Of course the big sites don't have redundancy for a big unfortunate event like this and I question the commercial viability of even adapting their achitecture to suit rare events. Is it really worth scaling like that for a rare event? Is it really worth re-addressing their systems architecture for events that rarely happen?
How much resource would that reorganising take? How much would it cost? We're in an economic down turn, do they have the money in the bank to address this when the money may be better spent elsewhere in their respective businesses rather than auto-scaling on big events?
What's the online ad revenue like at the time of a big event? How is that revenue impacted at the time the service experiences difficulties? Is it worth swallowing the cost of downtime?
I'm sure all of these questions may be going through the CTOs' minds at their respective channels/agencies right now. They should be.
Now I'm not disagreeing with Reuven Cohen's comments per say, I'm just pointing out that there's got to be a good business case for scaling to this level and that business case is going to vary from news channel to news channel.
Agreed, it's a matter of trust (much like SSL certificates). X University says you passed their degree course.
I respect X University therefore, I know that you're at least good at something. And so long as you can prove yourself and show how good you are, you have fewer hurdles to jump in the interview process.
That being said, I have a Bachelors in Music. But I've worked at a few tech companies, founded my own (which I'm finishing with at the moment) and now have a decent job as a programmer, get paid quite well, not CxO well but well enough for my age and experience. Do I wish to have a CS degree? Absolutely. But hey, I'm young, and with the futher experience I've got now, I shouldn't have any problems in pursuing that if I need to in the future.
I'm willing to bet that because the distros that are being shipped with these netbooks are rubbish.
Take my eeepc 1000 for example. Came with some rubbish Xandros install what simply wasn't up to scratch. It had no standard feel to it. Firefox used Gtk, the explorer app was Konqueror.
When I put Ubuntu on it, it immediately became more useable and more powerful. I bet if they shipped the machines with a more useable distro. The return rate would drop.
You handle the side effects on a case-by-case basis.
The great things about doing it this way is you can break up huge controllers with hundreds of lines of code into smaller class methods whilst still keeping the original integrity of the class intact and compatible with old calls.
The method's not 100% effective but at least this way you can get the code to correctly pass new tests piece by piece whilst still adhering to the inevitable looming deadlines.
I use this system quite a lot when dealing with legacy code. It's not the be-all/end-all solution but it helps.
iii. Open Source Compatibility. Microsoft will promise not to sue open source developers for development and non-commercial distribution of implementations of these Open Protocols. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.
So basically they'll be sending the hounds over to the Ubuntu camp, Red Hat and anyone else who doesn't want to pay their fees. Any developer of GPL products should steer well clear from any of their bait.
Screw people who say you need qualifications to be a 'good' programmer. Maybe it helps but there a plenty of decent programmers in the world who write good code without the nessecary educational background. No area of expertise should be selective based on qualifications alone (except maybe medicine).
I've seen some truly terrible code by folks with degrees in both Comp Sci and Software Engineering, and even worse code by people who are doing degrees in so called 'ICT'.
The code style was all over the place, one guy's test code didn't even compile!
As Excelsior said, a good technical interview is the only way. After the first interview, we then actually get interviewees to write a simple program in 4 hours and review it with them earlier. Sometimes that's the only way to tell if they're any good or whether they'll fit into our organisation.
Re:Another organization that wants to be above the
on
ICANN Wants Immunity
·
· Score: 1
uh, now let me see:
France, Germany, UK, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Canada, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, need I go on??
The US isn't unique, they just brainwash their population into thinking they're unique in the free speech world.
Utter crap! First up, the US is no different from Switzerland in freedom of expression laws, secondly ICANN never said they wanted to be under UN control, therefore they are under no obligation to bow to pressure from any country which would be a better position than they are in now (being under pressure from Congress - who have a grrreat track record in legislating on Technology law - thing DMCA)
Re:Another organization that wants to be above the
on
ICANN Wants Immunity
·
· Score: 1
The internet has done quite well under US law but it's far from perfect. Things like the.xxx dispute should not be a political football amongst under-educated US politicians. Same with the US having too much control over the root servers in general. Americans should wake up to the fact that the whole world uses the internet and respect needs to be given to every country.
For example, China is thinking about creating it's own internet, being greedy about who controls ICANN just encourages them to work on their own project which could potentially have devastating effects on current system, not to mention the added cost in supporting such a system (which our company for one would have to do).
Ahhh but you forget that UK law would prohibit this (the forceable non-resale of a licence agreement).
In the UK you can legally resell your copy of Windows, with the licence agreement, even if it is an OEM copy and was intended to be used (as Microsoft says) 'only on new computers'.
IMHO Those figures aren't influenced by Firefox's 'Latest Headlines' because that RSS feed points to article pages, not the homepage, these results were from the homepage therefore anyone that says that FF's 'Latest Headlines' unfairly influences the results should RTFA!
