It all seems a little premature to me. Both sides have benefits and pains.
But IPv6 (while i remember it being chosen as "the standard" we'll go with moving forward back in 1994 or 5?) is seriously at a point where IPv4 was when the internet was nothing more than a research network used by universities.
DHCPv6 has a number of advantages for a corporation, where it exists in the network and where it doesn't will still remain the same.
Cisco IOS's many integrations into dhcp v6 are interesting, but so much of it is way too idealistic at this point. IMHO, autoconfig will be pushed out to those routers for home networks where people dont want to know squat about their network and dhcp will probably be used in corporations for the extra functionality it gives.
Now, claiming dhcpv6 gives you control over your network space (even given cisco's embedded features) any more than dhcpv4 did for ipv4 is perhaps a little bit of a stretch. What i would say about dhcp vs autoconfig is that dhcp allows you to pass alot more info to your clients that does autoconfig. Using it for anything more than passing info to your clients and passing out ip addresses is just asking for a management nightmare at this point in time though.
It was sad to see him go, but as for the WoT (wheel of time or waste of time depending on who you listen to) im not sure i cared one way or another.
I read from 1-10 as well and it went something like: 1: wow, very interesting read, lots of interesting things happened? 2: Quite good, the plot is developing nicely 3: god i wish they'd stop pulling on those braids, but still not a bad ready 4: im so sick of reading 4 paragraphs on how the grass was on the hill somewhere in the middle of nowhere that didnt matter 5: How can he write so much and so little? the female/male balance really has gotten a little wierd 6..7: he still manages to do something interesting in each book, but i feel like im reading 400 pages that should really have been cut down to 2 chapters 8..9: i really cant remember much of significance happening here? 10: ug, someone gave me their's and i feel i should read it. That was the last straw for me, 9 was bad, but 10 was a continuation of the same thing - complete waffle describing every single little insignificant detail in 15 pages with no impact on the plot.
In short I think 12 books was waaaaaay too excessive. Jordan managed to stretch across 10 books what other authors put into 3-5, sometimes you could just flick 50 pages forward and literally not miss a thing. It was like reading "days of our lives" in that you could walk away for 2 years then watch one episode and be 100% caught up with everything that happened.
The other thing that started to get me was that by about book 5 the characters had lost any endearing qualities. Whether that was because of the explicit detail he went into describing their actions and thoughts or because they appeared to all fall victim to their various neuroses im not sure.
This is the crux of the problem. you have a hardware vendor (apple) that does software going up against a software vendor (MS) that does some hardware - apple cant win this battle under any circumstances really (not as it stands now).
If OSX could be white-boxed or even aligned with a vendor (Dell, IBM, HP, etc), then at least people could have an option on their already existing desktops. Software distribution is easy - hey you can even *clickedy click* do it online. They could even distribute a trial version under vm player or something so you could give it a go. Going apple is a largish investment because of it hardware tie-in and that will always make it niche.
At the end of the day, the PC itself should be a commodity item and sadly apple just don't seem to get that. I wouldn't mind going apple but im not replacing the HW i have on my desk because of the software that I want to run on it. You can even extend that problem the other way because you may not be able to get the hardware you want for you apple desktop.
But the problem itself extends beyond that because so many people stand to loose so much by apple winning this war - MB makers, disk makers, the list is endless of people who produce hardware centered around the x86 platform that isnt (necessarily) aimed at a specific OS but would cease to exist if apple got the 80% (not to mention apple would be unable to supply anywhere near that kind of number of boxes).
Apple should of really have opened their eyes and noticed whats been happening around them with hardware/software vendors (sgi are a good example and sun is going the same way) - decide whether you want to be a hardware or software vendor and back it. You want OSX to be your life blood? make it run on generic and keep building your iPod's/iPhones. You want to do hardware? keep building those little devices you build and integrate into windows or (even scarier) linux perhaps. It's just too hard to be a hardware and software vendor for GPC - everyone has failed because of the way it doesn't scale.
Most of the places i work, i have to fill out 4 forms and get sign off from a change control manager plus about 10 other people before i can change software on a machine. Wish i had that kind of power.
If this goes sour though, im going to have a wonderful chuckle.
Couldn't really care if they want to push out that kind of rubbish to my windows laptop though personally.
Though i find some peoples comments amusing (like "do you really want to be running a non-patched box"). Since when did MS push out patches relating to security through anything but windows update? I suppose some people out there like to think the best of MS just like alot of us want to think the worst.
im not sure thats fair, i think alot will view it uncritally in the light of what the RIAA and Co. have been claiming. If someone spreads fud after fud after fud, then someone else on the other side spreads their own fud it becomes "reasonable".
In this case its CCIA going "hey, we can twist figures also, how about that?".
In essence fighting fire with fire and if only one of those fires has the ability to burn you, do you really think its unreasonable for people to welcome something like this in the light of what has come before?
The sun x86 boxes are really quite nice unto themselves, but its not the "Sun" i grew up with and that is a bit disappointing. Ironic when you look back and think they almost canned x86 solaris at v9/8.
The E class servers they used to make where briliant, i still know places using e450's, e[3456]500 and even e[3456]000. Such a pity they couldnt have continued the way they were going. Thats not too say they've killing their e-line and unix, far from it but the things you used to expect from sun in the big-ass-box era are fast drawing to a close.
