually any excuse to do so. Is this an unreasonable conclusion?
And it's just as likely for a well-behaved Christian to get fired if their liberal, bigoted boss finds out what they've been doing on their own time. What's your point?
My question here is whether you want legislation to protect your interests or whether you want it to force others to believe in your cause. Even though I believe that homosexuality is a sin, I still think that the Supreme Court decision striking down Texas' anti-sodomy laws was correct. What two guys want to do in their own bedroom is their own business. But if you show up for work late every day because you spent all night "screwing around" then don't expect a lot of sympathy out of me as I'm giving you your walking papers. And BTW, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.
There are a million follow up jokes to this one, but the sad fact is that anyone would engineer a system where this is either possible or necessary. I had a long discussion with a Windows tester one day about code bloat in Windows and he argued that it wasn't a problem because "we got lots of virtual memory and stuff just gets paged out". I'd like to think that this is an isolated case, but when you look at Windows XP and see all the running services that are installed by default then it appears that he's not alone in his thinking.
The only upside here is that my friends are still replacing their old Windows machines on a regular basis and giving away their old hardware as "scrap". The last machine I got was a 1.6GHz machine with 256MB of memory and a 40GB hard drive. It's now serving as our company's chat server.
I've done dev work on both Windows CE devices (AutoPC) and Linux (Zaurus) and I can tell you hands-down that Linux is way easier to work with. Windows CE's roots are that it's a hacked version of Windows 95, so you never know what's there and whether it will work. The Linux flavors are just that - same kernel compiled a different way. There' s not a special set of tools for the platform that your targeting, rather an enhanced set that build on top of an already great system. It's also great to have tools like SSH available for remote connectivity so that you can do keyboard entry from a real keyboard. So if the choice comes down to Linux vs. Windows CE, Linux is the clear winner.
Thanks to this poster and the parent for the useful info. We'd been considering reverse proxy for intra-datacenter failover but it felt pretty heavy and we weren't sure about load balancing. We'll be sure to take a look.
That's great in theory, but what do you do when your entire data center goes away? And don't tell me "Get a better data center". What happened to Internap could happen to anyone, and it really wasn't their fault that someone pushed the big red button, although they should have come back up in something less than 45 minutes. What I'm saying is that the Internet as a whole needs a better solution than DNS replication that would allow you to switch data centers if need be. Like it or not, people are going to use short TTLs to help solve this problem until there's a better solution in place.
Usually on big providers overriding the TTL of the zone is a usual practice for sure, I do that myself in the ISP I'm working for (it's middle sized).
The problem with someone else deciding on TTL for my zone (whether they're big or small) is that they'll probably get it wrong. How do you know the "right" value to pick for me when you don't know why I picked the value in the first place? Granted, some people pick low TTL "just because", but in our case we round-robin servers and if one goes down then we want to be able to take it out of the loop in a timely fashion. We're ok with a 15 minute TTL, but not with a day.
Part of the problem with short TTL is that there is no really good mechanism in the Internet today for failing over a cluster of web servers short of buying expensive routing hardware. If you want to run a web server with a backup then having a short TTL is probably the best option around. What we need is a better DNS failover strategy and then many short-lived TTLs will probably go away. The current solution is crummy anyway. When Internap died here in Seattle and we were down for 45 minutes (along with LiveJournal), a high priced router/load balancer wouldn't have done us a bit of good.
If your friends are all so shallow that they'll believe anything they hear then you need some new friends. Unlike the other posters, I think that fighting back is a huge waste of time. If you don't believe me then just watch one episode of "The People's Court". It amazes me to see how far people will go to prove themselves right. Move on and let your g/f have her fun. While she's wasting her time blogging about you, you should be spending your time finding Miss (soon to be Mrs.) Right.
Any company that wants to see work samples probably isn't one that you want to work for. A good company will interview you to see if you know your stuff so it doesn't matter if you have a sample. If they're relying on samples then the people you'll be working with/for are probably just smart enough to have downloaded some stuff off the Internet for their interview and learned enough to answer a few questions. These are people that I would not want to work with. You also have to consider that if the interviewer isn't comfortable asking you coding questions then they probably aren't solid coders themselves. Either way, I'd avoid places that ask you for code.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a great article on ATA over Ethernet (AoE) and it has a story about a guy who put 2TB of RAID 10 up for $6,500. It looks like a fascinating solution for storing large volumes of data. If your data is primarily static, a couple of these machines replicating between themselves and you're good to go.
