This should not be an issue. Massive scaling with IIS and.NET is not an issue. Even on rather modest hardware. Azure has had some availability issues, but it does scale. Massively. Just ask Apple.
As for Accenture, sure, if you give those guys that much money to develop something, you're an idiot.
Sigh. Vast? It's a few hundred thousand users in a day. It is ridiculous. With a couple of high-end servers and properly designed software (that means, NOT from Accenture) this would scale easily.
No, it isn't. It is fairly medium sized. There is only about five million people in Norway. The alt-inn portal needed to handle a good few logins that day, but it mostly served up static PDFs, so the overall load on the system should have been, well, obviously high, but not tremendously so. I am willing to bet that more people in Norway logged on to Facebook that morning than logged on to alt-inn. Obviously Facebook is hosted in a huge data center, but it is also designed to scale to several (well, two) orders of magnitude more users.
I recently had to research some Dynamics CRM performance data. In a test, using two Dell PowerEdge R910 servers (they are about $30K each) the testing team ran 100 000 concurrent CRM users with heavy load for several hours. That was for sure a much higher load than alt-inn had to "endure" on tax day. CRM 4 runs on IIS and is, in my opinion, not the most performant of software (though it is a decent CRM solution, better in v 2011).
Sorry, the fact that alt-inn can not scale to the relatively "moderate" loads of tax day shows incompetence all over the place. Perhaps it runs on some generic Java/J2EE thing. Shudder.
And why did the Norwegian Government accept the system, if it was this buggy?
Lack of competence. It is the government for Pete's sake. They are a bunch of ignorant morons who hire an incompetent firm to do something that shouldn't be too hard. The incompetent firm over-engineers it, and all Hell breaks loose when they try to run it. They would have been better off giving the project to two PHP (I hate that PHP junk) hackers aged 23.
Um.... The odds do change after a run in blackjack
Not in most casinos for most people. Not enough for it to matter, even if you count cards. Casinos today shuffle four decks or more, and they cut the deck close to the half-way mark. This significantly (within the rather narrow margins already in place) reduces the odds variability as the game goes on, and it also significantly reduces the advantage of counting cards.
Correct, just a calculation in said games. For normal people, the calculations always end up the same, the house has a certain percentage advantage, and you can not win. For a traditional casino though, poker is not a lucrative business in the same way other games are. Not sure what you mean by "it makes the Casinos so much lucre", but if it is in any way intended to indicate that casinos benefit hugely from poker, you are wrong. They do not. Poker is one of the most expensive games casinos offer (for the casino) and one where the casino makes very little money. This is why, for example, traditionally poker players, and tournament players specially, were never comped at all with casinos. Blackjack players always are.
The popularity of poker is not decided by its profitability for the casinos, though these days casinos make tons on TV rights etc. Not much from the playing it self though.
Applications. The stuff that users need to do what they want to do. They are not there, or they are unpolished in an off-putting way.
Not there: alternatives to Lightroom/Aperture (nothing), Photoshop (no, Gimp is not it, though getting better), end-user video editing (nothing really), word processing ( Linux alternatives badly needs polish, and polish matters), spreadsheet (see word processing) etc.
People do not use computers to play with the operating system. People (as opposed to geeks like us) do not do any programming on their computer. People (as opposed to geeks) do not maintain websites. These are things that Linux excels at, and "nobody" needs it. Not regular users.
Despite what a lot of/.ers seem to think, people do not buy computers to run operating systems. They don't even buy them to run applications. People buy computers to do stuff. For private users, what people do is: read email, browse the web, manage their pictures and movies, do some occasional word processing, maintain a few lists database style in Excel. So, for personal use Linux needs: email reader (check), web browser (check), software to manage, manipulate photos (sorry, nothing out there compared to Windows offerings), something to manage and do some edits to movies (sorry, nothing out there for a Linux casual user), a word processing software that works like Word (nothing really, Open Office is a Yugo to the Microsoft Audi, and who wants to struggle with a Yugo), spradsheet software (again, Excel is what people wants - not necessarily needs - and Open Office simply isn't polished enough).
Now, at this point we have not even touched upon the absurdity of having multiple desktop alternatives and the insurmountable hazzles that created for a normal user. You know, the kind that doesn't know that you can use Ctrl+F to search a document for text. Oh, and did I mention Cut/Copy/Paste that still has terrible support on Linux. Yes it does. In Eclipse, for example, you try and hope, but quite often it doesn't work as expected.