And now they're a windows OEM - HAHAhahahah. Might as well just buy my x86 servers from Dell now i guess.
But as someone stated, most companies do work hard to stay 'legit' when it comes to software, at the consumer level its an entirely different story for the most part. Being that i work 20% of the time as a project manager (on average) your looking at a number of people who your aiming
1st is the company project manager, he'll use whatever the company dictates and he may look around for alternatives and propose the ocasional piece. 2nd is the consultant PM - he will often use what ever his company dictates of whatever the client wants him to use 3rd is the contract PM - he will typically use whatever the company he's contracting at will want him to use.
But piracy is a tool you can use to your benefit (im not going to quote obvious examples here!). If some cheap contractor decides to head out to a company with a pirated version of your software, that's eyes on your product. The otherside to the story is that if your product is worth pirating, it'll be pirated. Show me a piece of software that you cant find a crack/serial number for and i'll show you a piece of software that is either so niche that only a select group use it or a piece of software that no one wants.
If you can understand why the old RIAA/MPAA music pirated = lost sales argument is flawed then maybe you can see why its as valid for software as well.
As for what i would implement (and i wouldn't, but if i did) i'd go for a custom online-activation solution with some call-home code in it. it doesnt get more intrusive than that for users (assuming they're pirating), but if you are going to go to the effort of coding in an anti-pirate solution, it had better be something near unbreakable because your otherwise just wasting lines of code and time which = $.
Now you can either implement something yourself or you can use a pre-existing solution and both have pro's and con's. Pre-existing API's tend to have known work-arounds and as such make it easier for the would-be software cracker to break it and custom means your going to spend alot more time implementing it.
The most effective tool i've seen used though is nag screens, all the utility-style applications use them to good effect (winzip, winrar, etc). But hey, if your a software developer you probably have a better idea about it than many of the people here.
Even scarier scenario - someone hacks into MS servers and get them to make EVERY copy of vista as pirated. Or finds some way of turning any vista box into a black box thru some exploit of said feature.
Can you imagine that happening in a buisness - I can imagine having a good laugh about that one day!
Bias aside and so forth - i dont care which one im using so long as im not paying for it. The truth be told, i only use office suite's for work, i do alot of technical writing so im pretty decent with both (and the documents i produce can be anything from a 10-page plan for doing something to a 600-page disaster recovery design). So as long as i can save it, email it and print it while having the ability to format the document in a real way, life is pretty good and they both do that sufficiently.
I really cant say though that either is better or worse, they both have flaws and saving graces. The only choice i make when i come into work is what do i want to be doing that day and that usually decides whether to boot linux or windows. Now if i've come to a point where i need visio, thats about the only time i find myself having to boot back to windows cause there isn't many real alternatives to it.
For me its like they both have 99% of the functions i need in a word processing suite and 9000 functions i'll never touch or need. Simple really.
Its a mixed bag really. I'm really not a huge fan of cedega at all and never have been. It would have been nice if they'd said to the eve community "you want a linux port, heres what we need coded" and see how that went. Eve already does run under wine thanks to a number of very useful eve community guys (have a look at the wine db entries for eve).
But still, its a step in the right direction and I wont complain - on the contrary, I will love CCP to bits for it (being an already-active long-time eve player anyways).
$1000 is quite a significant sum for someone starting out!.
When i first got into the hobby (many many years ago) my parents bought me a telescope for Christmas and they'd done a bit of homework and managed to get me one quite cheaply that kept me going for a number of years (I had that thing for about 4 or so i think). It had a mediocre mount and the spotting scope kinda sucked, but all in all it was a respectable start - i bought 2 more after that one. I have since moved to a big city thats surrounded by 2 other smaller (yet not-insignificant-astronomically-speaking) cities and so getting somewhere the night sky is repectably viewable is a 3-4 hour journey each way. These days, when i do feel the itch i tend to point a browser at the various robotic sites and hope i get a job in the queue:)
I've seen good start-out scope in the 300$ range new, with a very sturdy base + motorized mount. And to be honest, the motorized mount is probably overkill for the beginner (your going to want to learn how to find the object your looking for and alot of motorized mounts make that task trivial = i learn nothing, some just do earth/moon rotation correction - that is good enough). Im not going to quote brands at you though.
Now consider you may grow out of it in 2 years, 300$ over 2 years is a pretty decent return considering the enjoyment you'll get out of it plus by then you'll have a much more significant understanding of astronomy, the equipment and what would be best for you. You'll have $700 left over, you'll be inspired to save a bit more and you can earn interest on the cash. So by the time you think you're ready for an upgrade you'll probably be able to afford the beast that'll cost you significantly more.
My advice though (as has been stated) find a club and turn up to anything they'll let you turn up to - alot hold open field nights/information nights and these are boundlessly informative. You'll be able to look through scope's and get info from people about why they like there scope and why its important to them (thats an important thing). I would personally avoid going into any details on a first (or even second) visit about wanting to buy something because clubs can be a little self-serving when it comes to furnishing new amateurs with gear. Thats not to say you'll end up with a dud, just that you might find they'll be pushing type x and brand y, when you find later on you'd of rather bought type z. OF course, not all clubs are like that. But like any purchase, do your research. You obviously have net access, and there are any number of reviews out there on the various scopes you might consider worthy of purchase. All in all, don't be too pushed into absolutely buying a scope by a given date (nothing new there really).
