What about the grown adults who quit their jobs (or just stop going), because they're playing WoW? The kids that stop doing anything except play? I think I can assert that giving up school, friends, and all other outside activities is not 'usual' and not healthy by any stretch of the imagination. Don't trivialise the problem just because your cynicism says it's nothing abnormal. I've seen people 'addicted', and believe me, it's nothing like being a loser in your parents' basement - it goes far beyond.
As for ADD, it's not just some symptom of kids being kids. I'm 24, and my inability to concentrate, both short-term and long-term, is a serious impairment in my daily life. I'm just now learning to manage it (I've never taken drugs for it, though I'm tempted to do so). I can't finish projects because I literally can't make myself focus on them. Whether for work or school, it's always the same. It affects work, it affects personal projects, it affects my social life.
ADHD is caused by a part of the brain which does not produce enough of a certain regulatory hormone to manage attention. Counter-intuitively, many hyperactive children, when given a stimulant (caffiene, ritalin, etc.) actually improved their ability to concentrate, and reduced their energy levels. You can't say that giving a hyperactive child a stimulant to calm down is just the way kids are, because it makes no sense.
After reading about that, I decided to test it myself, and began drinking energy drinks. After drinking one, my ability to concentrate and focus on problems improved by a staggering amount - what usually would take most of the day for me I could now do in two hours or less.
So please, just because you've never experienced it, don't shrug it off as just kids being kids. Sometimes there's more to it than your cynicism makes you want to believe, and sometimes, it's not just kids.
What you should have done is gone to your doctor with symptoms of burnout and gone on medical leave. Then you could have been paid to play WoW full time.;)
I look at Fable as an example contrary to your assertion. Fable had good gameplay (the core was solid, anyway), but there was no reason for me to progress. I didn't care about my characters, I didn't care about the world, I didn't care about my sister or mother, or the town I grew up in. I played through the game in the hopes that there would be something redeeming at the end, and not just 'You killed the bad guy. The end.'
Fable was a disappointment in that a lot of the gameplay innovations that were promised were never delivered on, but it was such a bland game that there may as well not have been a story. It would have been just as compelling if the 'story' had just been presented as 'Go here and kill this guy', which is not far off from what they provided.
When I compare that with a game like Jade Empire, where I actually felt bad for doing bad things when I was playing evil, and felt good for doing good deeds. I read every letter of the scrolls I found, because I was truly interested in the world around me and in finding out the history of the world and who the people were that I was always hearing about. The gameplay in JE wasn't that fantastic - in fact, it was astonishingly repetetive - but I enjoyed the game immensely more than I did in Fable, because it was a compelling story that I wanted to unfold, and because I had an emotional investment in the characters and their situation.
You don't need a good story to have a good game (look at Mario or Tetris), but for certain genres, it is imperative that the developer give the player a reason to progress. If the gameplay makes up for the poor story, then fine, but I'd rather have a good story.
The problem with your concept is that the application has no concept of the format of the table(s); if it did, it would have no idea what you want to do with it. Most SQL databases are not object-relational databases (Postgres is), and thus have no way to hold advanced concepts on their own. As such, you are required to break your relations down into normalised forms on your own, and write the appropriate INSERT or UPDATE statements for each.
The 'obvious' solution is to write this code once for your object and then implement it into a storeToDatabase() method for your object, along with a populateFromDatabase() method, populateFromDatabaseWithId(), populateFromDatabaseWithLatest(), and so on. This is made easier (though not necessarily easy) by moving work into separate functions, and having each function call the ones that it inherently requires.
The problem with the concept of abstracting ('wrapping') SQL in a programming interface is that it abstracts you from the features of the database which may not be standard, thus reducing you to the lowest common denominator (I believe that PEAR::DB in PHP has this problem). That said, a proper database interface (PDO is a good example) provides a standard set of functions along with the enhanced features of the database by extending the standard class.