FWIW Westminster Abbey's stats are (taken 16-10-05 to 22-10-05):
IE Variants: 65.9%
Netscape variants (mostly Firefox and other Geckos): 24.9%
This is compared to 6months ago (taken Jan 2005 - Feb 2005)
IE vars: 69.4%
Gecko vars: 21.1%
And finally last year (taken May 2004 - June 2004)
IE vars: 80.9%
Gecko vars: 11%
Our results do tend to suggest that Firefox has gained a significant market share from Microsoft's browsers.
As a small business, there's also another key reason to keep things secret at the beginning. That's potential big client contracts. Our company is competing for our first 'big' client contract and we can't afford to let our competitors in on our technology or designs, why? Because we want to surprise everyone come pitch-day.
I'm not against being open, and I'm all for sharing technology (because through sharing as open source comes improvement, better products and community, so we'll probably release our underlying as open source after we get the contract.
The switch to OpenOffice is simply not going to happen in education. Take the UK for example, schools get Microsoft Office very, very cheaply, same for Windows.
So my question is, if both Microsoft Office and Windows are free on your site, why would you want to switch to Linux and OpenOffice.org?
It's a very clever strategy by Microsoft to get students and teachers hooked on MS Office; helps assure custom when they get older.
I totally agree, I'm doing a four year music composition degree at the moment, I'm considering doing comp-sci with Open University, my composition degree includes dealing with object-oriented composition (Max/MSP), music technology but also forms, history, arrangement.
At the same time as doing this, I teach PHP, Linux, Samba at weekends and run a popular website.
Computing and Music is a brilliant match. Also... coding IS creative.
I'd like to see Mozilla making some nifty development tools which actually make it easier to develop with.
Remember, Mozilla is more than just an Internet/Email application, it's a whole platform. Anything which makes XUL / Mozilla program writing easier (like a tightly integrated IDE) would be much appreciated.
For online accounts I tend to use the same lame method unless the online account can lead to important information. I.e. my Slashdot account has a different password to my Amazon account for obvious reasons... Slashdot contains sensitive information:-)
I completely agree with Dell's views on RHEL's overpricing. I bought a Dell PowerEdge server for a small business back in August but Red Hat's Enterprise Linux was overpriced and we felt uncomfortable buying a subscription at the rates we were offered from Dell. Instead I recommend we choose Suse's offereing which was a far more viable option for the company. I can see why Dell went for Novell a month or two back.
Let's not beat about the bush though, it could be construed that Dell spoke to Novell so they are now in a better bargainig position with Red Hat.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up. Absolutely.
Of course the big sites don't have redundancy for a big unfortunate event like this and I question the commercial viability of even adapting their achitecture to suit rare events. Is it really worth scaling like that for a rare event? Is it really worth re-addressing their systems architecture for events that rarely happen?
How much resource would that reorganising take? How much would it cost? We're in an economic down turn, do they have the money in the bank to address this when the money may be better spent elsewhere in their respective businesses rather than auto-scaling on big events?
What's the online ad revenue like at the time of a big event? How is that revenue impacted at the time the service experiences difficulties? Is it worth swallowing the cost of downtime?
I'm sure all of these questions may be going through the CTOs' minds at their respective channels/agencies right now. They should be.
Now I'm not disagreeing with Reuven Cohen's comments per say, I'm just pointing out that there's got to be a good business case for scaling to this level and that business case is going to vary from news channel to news channel.
Agreed, it's a matter of trust (much like SSL certificates). X University says you passed their degree course.
I respect X University therefore, I know that you're at least good at something. And so long as you can prove yourself and show how good you are, you have fewer hurdles to jump in the interview process.
That being said, I have a Bachelors in Music. But I've worked at a few tech companies, founded my own (which I'm finishing with at the moment) and now have a decent job as a programmer, get paid quite well, not CxO well but well enough for my age and experience. Do I wish to have a CS degree? Absolutely. But hey, I'm young, and with the futher experience I've got now, I shouldn't have any problems in pursuing that if I need to in the future.
I'm willing to bet that because the distros that are being shipped with these netbooks are rubbish. Take my eeepc 1000 for example. Came with some rubbish Xandros install what simply wasn't up to scratch. It had no standard feel to it. Firefox used Gtk, the explorer app was Konqueror. When I put Ubuntu on it, it immediately became more useable and more powerful. I bet if they shipped the machines with a more useable distro. The return rate would drop.
You handle the side effects on a case-by-case basis. The great things about doing it this way is you can break up huge controllers with hundreds of lines of code into smaller class methods whilst still keeping the original integrity of the class intact and compatible with old calls. The method's not 100% effective but at least this way you can get the code to correctly pass new tests piece by piece whilst still adhering to the inevitable looming deadlines. I use this system quite a lot when dealing with legacy code. It's not the be-all/end-all solution but it helps.
Especially since it's a trap.
(from the doc...)
So basically they'll be sending the hounds over to the Ubuntu camp, Red Hat and anyone else who doesn't want to pay their fees. Any developer of GPL products should steer well clear from any of their bait.
Wow, SGI actually managed to scrape up some cash to buy someone! Didn't see that coming at all.