Points I would consider worth checking though - upgrade-ability (what mounts does it support, can it take a camera adaptor, can it view sun/moon, etc) - sturdiness (nothing worse that a scope that moves when you look thru the thing) - portability (as an amateur, you'll want to lug that thing around - get something luggable, get a less lugable later on) - durability (if your lugging it around you dont want it to take one bump and need a service) - Resistance to weather (you don't want to be using your scope in the middle of winter when theres condensing moisture in the air and find out later on the scope wasn't built to take that kind of atmospheric condition and has been damaged, this point is more important than it seems because alot of scopes are made nowhere near you and make some assumptions about the environment around you are operating in) - Serviceability/Warranty (make sure it comes with both a warranty and the ability for you to fulfill that warranty should you need to without much fuss)
Thats my 0.02 anyways. I've since wanted to build a home radio telescope, which has been quite a non-trivial task to the point where i've never really gotten anywhere with it. Thats a good thing though because the thing on the list after that is to build a "laser" on the moon in order to conquer the earth.
If i had $1 for everyone that predicted the end of the RDBMS i'd have about $20 by now... hmmm, thats not very impessive is it?
If i had $1,000,000 for everyone that predicted the end of the RDBMS i'd be a rich man by now. Ahhhh, thats better.
Seriously though, i can remember any number of dbms concepts that have come out and supposedly been potential for replacing rdbms as "the thing" for data storage. OODBMS springs to mind when c++ started to take hold, and even more so when java took off, "yeah, we need an OODBMS"
In reality, rdbms is and probably always will be flexible enough to handle almost any role. Maybe when we all have enterprise (starship that is) AI in our homes we'll have developed some form of natural data storage that will become the norm, but until then - i'll be a cynic!
But, What supprised me was the success of WoW, i did play it for a couple of months but to me it was just "more of the same" with some kewl new features (the pvp bg's being one of the more impressive efforts in terms of "fun"). I just never really understood why people were interested in an MMO that had the basically the same concepts as six or so other big hits before it and i certainly didn't believe that the BG's were enough to justify the overwhelming success.
But why are slashdotters so negative towards it? While there is a certain number of people on here that are malcontents, i do believe they rank very much in the minority (though they do seem to be the more frequent posters). Even check some of the posts around this one and you'll see where those "malcontents" are praising other big companies for their success or what they've done.
For my part, i'll say well done blizzard it's a fun game that for me got boring quite quickly (i probably spent 6-8 months on it, and 4 months of that was spent twinking 19 and 29 bg pvp chars cause that was the most interesting part of the game).
I think/.'ers are quite negative to it for 2 reasons however. The first is going to sound bad, and alot of people will think im just ragging on the game when im not. The game was made for people of quite average intelligence, and i think the average on/. tends to be a fair bit higher than in most places so alot of them (like myself) probably find it boring (given that it was more of the same as well for alot of us) and dont understand why your average joe can see the value in it. There really isnt any challenge in the game except for in the pvp system, and even that can sometimes just come down to who's twinked better.
The second is bnetd fiasco - it always came across as blizzard/vivendi using a bogus law to wipe out a piece of (FOSS) software that a guy had written that managed to be better then blizzards efforts. Most people who look at that case would scorn blizzard/vivendi for it given the way it played out and they probably deserved it. Enough said.
One other point I feel worth mentioning is "hardcore gamers" scare me. I know too many of them and they look at what they achieved by playing games the way I look at my work - which is to say they think they're achieving something by being the best out there at it. You can even see them on TV quite often - "Oh yeah, i want to be the best WoW player ever". What I dont understand with this whole concept is how people can look at that as an achievement. Its like watching movies and becoming "the best movie watcher ever". Its entertainment, how can you achieve anything using entertainment except fun and enjoyment? It's a remarkably insane concept. Once you start seeing what you do in a game as being an "achievement" of any kind that means anything anywhere except in the realm of the game you've truly lost the plot and should walk away. So you managed to find the "sword of a thousand truths" inside the instance dungeon in blackrock depths? Get 10 minutes amusement out of it and get on with your life. It's truly meaningless. If WoW shutdown tomorrow, your sword would be gone and so would your achievement. The scariest hardcore gamer i knew sold his car to buy a gaming pc and I could never quite comprehend that.
Well, I can only say im sadened by both Sun and Netapp really. With any luck they'll both end up invalidating each other patents. I really hope that is the case.
ZFS is a nice fs (even if the linux implementation is going to be sadly lacking).
DSL (damn small linux) or DSL-N (damn small linux-not) if it gets a virus reboot it.
Otherwise a bartpe image probably can do the trick as well. Boots off of cdrom, can be modified for a specific task (like web browsing) and away you go.
Im probably making a few assumptions, like you have a little cheap adsl router sitting in front of you to hand out dhcp addresses, but thats not hard to acquire really.
There are quite a number of options, but it can depend on what your using (OS wise). I remember using a nuclear power station simulator in physics once that was kinda kewl. But its been years since i was at school too. I would suggest searching on code.google.com, sourceforge.net and freshmeat.net. I know sourceforge.net and freshmeat both have quite a few visually based software packages that revolve around physics and maths.