That said, you still are forced to write your SQL by hand; either way, I don't see this as a huge problem necessarily, but then, I do more SQL work than I do programming, so I may be biased. For a programmer who doesn't want to learn SQL, who has a difficult time grasping the proper methodology, or who just doesn't have the time, it can definitely be a problem.
That said, your assertion that SQL is either arcane or 'shitty' isn't particularly educated. SQL is powerful, and the standard is more active than many other standards. SQL does what it does very well; the problem is that it does not do what you want it to do. Whether it should or not is a different argument.
It sounds like what you want is something more along the lines of OS X Tiger's Core Data API. Core Data allows the programmer to (semi-graphically) define objects and relate them together, and then bind those data times/formats/fields to your interface, your variables, and so on. Essentially, you define your object, and then the system takes care of loading/saving it. One of the save options is even an SQLite database, so obviously it wouldn't take much to extend this to other RDBMS implementations; whether that will ever happen, however, is a different question.
Unfortunately, even if I'm right and this is what you want, you can't have it. Sorry. It's only in Tiger, and it doesn't handle any other data formats except for XML, a proprietary binary format, and an SQLite database. You can't interface with any other SQL servers unless you're going to write an app to read/write the SQLite database and move that data over, and that would be even more work in the first place.
Hopefully people will realise the potential that a system like CoreData has and provide a way to duplicate it to other systems. Until then, we can only wish.
Of course it may only be coincidence that pre-Christian civilizations worshipped snakes... These civilizations saw the annual re-birth of the snake (via shedding its skin) as somehow divine. It may also be coincidence that the bull (horns, cloven feet) was also worshipped by pre-Christian civilizations. Or not so coincidental. Nothing like making the god of the old religion the icon of evil, eh?
Don't confuse 'pre-biblical' with 'pre-Christian'. The bible itself was written by pre-Christian civilisations, snake references and all.
This doesn't surprise me at all. When I was beta testing Windows 98, I got ahold of the Beta 3, and it was horrible, and I do mean horrible. It took hours to install, it took several minutes to boot, every app was slow as hell, and it used a ton of memory. Two days after I got my copy of Beta 3 installed over Beta 2 (or rather, reformatted and reinstalled to fix the colossal fuck-ups that the 'upgrade' caused), I got a copy of RC1. The difference was like night and day.
It booted in seconds rather than minutes (I think the first fresh boot took about 30 seconds to a minute, compared to two or three minutes), it was fast, snappy, and responsive, it was stable, it was reliable, and it stayed running for days without problems, instead of crashing every six to twelve hours.
Never underestimate that tipping point where bugs get fixed, problems get solved, testing code comes out, new code goes in, and the developers start compiling for RELEASE instead of DEBUG.;)
A big part of the reason I like my iPod (which a friend has now co-opted) is to listen to music and have a simple, straightforward interface to do it with. The scroll wheel is a great idea, and despite what other manufacturers have said about 'we're innovating our interface', the reality of the situation is that they'd copy it if they could.
I've seen other MP3 players, and used them, and you know what? They generally suck pretty bad. I've seen MP3 players whose volume controls were on the top of the system, which, for most people, would require two hands to operate. I've seem them where my thumb couldn't reach the controls on the left side when holding it with my right hand (and I have reasonably big hands). I've seen them with one-line text displays that barely fit the artist name, let alone the song title.
Finally, none of them integrate with iTunes, the only music software I've ever enjoyed using on Windows or Mac (amaroK is good enough if I'm on Linux), so I have to use their (usually proprietary, usually shitty) software, or use Windows Media Player (not available on Mac). No thanks.
The point of getting an iPod is because it's arguably the best player on the market. It's expensive, but it looks good, it works good, and it's easy to use. That's something most MP3 players can only dream about.
Fable for XBox (was there a PC version?) had some of the worst voice acting of any game that I was able to sit through. It was full of idiotic bugs, the controls were sub-par, they didn't deliver on half of what they promised, and what they DID have was pretty blase. I can buy houses and make money! For what? So I can buy more houses and make more money? 'Just because'?