Interestingly enough, my son was "carded" the other day while purchasing (not renting) "Saving Private Ryan" down at the local supermarket. (We recorded it off the TV but it ran too long, and the tape stopped just as they were getting ready for the big battle at the end of the movie.) I was somewhat surprised that the store did this, but as a parent I'm glad to know that someone is paying attention to the ratings system. I would have been happy to make the extra trip had my son not been 17.
My only complaint is that they can be a little too bleeding edge. They shipped the 2.6.8 kernel with 10.1 and it totally sucked. 10.2 (now Limited Edition 2005) ships with 2.6.11 and has been very stable. I run it on everything from multiproc boxes to my laptop.
http://www.mandriva.com/
I've had real problems with AMBER alerts being filtered by SpamAssassin. I sent an email to the guys running the system and life has improved quite a bit. The bigger problem now is the noise that comes from testing the system and false alerts. For example, here in Seattle we got an alert the other day for a kid missing from a military base. It was a simple (if there is such a thing) custodial dispute and the child's life was not in danger, which is a requirement for an AMBER alert. I flamed them for sending the alert, and within 15 minutes the alert was pulled. I'm sure that I didn't singlehandedly change things, but every little bit of pushback helps.
And I suppose that you like C:\ better?
I forget, was my CDROM drive D: or E:? I'd better call my mom and ask her. She's sure to know.
Ok, my bad. I should have known better. :-(
I think that Microsoft is in a similar quandry with the Internet. While it was good from a support standpoint (all those patches would cost big $ to deliver on CD), it really sucks from a software delivery standpoint. All the time and effort that they spent building a distribution network and securing shelf space at the local retailer so that they could have a strong influence on the market is now worth very little to them. I can compete head-to-head on the Internet, and while Microsoft can out-market me, I can out-service them. As my old boss at the food service company used to say, "A case of ketchup is a case of ketchup, it's the service that makes the difference."
Microsoft's problem isn't proprietary software, but rather shrink-wrapped software. There's tons of room for proprietary software in the real world (as far as I know, /. isn't open source) and there are lots of people still making money off of it. The ASP model says that it's not the software that's important, but the service that goes along with it. Ever wonder why IBM is throwing its weight behind Linux? They never made a lot of money selling OS/2, and probably even lost some money on it, but they did make money servicing it after the fact. Kind of like printers - sell the printer at cost and then sell ink cartridges at a big markup. Retailers understand the concept of "loss leader". It's better for IBM to throw a few bucks into Linux and sell support on the back end. The problem is that Microsoft just doesn't get this concept because it's never made any real money off of service. Try looking for service revenues on their yearly reports. It's a real hard number to find, and it's very, very small relative to product revenues.
As for your comment about my wallet not counting with big corporations, don't be too quick to dismiss the small wallet. Yes, Microsoft caters to large corporations, but what ultimately drives technology are the thousands of people who use it every day and know it best. A quick look at history confirms this. Microsoft beat IBM by going to the desktop and getting those users to demand change. Now F/OSS is doing the same because people want more bang for the buck. Microsoft has pretty much abandoned the casual desktop user in favor of serving corporate interests, yet consumers are demanding sub-$100 PCs. Microsoft in it's current form can't deliver this. And as the Red Hat debacle shows, abandon your base and it will come back to haunt you. It just takes longer with companies like Microsoft.
I know a guy who uses these to measure power output of an engine in a car. Put in the accelerometer, stand on the gas pedal, compute the g forces, and work the numbers backwards. From what I hear, the problem with using very sensitive accelerometers is that they can pick up stray noise such as the moon passing overhead, so you'll need to be careful.
This really gives me quite a bit of insight into where you are coming from. I can certainly understand why you feel the way that do about this issue. I've never really been in a situation where I've seen firsthand someone being beaten up for their views, and I'll be the first to stand up and say that we shouldn't tolerate that kind of behavior from anyone. A core principle of freedom is that oppression of any kind can't be tolerated. Although I'm socially and economically conservative, I have this real mean streak of libertarianism that runs deep. The founding fathers had it right - give people the freedom to live without oppression of any form.