The tricky thing for me would be to try and apply visual aids to maths, depending on the level required and what type of math it is. As has been suggested though, the ability to modify notes and distribute them on the fly would be a big plus. Sitting there writing down what the teach was saying (while it does seem to increase the ability of the human mind to retain things) was always an annoyance!:)
For starters theres a bunch of windows guys on here going "oh, vista is performing as per the rfc" - which really makes me laugh and think "MS did something on a standard for once? unbe-f**king-lievable" and how the ISP is the problem and on the other side you have linux guys going "oh here's another broken MS implementation" without even reading what people have actually said about the issue.
You are ALL, everyone of you (who responded with anti or pro windows sentiments), retards. For starters the article is so light-on with details that any conclusions you draw can only end with "if we knew more..". Any of you that came up with "Microsoft are to blame" or "Lund are to blame" should never be allowed to post - EVER AGAIN!
Has the community become so divided here in the pro and anti MS camps that you cant see the forest for the tree's? Get a clue. Half of you didn't even bother reading prior posts before your own replies - for that you should also be ashamed of yourselves.
MS can work around the rules to subvert a vote (and get caught doing it) but yet the SIS got the vote invalidated on a technicality.
I love hearing people who call themselves "grey beards" crapping on about how they love paying the MS tax cause of "i have no idea about computers, but i can pretend really well" (or words to that affect) and dont understand why there are people out there who fight against them so hard. I guess if you dont understand why you shouldnt really be in IT in the first place...
I think its more like "commit fraud for a company and you give that company a standard once, teach a company how to commit fraud and they can make any standards they want".
There are in reality many very reasonable reasons why a program might read your passwd file. There are in fact innumerable standard unix function calls that do just that (this has already been pointed out). Now, if I could be bothered looking at the strace its very easy to tell if its doing this via a libc/glibc function call or whether its implementing such a call internally. Even if its internal it could be because they've statically linked in a library that does getpw* calls - who knows.
However, the point I WANTED to make was that just because/etc/passwd is world-readable doesn't mean you should share with the world! Just having usernames provides a hacker with tonnes of information about your systems for an attack point. "Oh look the user blah appears, that means he installed package x - i bet its the one with the security flaws". Or any number of other things that can be gleaned from/etc/passwd. I hope all your users set passwords that are non-predictable for example.
These really are 2 different things. Though they do sometimes cross over - oracle RAC is a good example of that.
As for where to read from a developer perspective? (which alot of people replying seemed to have missed the actual question). There are TONNES.
But split the question in two, where can i read about HA: start here-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability Theres also many books on the subject (i remember one of the few i happened to like is the things that came out of the sun blueprints books). The problem with HA is it very subjective. You can talk about HA for say web applications and just talk session sharing and an intelligent load balancer (ironically, the same thing gives you scalability until you get to the DB) or you can talk all the way down to fault-tolerant hardware. Also take a look at the whitepapers that came out of such projects as mosix, VAX clusters, oracle HA (both RAC and dataguard), IBM Websphere (There alot in the various IBM sites about HA for all their products and one is bound to be similar to yours in nature), Sun J2EE. Alot of these do go into development aspects as well and give some fantastic concepts and paradigms to follow. But you really need to define the requirements for HA. i.e. 0 dt or 30 minutes dt is a HUGE difference! (and that really is just one scenario in many, and as a developer your usually faced with multiple requirements).
Scalability is a different issue - and usually very application and environment dependent. Again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability is a good start but finding general literature is often very hard because its so dependent on the situation and the application.
Personally, i've found i learn best from example. Such things J2EE application servers (websphere, sun JES, etc), load balancing, oracle RAC vs dataguard, mysql ndb vs replication vs read-only replica database methods, apache, php, samba, windows (most things), pick just about any main-stream application and it'll almost certainly cover both HA and scalability at a level helpful to a developer.
If you want to get even more complex - take a look even cooler forms of scalability and HA that involve things like utility computing (vmware DRS, or egenera for eg). Have a look at their design documents because they offer even more diverse examples of both subjects at a more abstract layer (i.e. even below the OS and entirely on the HW)
In both cases, its hard to go from a "we weren't thinking about HA or scalability scenario when we build it" to "its HA and scalable". HA tends to be a little easier because clusters can wrap themselves around almost any situation, but scaling on such systems usually means "i need bigger, faster and more CPUs, more memory and better disk until i can figure out how to code scaling into it".
Always keep in mind though, the law of diminishing returns almost always applies.
But, i would like to know from someone intimately familiar with the site, what happens if you code something covered by an MS patent (or MS partner patent, etc)?
To me, thats the big deal breaker really. People can whinge all they like about the site, but it is what it says it is "open source". There are plenty of project on sf.net that rely on proprietary api's (even some MS ones!! OMG).
Also, to say MS are doing some "kewl shit" with their enterprise library and having to code php/perl/python or java would require eye-poking, palease get with the program cause thats just saying "hi, im not actually a developer and have no clue about code unless i can use my mouse to write it" - go back to coding in logo chump.
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It all seems a little premature to me. Both sides have benefits and pains.
But IPv6 (while i remember it being chosen as "the standard" we'll go with moving forward back in 1994 or 5?) is seriously at a point where IPv4 was when the internet was nothing more than a research network used by universities.