Screw people who say you need qualifications to be a 'good' programmer. Maybe it helps but there a plenty of decent programmers in the world who write good code without the nessecary educational background. No area of expertise should be selective based on qualifications alone (except maybe medicine).
I've seen some truly terrible code by folks with degrees in both Comp Sci and Software Engineering, and even worse code by people who are doing degrees in so called 'ICT'.
The code style was all over the place, one guy's test code didn't even compile!
As Excelsior said, a good technical interview is the only way. After the first interview, we then actually get interviewees to write a simple program in 4 hours and review it with them earlier. Sometimes that's the only way to tell if they're any good or whether they'll fit into our organisation.
uh, now let me see:
France, Germany, UK, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Canada, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, need I go on??
The US isn't unique, they just brainwash their population into thinking they're unique in the free speech world.
Utter crap! First up, the US is no different from Switzerland in freedom of expression laws, secondly ICANN never said they wanted to be under UN control, therefore they are under no obligation to bow to pressure from any country which would be a better position than they are in now (being under pressure from Congress - who have a grrreat track record in legislating on Technology law - thing DMCA)
The internet has done quite well under US law but it's far from perfect. Things like the .xxx dispute should not be a political football amongst under-educated US politicians. Same with the US having too much control over the root servers in general. Americans should wake up to the fact that the whole world uses the internet and respect needs to be given to every country.
For example, China is thinking about creating it's own internet, being greedy about who controls ICANN just encourages them to work on their own project which could potentially have devastating effects on current system, not to mention the added cost in supporting such a system (which our company for one would have to do).
Ahhh but you forget that UK law would prohibit this (the forceable non-resale of a licence agreement). In the UK you can legally resell your copy of Windows, with the licence agreement, even if it is an OEM copy and was intended to be used (as Microsoft says) 'only on new computers'.
Yup, I agree, London is great!
IMHO Those figures aren't influenced by Firefox's 'Latest Headlines' because that RSS feed points to article pages, not the homepage, these results were from the homepage therefore anyone that says that FF's 'Latest Headlines' unfairly influences the results should RTFA!
FWIW Westminster Abbey's stats are (taken 16-10-05 to 22-10-05):
IE Variants: 65.9%
Netscape variants (mostly Firefox and other Geckos): 24.9%
This is compared to 6months ago (taken Jan 2005 - Feb 2005)
IE vars: 69.4%
Gecko vars: 21.1%
And finally last year (taken May 2004 - June 2004)
IE vars: 80.9%
Gecko vars: 11%
Our results do tend to suggest that Firefox has gained a significant market share from Microsoft's browsers.
Very true.
As a small business, there's also another key reason to keep things secret at the beginning. That's potential big client contracts. Our company is competing for our first 'big' client contract and we can't afford to let our competitors in on our technology or designs, why? Because we want to surprise everyone come pitch-day.
I'm not against being open, and I'm all for sharing technology (because through sharing as open source comes improvement, better products and community, so we'll probably release our underlying as open source after we get the contract.
The switch to OpenOffice is simply not going to happen in education. Take the UK for example, schools get Microsoft Office very, very cheaply, same for Windows.
So my question is, if both Microsoft Office and Windows are free on your site, why would you want to switch to Linux and OpenOffice.org?
It's a very clever strategy by Microsoft to get students and teachers hooked on MS Office; helps assure custom when they get older.
I totally agree, I'm doing a four year music composition degree at the moment, I'm considering doing comp-sci with Open University, my composition degree includes dealing with object-oriented composition (Max/MSP), music technology but also forms, history, arrangement. At the same time as doing this, I teach PHP, Linux, Samba at weekends and run a popular website. Computing and Music is a brilliant match. Also... coding IS creative.
Not dirac, what you're talking about is the BBC iMP (interactive Media Player): http://www.bbc.co.uk/imp/
I've put the high and low quality recordings of Season 2 Episode 9 - 14 February 2005 in Ogg format up here:
http://www.gobisoft.net/tmp/
Just in case the Slashdot effect takes hold.
Developers, developers, developers, developers.
I'd like to see Mozilla making some nifty development tools which actually make it easier to develop with.
Remember, Mozilla is more than just an Internet/Email application, it's a whole platform. Anything which makes XUL / Mozilla program writing easier (like a tightly integrated IDE) would be much appreciated.
Plus... documentation.
For online accounts I tend to use the same lame method unless the online account can lead to important information. I.e. my Slashdot account has a different password to my Amazon account for obvious reasons... Slashdot contains sensitive information :-)
I completely agree with Dell's views on RHEL's overpricing. I bought a Dell PowerEdge server for a small business back in August but Red Hat's Enterprise Linux was overpriced and we felt uncomfortable buying a subscription at the rates we were offered from Dell. Instead I recommend we choose Suse's offereing which was a far more viable option for the company. I can see why Dell went for Novell a month or two back. Let's not beat about the bush though, it could be construed that Dell spoke to Novell so they are now in a better bargainig position with Red Hat.
All BBC broadband content is free for persons living in the UK and who use a UK broadband provider.