You can get married and then your wife gives you stuff if you dote over her, or you can not get married and just find the stuff in treasure chests anyway (and throw it away because what you have is better anyway). You can unravel some story about some woman who killed her sister. You can do side quests which add nothing to the game but time.
When playing Fable, I was reminded a lot of Jade Empire (which I had played first). After my roommate had played Fable for a while, I tried to encourage him to try JE, beacuse to me, JE is 'Similar to Fable, but more polished in every way.' The music isn't repetetive, the voice acting isn't repetetive, the character models in towns aren't repetetive, and the world seems real and fresh and alive. Fable, on the other hand, promised all of this, but delivered none of it. I ended up playing an evil character, not because I enjoyed killing townspeople, but because I just didn't care. The main storyline isn't affected by your alignment, only your appearance. Compare that to Jade Empire, where you feel like your decisions are impacting real people, and evil takes on a whole new meaning.
Fable was a great game until I'd experienced everything it had to offer, and that didn't take long at all. I only beat the game for the sake of doing so, in the hopes that I'd get an actual ending, and not just 'Well, the hero killed the bad guy. The end.'
So please, Molyneux, deliver on what you promise, or promise what you'll deliver, but don't get our hopes up again just to ship a half-assed shadow of your original grandiose vision.
Nice, they ship the latest upgrade to a four-year-old database engine in a tiger-incompatible format. If your OS is up-to-date (and it should be), grab them from an arguably better source instead.
Probably because Americans get two weeks of vacation out of 52, and work eight hours a day, five days a week, for every other day, plus unpaid overtime, traffic jams, commuting, pollution, and so on. Most of the time when people actually DO take their vacation, they use it to catch up on all the things they didn't have time to do during the other 50 weeks of the year.
Compare that to Spain. Do people in Spain work as hard as Americans? Perhaps. Do they work the same hours? Could be. They do, however, get more vacations, and I'm willing to bet that they're not afraid to go to the beach to relax, instead of going to the tanning salon.
High-tech medicine is valuable, but it's impossible to understate the importance of a healthy living. Looking at the list of countries linked, it seems as though most of the countries ahead of the US are tropical countries, European countries, Iceland, or Canada. Among the countries listed after the US are Cuba, Libya, Kuwait, Taiwan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia... Not necessarily places known for their relaxed philosophies on life or their socialist attitudes in regards to health care and society.
Except when you already have a 'Progra*' directory when you reinstall windows - for example, 'Program Files Old', or 'Program Data'. Suddenly, all the apps that use c:\progra~1 will break, your muscle memory will work against you, and all kinds of other hackery will ensue. Not a pretty picture.
Amen. When we got our DL385, I was absolutely amazed at the engineering. The whole thing was put together by someone who's had to take servers apart, and it's just brilliant. Performance is fantastic as well. The only complaint I have is that there's no place to attach the battery for the battery-backed write cache on our RAID controller. After the great design of the rest of the case, I figured I must have been missing something. Other than that, the server is fantastic.
How long until someone figures out how to script a system whereby users can go to a website, input their iTunes user/pass, and force Microsoft's service to re-sync its library (at great expense to Microsoft)? Think of it - an automated way to screw Microsoft, just by putting in your user/pass!
Personally, I'm going to be encouraging everyone I know to sign up for the service and download the Microsoft versions of their iTunes libraries - and then cancel their subscription.
1: 1992. The year E.V.O. The Search For Eden was released. Quite possibly the single greatest evolution-themed platformer for the SNES ever produced. 'nuff said.
I was going to suggest 1995, the release year for Kolibri, arguably the finest hummingbird-based shooter for the 32X, but that's just me.
I think the parent poster brings up an interesting point though, about charity vs. sacrifice
If I were to give away 85% of MY worth, I'd be homeless and relying on the charity of others. Mr. Buffet does not have that problem. He can donate billions and not suffer. because there comes a point at which having more money just means a higher number. If I had ten million dollars, I could do a lot. If I had twenty million, I could do a little more. If I had a billion, I could do pretty much anything I'd want to do. If I had ten billion, or a hundred, would anything change? What does $30 billion get me that $20 billion doesn't?