For IT departments. You need AD and the management tools. They can be hacked together if you are good, but again, on Linux it is a hazzle. To put it mildly.
What a bird cannot do is fly in a vacuum. We know why. We know why because it has been experimentally tested and verified using scientific method (my emphasis).
You don't know anything at all about science, why are you talking about it? Science doesn't deal with knowing positives at all (outside of a limited area such as maths, where knowing is actually possible). Science deals with theories (no, any wild idea is not a theory), and the process of falsification (proving that those theories are wrong.
Did you see that last word? Science doesn't actually (with the mentioned exception) actually do much proving of anything at all, but it dis-proves, falsifies, a lot of stuff. You see, there is exactly an infinite things you can not prove. I can not prove that there are no flower-patterned tea cups filled half full with Whiskey in orbit around Pluto right now. I can't prove that they do not exist. Assuming they do is moronic however. Likewise, it is actually impossible to prove that homeopathy works, however it is quite possible to prove that it doesn't work. We have well established procedures in place to see if stuff works. There is lots of technical jargon like double-blind etc, but it all basically comes down to this: Let's give it to him and see if he gets well. If he doesn't (objectively) get well, it didn't work.
When it comes to homeopathy, nobody ever got well. Seriously. Nobody. Assuming it works is as dumb as assuming that there are in fact half-full tea cups flying around Pluto. In fact, it is dumber, since I haven't yet proven that there are no such flowery cups.
My relationship with my wife. There are obviously things that "work" without science, but they work. As opposed to homeopathy, which we know doesn't work, because we have checked.
I don't think the second part of that is true. The problem with a benevolent monarchy is that it often degenerates into a malevolent monarchy, and then people revolt
True, it tends to devolve, and you get a revolt. That is also true for democracy. Look at the sorry state of both the US and Europe at the moment. In the US you have Newt and Santorum and in Europe you have Greece. The problem with democracy is that the "people" thinks that they are responsible for their government and they will therefore go out and vote again and again, equally surprised each time that things don't improve.
This is of course because of the fact that democratically elected leaders are not in fact leaders of much at all. They are puppets of large bureaucracies, special interest groups and large corporations. This is the tragedy of democracy. It doesn't as much give power to the people as it hides the powerful from the people.
I would argue that the "people" is better served by totalitarian bastard we can chop the head off when he doesn't behave rather than a nameless, faceless bureaucracy that nobody can find or chop the head off.
It's like the role of the Galactic President. It's a role designed not as much to wield power as to attract attention away from it.
Then you are mad. Insane. Off your rockers. More terrible things have been done to people by kind, loving, caring but ultimately mentally disabled people than all the evil, power-hungry bastards in the world. The road to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions. Rather a calculating bastard than a kind, well-meaning do-gooder.
1) Click the Desktop "Tile"
2) Open up File Manager and point your browser to C:\\Windows\\System32\\
3) Rename shsxs.dll to old_shsxs.dll
4) Confirm UAC Dialog Prompt
5) Reboot the Operating System
6) On the new login screen, click the mouse button and drag up
7) Login to the machine
8) Your operating system should act like a desktop OS without the "crap"
I did - it's rubbish. A six megapixel camera has about 2000 lines of resolution (3000 x 2000). A ten story building is about 20 meters high. Your pixels would be in the neighborhood of a cm square (quick calc in head). You need to be rather far away to not see the pixelation. Obviously, any picture can be blown up to any size and look fine providing the viewer is far enough away.
There is one huge difference, the sensor size. A bigger sensor, particularly if the pixel count is similar, is more light sensitive, and it also (typically) can reproduce a bigger color gamut. The Nikon D800 (and big brothers) and the new Canons can (with the right photographer) produce rather spectacular images that are very difficult do to with a smaller sensor.
Also, not forgetting the light sensitivity of these sensors. Shooting at above 6400 ISO is not just an option any more, it produces images of a quality that can not be matched (or even come close to) with the smaller sensors.
Slashdot Mirror
MS-based web application basket
This should not be an issue. Massive scaling with IIS and .NET is not an issue. Even on rather modest hardware. Azure has had some availability issues, but it does scale. Massively. Just ask Apple.