I'm kind of curious as to how you've managed to draw a parallel between the status of gays and blacks. I'd like to think that I'm a pretty tough guy and that there are few things that really bother me that much, but I'm nearly brought to tears when I think of how aweful slavery really is. I watched a story on TV about a guy who collected items of slavery (shackles, whips, etc) and used them to tell the story of slavery in the US. It was sickening to say the least. It's virtually impossible to imagine that there are people out there who are sick enough to pull this off.
So getting back to the parallel, do you really see this same kind of oppression of gays today? I don't know any oppressed gays - in fact it's quite the opposite. Virtually everyone I know who is gay has a very comfortable lifestyle. Although I'm sure that they experience some level of discrimination, I'm not seeing anything near the level that blacks have had to suffer for hundreds of years. If there were, I'd wouldn't be here writing this today. I'd be down in the streets doing what I could to change the system.
What concerns me when I see the parallel drawn between the black and gays is that feels like we're trivializing the suffering of blacks throughout history. It's important to honor the memory of those who died in support of a cause and to put them in a very special category. By respecting them in this way we send a very powerful message that slavery is unacceptable in any form. (The sad fact is that slavery is still alive and well today throughout the world, even here in the US. If you're looking for a social justice cause then this would be a great place to start.)
Your "do unto others" quote is probably what drives me to be a libertarian at heart. There are thought police on both the conservative and liberal sides of the aisle who want to tell you what you should or shouldn't do or think. Personally I don't think that what people do in their own bedroom with another consenting adult is anyone else's business, but in the same regard I think that it's no one else's business how I feel about that kind of activity. To pass legislation as a way of telling me that I'm wrong to believe that homosexuality is a sin just isn't going to work. I derive my views from reading my Bible, and if someone else reads something different than I do then I can respect their opinion yet disagree with them on their belief. Ultimately I believe that God will hold us all accountable for our own individual sins, and I know that I've got a lot of answering to do for what I've done in my life, including how I've treated other people around me. It's the recognition of our own faults that can really make a permanent change our behavior.
You're assuming here that I'm trying to find a "safe" position, meaning that by coming up with some combination of laws (or non-laws) that we can establish a complete set of protections. But that's not my point. The whole point here is that life doesn't work like that. In this specific case, unless you're willing to abandon the First Ammendment protections on freedom of association, there will always be a mechanism for employers to fire employees at will. You might make it a little harder to do the firing, but it can still be done nonetheless. It happens all the time to people who are currently in protected classes, and the current law (the EEOC site I posted earlier) even allows for it. Maybe I'm wrong, but my assumption was that the purpose behind the legislation proposal was to eliminate discrimination, and I'm saying that it takes a lot more than a law to change people's behavior.
Let me use another example to help you understand my point. On 9/12/2001, were you any less safe than you were on 9/10/2001? Some people would say that 9/11 changed things, but in reality all that changed was our perception of the threats. Most of us lived in a bubble thinking the world was a safe place. By accepting the reality of the situtation, we were able to deal with those threats. You can argue whether the solution was the right one or not (and I'd prefer not to do that here), but very few people would have said "Yup, everything's still ok here. Move along. Nothing to see." What's helped keep the country safe since then isn't that we passed a bunch of laws telling terrorists that they could no longer fly airplanes into buildings, but rather that we became aware of the situation and took action to help prevent future problems.
Does this make more sense now, or am I just rambling at this point? :-)
And I vote for corporations all the time with my wallet. If I don't like their services then I switch. I'm never forced to use any platform that I don't want, even if it doesn't have the software I like. I can either learn to live without, or I can use that platform just for what I need it to do and no more. For many people, the days of being locked into a single vendor solution are over.
On a somewhat related note, I find it interesting that there are people who actually buy stocks and then do things like vote at the company meetings. I guess if you're interested in that kind of thing then it's probably a lot of fun, but if you purchase shares to make money then you should be voting with your wallet. Companies know that they need to attract investors and customers, which is why they're so worried about their stock price. It also forces them to be somewhere near neutral when it comes to social issues, as we've seen recently with Microsoft.