DHCPv6 has a number of advantages for a corporation, where it exists in the network and where it doesn't will still remain the same.
Cisco IOS's many integrations into dhcp v6 are interesting, but so much of it is way too idealistic at this point. IMHO, autoconfig will be pushed out to those routers for home networks where people dont want to know squat about their network and dhcp will probably be used in corporations for the extra functionality it gives.
Now, claiming dhcpv6 gives you control over your network space (even given cisco's embedded features) any more than dhcpv4 did for ipv4 is perhaps a little bit of a stretch. What i would say about dhcp vs autoconfig is that dhcp allows you to pass alot more info to your clients that does autoconfig. Using it for anything more than passing info to your clients and passing out ip addresses is just asking for a management nightmare at this point in time though.
It was sad to see him go, but as for the WoT (wheel of time or waste of time depending on who you listen to) im not sure i cared one way or another.
I read from 1-10 as well and it went something like:
1: wow, very interesting read, lots of interesting things happened?
2: Quite good, the plot is developing nicely
3: god i wish they'd stop pulling on those braids, but still not a bad ready
4: im so sick of reading 4 paragraphs on how the grass was on the hill somewhere in the middle of nowhere that didnt matter
5: How can he write so much and so little? the female/male balance really has gotten a little wierd
6..7: he still manages to do something interesting in each book, but i feel like im reading 400 pages that should really have been cut down to 2 chapters
8..9: i really cant remember much of significance happening here?
10: ug, someone gave me their's and i feel i should read it. That was the last straw for me, 9 was bad, but 10 was a continuation of the same thing - complete waffle describing every single little insignificant detail in 15 pages with no impact on the plot.
In short I think 12 books was waaaaaay too excessive. Jordan managed to stretch across 10 books what other authors put into 3-5, sometimes you could just flick 50 pages forward and literally not miss a thing. It was like reading "days of our lives" in that you could walk away for 2 years then watch one episode and be 100% caught up with everything that happened.
The other thing that started to get me was that by about book 5 the characters had lost any endearing qualities. Whether that was because of the explicit detail he went into describing their actions and thoughts or because they appeared to all fall victim to their various neuroses im not sure.
This is the crux of the problem. you have a hardware vendor (apple) that does software going up against a software vendor (MS) that does some hardware - apple cant win this battle under any circumstances really (not as it stands now).
If OSX could be white-boxed or even aligned with a vendor (Dell, IBM, HP, etc), then at least people could have an option on their already existing desktops. Software distribution is easy - hey you can even *clickedy click* do it online. They could even distribute a trial version under vm player or something so you could give it a go. Going apple is a largish investment because of it hardware tie-in and that will always make it niche.
At the end of the day, the PC itself should be a commodity item and sadly apple just don't seem to get that. I wouldn't mind going apple but im not replacing the HW i have on my desk because of the software that I want to run on it. You can even extend that problem the other way because you may not be able to get the hardware you want for you apple desktop.
But the problem itself extends beyond that because so many people stand to loose so much by apple winning this war - MB makers, disk makers, the list is endless of people who produce hardware centered around the x86 platform that isnt (necessarily) aimed at a specific OS but would cease to exist if apple got the 80% (not to mention apple would be unable to supply anywhere near that kind of number of boxes).
Apple should of really have opened their eyes and noticed whats been happening around them with hardware/software vendors (sgi are a good example and sun is going the same way) - decide whether you want to be a hardware or software vendor and back it. You want OSX to be your life blood? make it run on generic and keep building your iPod's/iPhones. You want to do hardware? keep building those little devices you build and integrate into windows or (even scarier) linux perhaps. It's just too hard to be a hardware and software vendor for GPC - everyone has failed because of the way it doesn't scale.
Most of the places i work, i have to fill out 4 forms and get sign off from a change control manager plus about 10 other people before i can change software on a machine. Wish i had that kind of power.
If this goes sour though, im going to have a wonderful chuckle.
Couldn't really care if they want to push out that kind of rubbish to my windows laptop though personally.
Though i find some peoples comments amusing (like "do you really want to be running a non-patched box"). Since when did MS push out patches relating to security through anything but windows update? I suppose some people out there like to think the best of MS just like alot of us want to think the worst.
im not sure thats fair, i think alot will view it uncritally in the light of what the RIAA and Co. have been claiming. If someone spreads fud after fud after fud, then someone else on the other side spreads their own fud it becomes "reasonable".
In this case its CCIA going "hey, we can twist figures also, how about that?".
In essence fighting fire with fire and if only one of those fires has the ability to burn you, do you really think its unreasonable for people to welcome something like this in the light of what has come before?
Agree'd.
The sun x86 boxes are really quite nice unto themselves, but its not the "Sun" i grew up with and that is a bit disappointing. Ironic when you look back and think they almost canned x86 solaris at v9/8.
The E class servers they used to make where briliant, i still know places using e450's, e[3456]500 and even e[3456]000. Such a pity they couldnt have continued the way they were going. Thats not too say they've killing their e-line and unix, far from it but the things you used to expect from sun in the big-ass-box era are fast drawing to a close.
And now they're a windows OEM - HAHAhahahah. Might as well just buy my x86 servers from Dell now i guess.
I agree, none at all.