His donation is fantastic, and I'm staggered, but he does not suffer as a result of giving this gift. All this means is a lower number in a computer somewhere, and that's it. His charity is outstanding, but his sacrifice is non-existent.
What the bible passage quoted is trying to say is that it is sacrifice we should truly applaud, because giving of yourself is far more difficult and far more noble than giving what you have left over, and in the end, that is all Mr. Buffet is doing - giving away what he has left over.
A big one that a lot of sites miss is mismatch between what the IP address reverses to, what the hostname resolves to, and what hostname the MTA says it is. If my MTA says 'Hey, I'm foo.example.com', but my IP address reverses to jack.hostingcompany.com and jack.hostingcompany.com resolves to a different IP address, then some servers are going to say 'yeah right' and either reject messages outright, or flag them as high-risk for spam. I've seen issues with mail servers I've set up where mail was getting rejected outright just because our reverse DNS didn't match our hostname.
I was referred to a fantastic website once which, when you put in your mail server's hostname, would check EVERYTHING - DNS forward/reverse, DNS TTL, the hostname your MTA said it was, your nameservers ('Your nameservers appear to be in the same physical location...'), everything. It was an absolutely amazing service, but to this day I haven't been able to find it again. Too bad, it was the best mail diagnostic I've seen.
Personally, I can't wait for the first Debian ISO to come with all known/available packages for stable, current snapshots of testing and unstable, netinst ISO images for installing other computers from the original, full source for all packages, and some video tutorials on how to use the system.
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What about the grown adults who quit their jobs (or just stop going), because they're playing WoW? The kids that stop doing anything except play? I think I can assert that giving up school, friends, and all other outside activities is not 'usual' and not healthy by any stretch of the imagination. Don't trivialise the problem just because your cynicism says it's nothing abnormal. I've seen people 'addicted', and believe me, it's nothing like being a loser in your parents' basement - it goes far beyond.
As for ADD, it's not just some symptom of kids being kids. I'm 24, and my inability to concentrate, both short-term and long-term, is a serious impairment in my daily life. I'm just now learning to manage it (I've never taken drugs for it, though I'm tempted to do so). I can't finish projects because I literally can't make myself focus on them. Whether for work or school, it's always the same. It affects work, it affects personal projects, it affects my social life.
ADHD is caused by a part of the brain which does not produce enough of a certain regulatory hormone to manage attention. Counter-intuitively, many hyperactive children, when given a stimulant (caffiene, ritalin, etc.) actually improved their ability to concentrate, and reduced their energy levels. You can't say that giving a hyperactive child a stimulant to calm down is just the way kids are, because it makes no sense.
After reading about that, I decided to test it myself, and began drinking energy drinks. After drinking one, my ability to concentrate and focus on problems improved by a staggering amount - what usually would take most of the day for me I could now do in two hours or less.
So please, just because you've never experienced it, don't shrug it off as just kids being kids. Sometimes there's more to it than your cynicism makes you want to believe, and sometimes, it's not just kids.
What you should have done is gone to your doctor with symptoms of burnout and gone on medical leave. Then you could have been paid to play WoW full time. ;)
I look at Fable as an example contrary to your assertion. Fable had good gameplay (the core was solid, anyway), but there was no reason for me to progress. I didn't care about my characters, I didn't care about the world, I didn't care about my sister or mother, or the town I grew up in. I played through the game in the hopes that there would be something redeeming at the end, and not just 'You killed the bad guy. The end.'
Fable was a disappointment in that a lot of the gameplay innovations that were promised were never delivered on, but it was such a bland game that there may as well not have been a story. It would have been just as compelling if the 'story' had just been presented as 'Go here and kill this guy', which is not far off from what they provided.