As for Accenture, sure, if you give those guys that much money to develop something, you're an idiot.
such a vast solution as Altinn
Sigh. Vast? It's a few hundred thousand users in a day. It is ridiculous. With a couple of high-end servers and properly designed software (that means, NOT from Accenture) this would scale easily.
and how much money he/she has in the bank
Rubbish
This is actually a huge system
No, it isn't. It is fairly medium sized. There is only about five million people in Norway. The alt-inn portal needed to handle a good few logins that day, but it mostly served up static PDFs, so the overall load on the system should have been, well, obviously high, but not tremendously so. I am willing to bet that more people in Norway logged on to Facebook that morning than logged on to alt-inn. Obviously Facebook is hosted in a huge data center, but it is also designed to scale to several (well, two) orders of magnitude more users.
I recently had to research some Dynamics CRM performance data. In a test, using two Dell PowerEdge R910 servers (they are about $30K each) the testing team ran 100 000 concurrent CRM users with heavy load for several hours. That was for sure a much higher load than alt-inn had to "endure" on tax day. CRM 4 runs on IIS and is, in my opinion, not the most performant of software (though it is a decent CRM solution, better in v 2011).
Sorry, the fact that alt-inn can not scale to the relatively "moderate" loads of tax day shows incompetence all over the place. Perhaps it runs on some generic Java/J2EE thing. Shudder.
And why did the Norwegian Government accept the system, if it was this buggy?
Lack of competence. It is the government for Pete's sake. They are a bunch of ignorant morons who hire an incompetent firm to do something that shouldn't be too hard. The incompetent firm over-engineers it, and all Hell breaks loose when they try to run it. They would have been better off giving the project to two PHP (I hate that PHP junk) hackers aged 23.
Um.... The odds do change after a run in blackjack
Not in most casinos for most people. Not enough for it to matter, even if you count cards. Casinos today shuffle four decks or more, and they cut the deck close to the half-way mark. This significantly (within the rather narrow margins already in place) reduces the odds variability as the game goes on, and it also significantly reduces the advantage of counting cards.
Correct, just a calculation in said games. For normal people, the calculations always end up the same, the house has a certain percentage advantage, and you can not win. For a traditional casino though, poker is not a lucrative business in the same way other games are. Not sure what you mean by "it makes the Casinos so much lucre", but if it is in any way intended to indicate that casinos benefit hugely from poker, you are wrong. They do not. Poker is one of the most expensive games casinos offer (for the casino) and one where the casino makes very little money. This is why, for example, traditionally poker players, and tournament players specially, were never comped at all with casinos. Blackjack players always are.
The popularity of poker is not decided by its profitability for the casinos, though these days casinos make tons on TV rights etc. Not much from the playing it self though.
what are these features that Linux is missing?
Applications. The stuff that users need to do what they want to do. They are not there, or they are unpolished in an off-putting way.
Not there: alternatives to Lightroom/Aperture (nothing), Photoshop (no, Gimp is not it, though getting better), end-user video editing (nothing really), word processing ( Linux alternatives badly needs polish, and polish matters), spreadsheet (see word processing) etc.
People do not use computers to play with the operating system. People (as opposed to geeks like us) do not do any programming on their computer. People (as opposed to geeks) do not maintain websites. These are things that Linux excels at, and "nobody" needs it. Not regular users.
Don't forget the smear campaigns and FUD about other operating systems, threats to sue end users over patent infringement, etc
and even more importantly, applications. The things that users run to do what they want to do. Linux doesn't have them.
Despite what a lot of /.ers seem to think, people do not buy computers to run operating systems. They don't even buy them to run applications. People buy computers to do stuff. For private users, what people do is: read email, browse the web, manage their pictures and movies, do some occasional word processing, maintain a few lists database style in Excel. So, for personal use Linux needs: email reader (check), web browser (check), software to manage, manipulate photos (sorry, nothing out there compared to Windows offerings), something to manage and do some edits to movies (sorry, nothing out there for a Linux casual user), a word processing software that works like Word (nothing really, Open Office is a Yugo to the Microsoft Audi, and who wants to struggle with a Yugo), spradsheet software (again, Excel is what people wants - not necessarily needs - and Open Office simply isn't polished enough).
Now, at this point we have not even touched upon the absurdity of having multiple desktop alternatives and the insurmountable hazzles that created for a normal user. You know, the kind that doesn't know that you can use Ctrl+F to search a document for text. Oh, and did I mention Cut/Copy/Paste that still has terrible support on Linux. Yes it does. In Eclipse, for example, you try and hope, but quite often it doesn't work as expected.
For IT departments. You need AD and the management tools. They can be hacked together if you are good, but again, on Linux it is a hazzle. To put it mildly.