But as someone stated, most companies do work hard to stay 'legit' when it comes to software, at the consumer level its an entirely different story for the most part. Being that i work 20% of the time as a project manager (on average) your looking at a number of people who your aiming
1st is the company project manager, he'll use whatever the company dictates and he may look around for alternatives and propose the ocasional piece.
2nd is the consultant PM - he will often use what ever his company dictates of whatever the client wants him to use
3rd is the contract PM - he will typically use whatever the company he's contracting at will want him to use.
But piracy is a tool you can use to your benefit (im not going to quote obvious examples here!). If some cheap contractor decides to head out to a company with a pirated version of your software, that's eyes on your product. The otherside to the story is that if your product is worth pirating, it'll be pirated. Show me a piece of software that you cant find a crack/serial number for and i'll show you a piece of software that is either so niche that only a select group use it or a piece of software that no one wants.
If you can understand why the old RIAA/MPAA music pirated = lost sales argument is flawed then maybe you can see why its as valid for software as well.
As for what i would implement (and i wouldn't, but if i did) i'd go for a custom online-activation solution with some call-home code in it. it doesnt get more intrusive than that for users (assuming they're pirating), but if you are going to go to the effort of coding in an anti-pirate solution, it had better be something near unbreakable because your otherwise just wasting lines of code and time which = $.
Now you can either implement something yourself or you can use a pre-existing solution and both have pro's and con's. Pre-existing API's tend to have known work-arounds and as such make it easier for the would-be software cracker to break it and custom means your going to spend alot more time implementing it.
The most effective tool i've seen used though is nag screens, all the utility-style applications use them to good effect (winzip, winrar, etc). But hey, if your a software developer you probably have a better idea about it than many of the people here.
Even scarier scenario - someone hacks into MS servers and get them to make EVERY copy of vista as pirated. Or finds some way of turning any vista box into a black box thru some exploit of said feature.
Can you imagine that happening in a buisness - I can imagine having a good laugh about that one day!
Bias aside and so forth - i dont care which one im using so long as im not paying for it. The truth be told, i only use office suite's for work, i do alot of technical writing so im pretty decent with both (and the documents i produce can be anything from a 10-page plan for doing something to a 600-page disaster recovery design). So as long as i can save it, email it and print it while having the ability to format the document in a real way, life is pretty good and they both do that sufficiently.
I really cant say though that either is better or worse, they both have flaws and saving graces. The only choice i make when i come into work is what do i want to be doing that day and that usually decides whether to boot linux or windows. Now if i've come to a point where i need visio, thats about the only time i find myself having to boot back to windows cause there isn't many real alternatives to it.
For me its like they both have 99% of the functions i need in a word processing suite and 9000 functions i'll never touch or need. Simple really.
Its a mixed bag really. I'm really not a huge fan of cedega at all and never have been. It would have been nice if they'd said to the eve community "you want a linux port, heres what we need coded" and see how that went. Eve already does run under wine thanks to a number of very useful eve community guys (have a look at the wine db entries for eve).
But still, its a step in the right direction and I wont complain - on the contrary, I will love CCP to bits for it (being an already-active long-time eve player anyways).
$1000 is quite a significant sum for someone starting out!.
:)
When i first got into the hobby (many many years ago) my parents bought me a telescope for Christmas and they'd done a bit of homework and managed to get me one quite cheaply that kept me going for a number of years (I had that thing for about 4 or so i think). It had a mediocre mount and the spotting scope kinda sucked, but all in all it was a respectable start - i bought 2 more after that one. I have since moved to a big city thats surrounded by 2 other smaller (yet not-insignificant-astronomically-speaking) cities and so getting somewhere the night sky is repectably viewable is a 3-4 hour journey each way. These days, when i do feel the itch i tend to point a browser at the various robotic sites and hope i get a job in the queue
I've seen good start-out scope in the 300$ range new, with a very sturdy base + motorized mount. And to be honest, the motorized mount is probably overkill for the beginner (your going to want to learn how to find the object your looking for and alot of motorized mounts make that task trivial = i learn nothing, some just do earth/moon rotation correction - that is good enough). Im not going to quote brands at you though.
Now consider you may grow out of it in 2 years, 300$ over 2 years is a pretty decent return considering the enjoyment you'll get out of it plus by then you'll have a much more significant understanding of astronomy, the equipment and what would be best for you. You'll have $700 left over, you'll be inspired to save a bit more and you can earn interest on the cash. So by the time you think you're ready for an upgrade you'll probably be able to afford the beast that'll cost you significantly more.
My advice though (as has been stated) find a club and turn up to anything they'll let you turn up to - alot hold open field nights/information nights and these are boundlessly informative. You'll be able to look through scope's and get info from people about why they like there scope and why its important to them (thats an important thing). I would personally avoid going into any details on a first (or even second) visit about wanting to buy something because clubs can be a little self-serving when it comes to furnishing new amateurs with gear. Thats not to say you'll end up with a dud, just that you might find they'll be pushing type x and brand y, when you find later on you'd of rather bought type z. OF course, not all clubs are like that. But like any purchase, do your research. You obviously have net access, and there are any number of reviews out there on the various scopes you might consider worthy of purchase. All in all, don't be too pushed into absolutely buying a scope by a given date (nothing new there really).