When I compare that with a game like Jade Empire, where I actually felt bad for doing bad things when I was playing evil, and felt good for doing good deeds. I read every letter of the scrolls I found, because I was truly interested in the world around me and in finding out the history of the world and who the people were that I was always hearing about. The gameplay in JE wasn't that fantastic - in fact, it was astonishingly repetetive - but I enjoyed the game immensely more than I did in Fable, because it was a compelling story that I wanted to unfold, and because I had an emotional investment in the characters and their situation.
You don't need a good story to have a good game (look at Mario or Tetris), but for certain genres, it is imperative that the developer give the player a reason to progress. If the gameplay makes up for the poor story, then fine, but I'd rather have a good story.
The problem with your concept is that the application has no concept of the format of the table(s); if it did, it would have no idea what you want to do with it. Most SQL databases are not object-relational databases (Postgres is), and thus have no way to hold advanced concepts on their own. As such, you are required to break your relations down into normalised forms on your own, and write the appropriate INSERT or UPDATE statements for each.
The 'obvious' solution is to write this code once for your object and then implement it into a storeToDatabase() method for your object, along with a populateFromDatabase() method, populateFromDatabaseWithId(), populateFromDatabaseWithLatest(), and so on. This is made easier (though not necessarily easy) by moving work into separate functions, and having each function call the ones that it inherently requires.
The problem with the concept of abstracting ('wrapping') SQL in a programming interface is that it abstracts you from the features of the database which may not be standard, thus reducing you to the lowest common denominator (I believe that PEAR::DB in PHP has this problem). That said, a proper database interface (PDO is a good example) provides a standard set of functions along with the enhanced features of the database by extending the standard class.
That said, you still are forced to write your SQL by hand; either way, I don't see this as a huge problem necessarily, but then, I do more SQL work than I do programming, so I may be biased. For a programmer who doesn't want to learn SQL, who has a difficult time grasping the proper methodology, or who just doesn't have the time, it can definitely be a problem.
That said, your assertion that SQL is either arcane or 'shitty' isn't particularly educated. SQL is powerful, and the standard is more active than many other standards. SQL does what it does very well; the problem is that it does not do what you want it to do. Whether it should or not is a different argument.
It sounds like what you want is something more along the lines of OS X Tiger's Core Data API. Core Data allows the programmer to (semi-graphically) define objects and relate them together, and then bind those data times/formats/fields to your interface, your variables, and so on. Essentially, you define your object, and then the system takes care of loading/saving it. One of the save options is even an SQLite database, so obviously it wouldn't take much to extend this to other RDBMS implementations; whether that will ever happen, however, is a different question.
Unfortunately, even if I'm right and this is what you want, you can't have it. Sorry. It's only in Tiger, and it doesn't handle any other data formats except for XML, a proprietary binary format, and an SQLite database. You can't interface with any other SQL servers unless you're going to write an app to read/write the SQLite database and move that data over, and that would be even more work in the first place.
Hopefully people will realise the potential that a system like CoreData has and provide a way to duplicate it to other systems. Until then, we can only wish.
Don't confuse 'pre-biblical' with 'pre-Christian'. The bible itself was written by pre-Christian civilisations, snake references and all.
This doesn't surprise me at all. When I was beta testing Windows 98, I got ahold of the Beta 3, and it was horrible, and I do mean horrible. It took hours to install, it took several minutes to boot, every app was slow as hell, and it used a ton of memory. Two days after I got my copy of Beta 3 installed over Beta 2 (or rather, reformatted and reinstalled to fix the colossal fuck-ups that the 'upgrade' caused), I got a copy of RC1. The difference was like night and day.
;)
It booted in seconds rather than minutes (I think the first fresh boot took about 30 seconds to a minute, compared to two or three minutes), it was fast, snappy, and responsive, it was stable, it was reliable, and it stayed running for days without problems, instead of crashing every six to twelve hours.
Never underestimate that tipping point where bugs get fixed, problems get solved, testing code comes out, new code goes in, and the developers start compiling for RELEASE instead of DEBUG.