Wow, so confident that alternative medicine doesn't work
Yes, It's been tested. They got the treatment. They didn't get better. It didn't work.
What a bird cannot do is fly in a vacuum. We know why. We know why because it has been experimentally tested and verified using scientific method (my emphasis).
The heartless bastards!
You don't know anything at all about science, why are you talking about it? Science doesn't deal with knowing positives at all (outside of a limited area such as maths, where knowing is actually possible). Science deals with theories (no, any wild idea is not a theory), and the process of falsification (proving that those theories are wrong.
Did you see that last word? Science doesn't actually (with the mentioned exception) actually do much proving of anything at all, but it dis-proves, falsifies, a lot of stuff. You see, there is exactly an infinite things you can not prove. I can not prove that there are no flower-patterned tea cups filled half full with Whiskey in orbit around Pluto right now. I can't prove that they do not exist. Assuming they do is moronic however. Likewise, it is actually impossible to prove that homeopathy works, however it is quite possible to prove that it doesn't work. We have well established procedures in place to see if stuff works. There is lots of technical jargon like double-blind etc, but it all basically comes down to this: Let's give it to him and see if he gets well. If he doesn't (objectively) get well, it didn't work.
When it comes to homeopathy, nobody ever got well. Seriously. Nobody. Assuming it works is as dumb as assuming that there are in fact half-full tea cups flying around Pluto. In fact, it is dumber, since I haven't yet proven that there are no such flowery cups.
My relationship with my wife. There are obviously things that "work" without science, but they work. As opposed to homeopathy, which we know doesn't work, because we have checked.
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science
Sure it is, but they work.
I don't think the second part of that is true. The problem with a benevolent monarchy is that it often degenerates into a malevolent monarchy, and then people revolt
True, it tends to devolve, and you get a revolt. That is also true for democracy. Look at the sorry state of both the US and Europe at the moment. In the US you have Newt and Santorum and in Europe you have Greece. The problem with democracy is that the "people" thinks that they are responsible for their government and they will therefore go out and vote again and again, equally surprised each time that things don't improve.
This is of course because of the fact that democratically elected leaders are not in fact leaders of much at all. They are puppets of large bureaucracies, special interest groups and large corporations. This is the tragedy of democracy. It doesn't as much give power to the people as it hides the powerful from the people.
I would argue that the "people" is better served by totalitarian bastard we can chop the head off when he doesn't behave rather than a nameless, faceless bureaucracy that nobody can find or chop the head off.
It's like the role of the Galactic President. It's a role designed not as much to wield power as to attract attention away from it.
The world needs more Pinochets. Many, many more.
Then you are mad. Insane. Off your rockers. More terrible things have been done to people by kind, loving, caring but ultimately mentally disabled people than all the evil, power-hungry bastards in the world. The road to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions. Rather a calculating bastard than a kind, well-meaning do-gooder.
They would consider voting for Newt.
The irony is that the evidence for design is far stronger than the evidence for completely naturalistic origin.
Evidence? You are jesting, right? Nobody has even formulated a single alternative theory about the origins of life. Evidence? There is none.
1) Click the Desktop "Tile"
2) Open up File Manager and point your browser to C:\\Windows\\System32\\
3) Rename shsxs.dll to old_shsxs.dll
4) Confirm UAC Dialog Prompt
5) Reboot the Operating System
6) On the new login screen, click the mouse button and drag up
7) Login to the machine
8) Your operating system should act like a desktop OS without the "crap"
You didn't read his post at all, did you?
I did - it's rubbish. A six megapixel camera has about 2000 lines of resolution (3000 x 2000). A ten story building is about 20 meters high. Your pixels would be in the neighborhood of a cm square (quick calc in head). You need to be rather far away to not see the pixelation. Obviously, any picture can be blown up to any size and look fine providing the viewer is far enough away.
Not strange you were modded down, you can't even read. When did Ballmer peddle Symbian? Moron.
There is one huge difference, the sensor size. A bigger sensor, particularly if the pixel count is similar, is more light sensitive, and it also (typically) can reproduce a bigger color gamut. The Nikon D800 (and big brothers) and the new Canons can (with the right photographer) produce rather spectacular images that are very difficult do to with a smaller sensor.
Also, not forgetting the light sensitivity of these sensors. Shooting at above 6400 ISO is not just an option any more, it produces images of a quality that can not be matched (or even come close to) with the smaller sensors.