Points I would consider worth checking though
- upgrade-ability (what mounts does it support, can it take a camera adaptor, can it view sun/moon, etc)
- sturdiness (nothing worse that a scope that moves when you look thru the thing)
- portability (as an amateur, you'll want to lug that thing around - get something luggable, get a less lugable later on)
- durability (if your lugging it around you dont want it to take one bump and need a service)
- Resistance to weather (you don't want to be using your scope in the middle of winter when theres condensing moisture in the air and find out later on the scope wasn't built to take that kind of atmospheric condition and has been damaged, this point is more important than it seems because alot of scopes are made nowhere near you and make some assumptions about the environment around you are operating in)
- Serviceability/Warranty (make sure it comes with both a warranty and the ability for you to fulfill that warranty should you need to without much fuss)
Thats my 0.02 anyways. I've since wanted to build a home radio telescope, which has been quite a non-trivial task to the point where i've never really gotten anywhere with it. Thats a good thing though because the thing on the list after that is to build a "laser" on the moon in order to conquer the earth.
We wont know if its real or not until someone with an RFID ends up with cancer and wins millions (billions?) of dollars from verichip.
Only a judge can decide on such important scientific matters (can you taste the sarcasm?)
I overhauled my car by replacing the left wiper...
it has bald wheels, the electrics are shot, one 1 brake works - but its still drivable!
If i had $1 for everyone that predicted the end of the RDBMS i'd have about $20 by now... hmmm, thats not very impessive is it?
If i had $1,000,000 for everyone that predicted the end of the RDBMS i'd be a rich man by now. Ahhhh, thats better.
Seriously though, i can remember any number of dbms concepts that have come out and supposedly been potential for replacing rdbms as "the thing" for data storage. OODBMS springs to mind when c++ started to take hold, and even more so when java took off, "yeah, we need an OODBMS"
In reality, rdbms is and probably always will be flexible enough to handle almost any role. Maybe when we all have enterprise (starship that is) AI in our homes we'll have developed some form of natural data storage that will become the norm, but until then - i'll be a cynic!
I know, im posting into an old discussion.
/.'ers are quite negative to it for 2 reasons however. The first is going to sound bad, and alot of people will think im just ragging on the game when im not. The game was made for people of quite average intelligence, and i think the average on /. tends to be a fair bit higher than in most places so alot of them (like myself) probably find it boring (given that it was more of the same as well for alot of us) and dont understand why your average joe can see the value in it. There really isnt any challenge in the game except for in the pvp system, and even that can sometimes just come down to who's twinked better.
But, What supprised me was the success of WoW, i did play it for a couple of months but to me it was just "more of the same" with some kewl new features (the pvp bg's being one of the more impressive efforts in terms of "fun"). I just never really understood why people were interested in an MMO that had the basically the same concepts as six or so other big hits before it and i certainly didn't believe that the BG's were enough to justify the overwhelming success.
But why are slashdotters so negative towards it? While there is a certain number of people on here that are malcontents, i do believe they rank very much in the minority (though they do seem to be the more frequent posters). Even check some of the posts around this one and you'll see where those "malcontents" are praising other big companies for their success or what they've done.
For my part, i'll say well done blizzard it's a fun game that for me got boring quite quickly (i probably spent 6-8 months on it, and 4 months of that was spent twinking 19 and 29 bg pvp chars cause that was the most interesting part of the game).
I think
The second is bnetd fiasco - it always came across as blizzard/vivendi using a bogus law to wipe out a piece of (FOSS) software that a guy had written that managed to be better then blizzards efforts. Most people who look at that case would scorn blizzard/vivendi for it given the way it played out and they probably deserved it. Enough said.
One other point I feel worth mentioning is "hardcore gamers" scare me. I know too many of them and they look at what they achieved by playing games the way I look at my work - which is to say they think they're achieving something by being the best out there at it. You can even see them on TV quite often - "Oh yeah, i want to be the best WoW player ever". What I dont understand with this whole concept is how people can look at that as an achievement. Its like watching movies and becoming "the best movie watcher ever". Its entertainment, how can you achieve anything using entertainment except fun and enjoyment? It's a remarkably insane concept. Once you start seeing what you do in a game as being an "achievement" of any kind that means anything anywhere except in the realm of the game you've truly lost the plot and should walk away. So you managed to find the "sword of a thousand truths" inside the instance dungeon in blackrock depths? Get 10 minutes amusement out of it and get on with your life. It's truly meaningless. If WoW shutdown tomorrow, your sword would be gone and so would your achievement. The scariest hardcore gamer i knew sold his car to buy a gaming pc and I could never quite comprehend that.
Well, I can only say im sadened by both Sun and Netapp really. With any luck they'll both end up invalidating each other patents. I really hope that is the case.
ZFS is a nice fs (even if the linux implementation is going to be sadly lacking).
DSL (damn small linux)
or
DSL-N (damn small linux-not) if it gets a virus reboot it.
Otherwise a bartpe image probably can do the trick as well. Boots off of cdrom, can be modified for a specific task (like web browsing) and away you go.
Im probably making a few assumptions, like you have a little cheap adsl router sitting in front of you to hand out dhcp addresses, but thats not hard to acquire really.
There are quite a number of options, but it can depend on what your using (OS wise). I remember using a nuclear power station simulator in physics once that was kinda kewl. But its been years since i was at school too. I would suggest searching on code.google.com, sourceforge.net and freshmeat.net. I know sourceforge.net and freshmeat both have quite a few visually based software packages that revolve around physics and maths.