A big part of the reason I like my iPod (which a friend has now co-opted) is to listen to music and have a simple, straightforward interface to do it with. The scroll wheel is a great idea, and despite what other manufacturers have said about 'we're innovating our interface', the reality of the situation is that they'd copy it if they could.
I've seen other MP3 players, and used them, and you know what? They generally suck pretty bad. I've seen MP3 players whose volume controls were on the top of the system, which, for most people, would require two hands to operate. I've seem them where my thumb couldn't reach the controls on the left side when holding it with my right hand (and I have reasonably big hands). I've seen them with one-line text displays that barely fit the artist name, let alone the song title.
Finally, none of them integrate with iTunes, the only music software I've ever enjoyed using on Windows or Mac (amaroK is good enough if I'm on Linux), so I have to use their (usually proprietary, usually shitty) software, or use Windows Media Player (not available on Mac). No thanks.
The point of getting an iPod is because it's arguably the best player on the market. It's expensive, but it looks good, it works good, and it's easy to use. That's something most MP3 players can only dream about.
If I had to listen to bagpipe music all the time, I'd probably buy a gun too.
Fable for XBox (was there a PC version?) had some of the worst voice acting of any game that I was able to sit through. It was full of idiotic bugs, the controls were sub-par, they didn't deliver on half of what they promised, and what they DID have was pretty blase. I can buy houses and make money! For what? So I can buy more houses and make more money? 'Just because'?
You can get married and then your wife gives you stuff if you dote over her, or you can not get married and just find the stuff in treasure chests anyway (and throw it away because what you have is better anyway). You can unravel some story about some woman who killed her sister. You can do side quests which add nothing to the game but time.
When playing Fable, I was reminded a lot of Jade Empire (which I had played first). After my roommate had played Fable for a while, I tried to encourage him to try JE, beacuse to me, JE is 'Similar to Fable, but more polished in every way.' The music isn't repetetive, the voice acting isn't repetetive, the character models in towns aren't repetetive, and the world seems real and fresh and alive. Fable, on the other hand, promised all of this, but delivered none of it. I ended up playing an evil character, not because I enjoyed killing townspeople, but because I just didn't care. The main storyline isn't affected by your alignment, only your appearance. Compare that to Jade Empire, where you feel like your decisions are impacting real people, and evil takes on a whole new meaning.
Fable was a great game until I'd experienced everything it had to offer, and that didn't take long at all. I only beat the game for the sake of doing so, in the hopes that I'd get an actual ending, and not just 'Well, the hero killed the bad guy. The end.'
So please, Molyneux, deliver on what you promise, or promise what you'll deliver, but don't get our hopes up again just to ship a half-assed shadow of your original grandiose vision.
Nice, they ship the latest upgrade to a four-year-old database engine in a tiger-incompatible format. If your OS is up-to-date (and it should be), grab them from an arguably better source instead.
Except for the fact that you can't enjoy either one because it's too dark to see what you're doing...
Probably because Americans get two weeks of vacation out of 52, and work eight hours a day, five days a week, for every other day, plus unpaid overtime, traffic jams, commuting, pollution, and so on. Most of the time when people actually DO take their vacation, they use it to catch up on all the things they didn't have time to do during the other 50 weeks of the year.
Compare that to Spain. Do people in Spain work as hard as Americans? Perhaps. Do they work the same hours? Could be. They do, however, get more vacations, and I'm willing to bet that they're not afraid to go to the beach to relax, instead of going to the tanning salon.
High-tech medicine is valuable, but it's impossible to understate the importance of a healthy living. Looking at the list of countries linked, it seems as though most of the countries ahead of the US are tropical countries, European countries, Iceland, or Canada. Among the countries listed after the US are Cuba, Libya, Kuwait, Taiwan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia... Not necessarily places known for their relaxed philosophies on life or their socialist attitudes in regards to health care and society.
Just a thought.
Well, that depends on how eager Vinnie the Nail is to get back that ten large he loaned me...