Actually, the point here is that fair is fair. If you want to pass legislation that says that companies can't discriminate based on sexual orientation then you'd better be prepared to have the same set of rules applied to you that are applied to everyone else who falls into a legally protected class. That means that your personal activities will be scrutinized as far as they apply to your work activities. Given that set of rules, no one should be surprised when their boss makes up a reason to fire them for a reason that fits well within EEOC guidelines but probably has more to do with their personal lifestyle.
While you're pondering that question, consider this - According to the EEOC web site, employers can indeed discriminate on a religious basis if they can prove undue burden in accomodating an employee's religious needs. This means that my employer can restrict my activities if, for example, I come to work with a handful of flyers for my church, pass them out to my coworkers, and another employee complains that my activities are interfering with their ability to work. If I fail to follow my employers wishes then they are free to fire me. I guess that what I'm saying is that it appears to me that the law gives a lot of discretion to the employer in these matters, and that anyone determined to fire someone can come up with virtually any excuse to do so. Is this an unreasonable conclusion?
My question here is whether you want legislation to protect your interests or whether you want it to force others to believe in your cause. Even though I believe that homosexuality is a sin, I still think that the Supreme Court decision striking down Texas' anti-sodomy laws was correct. What two guys want to do in their own bedroom is their own business. But if you show up for work late every day because you spent all night "screwing around" then don't expect a lot of sympathy out of me as I'm giving you your walking papers. And BTW, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.
The only upside here is that my friends are still replacing their old Windows machines on a regular basis and giving away their old hardware as "scrap". The last machine I got was a 1.6GHz machine with 256MB of memory and a 40GB hard drive. It's now serving as our company's chat server.
I agree with you here, but it's probably better to say:
"not full" !== empty
The reason you need to say this way is to exclude the one instance where not full and empty are in fact the same.
I've done dev work on both Windows CE devices (AutoPC) and Linux (Zaurus) and I can tell you hands-down that Linux is way easier to work with. Windows CE's roots are that it's a hacked version of Windows 95, so you never know what's there and whether it will work. The Linux flavors are just that - same kernel compiled a different way. There' s not a special set of tools for the platform that your targeting, rather an enhanced set that build on top of an already great system. It's also great to have tools like SSH available for remote connectivity so that you can do keyboard entry from a real keyboard. So if the choice comes down to Linux vs. Windows CE, Linux is the clear winner.
Thanks to this poster and the parent for the useful info. We'd been considering reverse proxy for intra-datacenter failover but it felt pretty heavy and we weren't sure about load balancing. We'll be sure to take a look.
That's great in theory, but what do you do when your entire data center goes away? And don't tell me "Get a better data center". What happened to Internap could happen to anyone, and it really wasn't their fault that someone pushed the big red button, although they should have come back up in something less than 45 minutes. What I'm saying is that the Internet as a whole needs a better solution than DNS replication that would allow you to switch data centers if need be. Like it or not, people are going to use short TTLs to help solve this problem until there's a better solution in place.
Part of the problem with short TTL is that there is no really good mechanism in the Internet today for failing over a cluster of web servers short of buying expensive routing hardware. If you want to run a web server with a backup then having a short TTL is probably the best option around. What we need is a better DNS failover strategy and then many short-lived TTLs will probably go away. The current solution is crummy anyway. When Internap died here in Seattle and we were down for 45 minutes (along with LiveJournal), a high priced router/load balancer wouldn't have done us a bit of good.
If your friends are all so shallow that they'll believe anything they hear then you need some new friends. Unlike the other posters, I think that fighting back is a huge waste of time. If you don't believe me then just watch one episode of "The People's Court". It amazes me to see how far people will go to prove themselves right. Move on and let your g/f have her fun. While she's wasting her time blogging about you, you should be spending your time finding Miss (soon to be Mrs.) Right.
I got a "Service Unavailable" message. Doesn't bode well for their future.
Any company that wants to see work samples probably isn't one that you want to work for. A good company will interview you to see if you know your stuff so it doesn't matter if you have a sample. If they're relying on samples then the people you'll be working with/for are probably just smart enough to have downloaded some stuff off the Internet for their interview and learned enough to answer a few questions. These are people that I would not want to work with. You also have to consider that if the interviewer isn't comfortable asking you coding questions then they probably aren't solid coders themselves. Either way, I'd avoid places that ask you for code.