:)
This might be a good example: http://freshmeat.net/projects/physics3d/
The tricky thing for me would be to try and apply visual aids to maths, depending on the level required and what type of math it is. As has been suggested though, the ability to modify notes and distribute them on the fly would be a big plus. Sitting there writing down what the teach was saying (while it does seem to increase the ability of the human mind to retain things) was always an annoyance!
Probably not the most useful post however!
For starters theres a bunch of windows guys on here going "oh, vista is performing as per the rfc" - which really makes me laugh and think "MS did something on a standard for once? unbe-f**king-lievable" and how the ISP is the problem and on the other side you have linux guys going "oh here's another broken MS implementation" without even reading what people have actually said about the issue.
You are ALL, everyone of you (who responded with anti or pro windows sentiments), retards. For starters the article is so light-on with details that any conclusions you draw can only end with "if we knew more..". Any of you that came up with "Microsoft are to blame" or "Lund are to blame" should never be allowed to post - EVER AGAIN!
Has the community become so divided here in the pro and anti MS camps that you cant see the forest for the tree's? Get a clue. Half of you didn't even bother reading prior posts before your own replies - for that you should also be ashamed of yourselves.
MS can work around the rules to subvert a vote (and get caught doing it) but yet the SIS got the vote invalidated on a technicality.
I love hearing people who call themselves "grey beards" crapping on about how they love paying the MS tax cause of "i have no idea about computers, but i can pretend really well" (or words to that affect) and dont understand why there are people out there who fight against them so hard. I guess if you dont understand why you shouldnt really be in IT in the first place...
I think its more like "commit fraud for a company and you give that company a standard once, teach a company how to commit fraud and they can make any standards they want".
Sickening.
There are in reality many very reasonable reasons why a program might read your passwd file. There are in fact innumerable standard unix function calls that do just that (this has already been pointed out). Now, if I could be bothered looking at the strace its very easy to tell if its doing this via a libc/glibc function call or whether its implementing such a call internally. Even if its internal it could be because they've statically linked in a library that does getpw* calls - who knows.
/etc/passwd is world-readable doesn't mean you should share with the world! Just having usernames provides a hacker with tonnes of information about your systems for an attack point. "Oh look the user blah appears, that means he installed package x - i bet its the one with the security flaws". Or any number of other things that can be gleaned from /etc/passwd. I hope all your users set passwords that are non-predictable for example.
However, the point I WANTED to make was that just because
These really are 2 different things. Though they do sometimes cross over - oracle RAC is a good example of that.
As for where to read from a developer perspective? (which alot of people replying seemed to have missed the actual question). There are TONNES.
But split the question in two, where can i read about HA:
start here-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability Theres also many books on the subject (i remember one of the few i happened to like is the things that came out of the sun blueprints books). The problem with HA is it very subjective. You can talk about HA for say web applications and just talk session sharing and an intelligent load balancer (ironically, the same thing gives you scalability until you get to the DB) or you can talk all the way down to fault-tolerant hardware. Also take a look at the whitepapers that came out of such projects as mosix, VAX clusters, oracle HA (both RAC and dataguard), IBM Websphere (There alot in the various IBM sites about HA for all their products and one is bound to be similar to yours in nature), Sun J2EE. Alot of these do go into development aspects as well and give some fantastic concepts and paradigms to follow. But you really need to define the requirements for HA. i.e. 0 dt or 30 minutes dt is a HUGE difference! (and that really is just one scenario in many, and as a developer your usually faced with multiple requirements).
Scalability is a different issue - and usually very application and environment dependent. Again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability is a good start but finding general literature is often very hard because its so dependent on the situation and the application.
Personally, i've found i learn best from example. Such things J2EE application servers (websphere, sun JES, etc), load balancing, oracle RAC vs dataguard, mysql ndb vs replication vs read-only replica database methods, apache, php, samba, windows (most things), pick just about any main-stream application and it'll almost certainly cover both HA and scalability at a level helpful to a developer.
If you want to get even more complex - take a look even cooler forms of scalability and HA that involve things like utility computing (vmware DRS, or egenera for eg). Have a look at their design documents because they offer even more diverse examples of both subjects at a more abstract layer (i.e. even below the OS and entirely on the HW)
In both cases, its hard to go from a "we weren't thinking about HA or scalability scenario when we build it" to "its HA and scalable". HA tends to be a little easier because clusters can wrap themselves around almost any situation, but scaling on such systems usually means "i need bigger, faster and more CPUs, more memory and better disk until i can figure out how to code scaling into it".
Always keep in mind though, the law of diminishing returns almost always applies.
But, i would like to know from someone intimately familiar with the site, what happens if you code something covered by an MS patent (or MS partner patent, etc)?
To me, thats the big deal breaker really. People can whinge all they like about the site, but it is what it says it is "open source". There are plenty of project on sf.net that rely on proprietary api's (even some MS ones!! OMG).
Also, to say MS are doing some "kewl shit" with their enterprise library and having to code php/perl/python or java would require eye-poking, palease get with the program cause thats just saying "hi, im not actually a developer and have no clue about code unless i can use my mouse to write it" - go back to coding in logo chump.