Terrorists? Nah! As any Quebecois knows, c'est la faute du federal.
Except when you already have a 'Progra*' directory when you reinstall windows - for example, 'Program Files Old', or 'Program Data'. Suddenly, all the apps that use c:\progra~1 will break, your muscle memory will work against you, and all kinds of other hackery will ensue. Not a pretty picture.
Amen. When we got our DL385, I was absolutely amazed at the engineering. The whole thing was put together by someone who's had to take servers apart, and it's just brilliant. Performance is fantastic as well. The only complaint I have is that there's no place to attach the battery for the battery-backed write cache on our RAID controller. After the great design of the rest of the case, I figured I must have been missing something. Other than that, the server is fantastic.
He should make sure to buy a shotgun and shells for when mosquito season starts up. They don't call it the 'Land of the Living Skies' for nothing.
How long until someone figures out how to script a system whereby users can go to a website, input their iTunes user/pass, and force Microsoft's service to re-sync its library (at great expense to Microsoft)? Think of it - an automated way to screw Microsoft, just by putting in your user/pass!
Personally, I'm going to be encouraging everyone I know to sign up for the service and download the Microsoft versions of their iTunes libraries - and then cancel their subscription.
I second this. I've been using Macs since youth, and I haven't died once so far. Obviously Jobs' promises of immortality were genuine.
1: 1992. The year E.V.O. The Search For Eden was released. Quite possibly the single greatest evolution-themed platformer for the SNES ever produced. 'nuff said.
I was going to suggest 1995, the release year for Kolibri, arguably the finest hummingbird-based shooter for the 32X, but that's just me.
I think the parent poster brings up an interesting point though, about charity vs. sacrifice
If I were to give away 85% of MY worth, I'd be homeless and relying on the charity of others. Mr. Buffet does not have that problem. He can donate billions and not suffer. because there comes a point at which having more money just means a higher number. If I had ten million dollars, I could do a lot. If I had twenty million, I could do a little more. If I had a billion, I could do pretty much anything I'd want to do. If I had ten billion, or a hundred, would anything change? What does $30 billion get me that $20 billion doesn't?
His donation is fantastic, and I'm staggered, but he does not suffer as a result of giving this gift. All this means is a lower number in a computer somewhere, and that's it. His charity is outstanding, but his sacrifice is non-existent.
What the bible passage quoted is trying to say is that it is sacrifice we should truly applaud, because giving of yourself is far more difficult and far more noble than giving what you have left over, and in the end, that is all Mr. Buffet is doing - giving away what he has left over.
A big one that a lot of sites miss is mismatch between what the IP address reverses to, what the hostname resolves to, and what hostname the MTA says it is. If my MTA says 'Hey, I'm foo.example.com', but my IP address reverses to jack.hostingcompany.com and jack.hostingcompany.com resolves to a different IP address, then some servers are going to say 'yeah right' and either reject messages outright, or flag them as high-risk for spam. I've seen issues with mail servers I've set up where mail was getting rejected outright just because our reverse DNS didn't match our hostname.
I was referred to a fantastic website once which, when you put in your mail server's hostname, would check EVERYTHING - DNS forward/reverse, DNS TTL, the hostname your MTA said it was, your nameservers ('Your nameservers appear to be in the same physical location...'), everything. It was an absolutely amazing service, but to this day I haven't been able to find it again. Too bad, it was the best mail diagnostic I've seen.
Personally, I can't wait for the first Debian ISO to come with all known/available packages for stable, current snapshots of testing and unstable, netinst ISO images for installing other computers from the original, full source for all packages, and some video tutorials on how to use the system.
Technology marches ever onward.
Haven't you heard of the Onion Layer in network security?
Ah, the famous 'Networks are like Ogres' design...
Not to mention that the actual media formats are exactly the same - a chip that can decode blu-ray content can decode HD-DVD content, and vice-versa.
This really isn't a format war, it's just a media war, like DVD-R vs. DVD+R. In the end, it's all going to come down to the players that do both.