I recently blogged on this, but essentially, as long as your average PHP developer thinks of MySQL as a glorified flat file system to place their serialized PHP objects, an always-available, pay-as-you-go distributed database is going to revolutionize application development in the coming years. For those that want to keep control of their data, HBase is coming along quite nicely.
Offshoring is happening in plenty of other 'rigorous' fields as well: medical tourism is a huge and expanding field. I personally know of several people taking exotic vacations to places like India, had a hip replaced, some dental work done, rested and recovered, flown back and still come out far better than had they paid for the service in the US.
Viacom and other Big Media have fingers in several holes right now. On the one hand, the cable providers want to keep exclusive access to their content so they can rip you off for $100+ a month for what is effectively an internet connection suited to streaming media.
They are also watching YouTube siphon off considerable amounts of their viewership, a bunch of eyeballs that they could make much more effective use of if they controlled access.
I do'nt think the big media companies see the internet as a bad thing - quite the opposite, i think they see huge potential because the internet lets you measure advertising performance. They really want to see who is stupid enough to buy Product X after coming to watch an online version of Living Lohan or whatever drivel they come up with next. Entrenched interests are the only thing that keep this from progressing faster.
"These are doing multiple-master replication, with one acting as Slashdot's single write-only DB, and the other acting as a reader."
Isn't that a contradiction? If you have only one write DB, why do you need multiple masters, aren't the other 6 just slaves at that point? Or are there separate master/slave pairs (I'm assuming these are MySQL databases)
I should restate, as you make a valid point. Climate change will always have a political component, but in most countries that political component surrounds what to _do_ about climate change, not whether climate change is a problem or not.
When I said "politicize", I meant to take something relatively clear cut and accepted as fact by a great majority of scientists, and introduce an element of speculation and debate in the public arena which is largely fantasy and should be left to the experts to sort out (which they have mostly done).
Climate change is fact, and solid science. Only in countries where there is a strong vested interest in maintaining the status quo has the issue been politicized.
and proper use of privileges, views, etc. to limit access to data is almost a non-existent thing in a lot of companies I've worked for. All it takes is one "power user" with access to all columns in a customer table to have this problem.
Any DBA interested in keeping his job would go out of his way to design an HR database to prevent only key users from accessing the column 'employee.salary'. Qualified email addresses, a valuable commodity when sold on the spam black market, need to be treated the same way.
I agree with you that the author has not made a single insightful comment. But you are looking at MySQL as an Oracle DBA which isn't much better. I don't disagree with any of your points - they are all valid issues and are a result of MySQL not being used extensively on Big Iron in favour of clusters of commodity hardware. It comes down to the right tool for the job, and writing and architecting your application with the strengths and weaknesses of the DBMS in mind. Database neutrality is a great ideal, but for anything high-performance its unrealistic, and when taking an application written for one database and running it on another, downright unfair
e.g: Limit of 1024 current transactions (bug 26590). Why are you running so many simultaneous transactions on one box? Partition your data and take advantage of the fact that MySQL runs incredibly fast on cheap hardware and that you aren't limited by license cost.
If large web-based social networking sites with millions of hits per day can make MySQL work for their needs, it can work for you too. Don't expect your application written for Oracle to run flawlessly on MySQL without some tweaking, though.
The fact that biofuels are introducing competition for scarce food resources is a regulatory problem, not a problem with biofuels themselves. There need to be laws in place to prevent the food supply from competing with the biofuel supply. eg. only waste oils/alcohols, oils derived from inedible crops using land not fit for human consumption, etc. should be permissible as 'fuel'. This will be a net positive for the environment, as more existing carbon in the atmosphere will be utilised as unused swathes of land are brought under heavier agricultural development with hardy crops like mustard seed.
I couldn't have put it better myself. Ironically, the sexism and hostility to men inherent in this study and its conclusions are quite amusing to me. Similarly, I get quite a laugh out of people cussing and freaking out on the roads. Why is that? Because I feel secure in myself in both situations and can look with amusement at how absurd it all is. Whether, for me, that's connected to high testosterone levels, a death wish, or just being a "man" is anyone's guess. I'm not going to apologise for it though.
And on that note, here is a test for high testosterone:
If you find funny this video of an investigative reporter in Toronto being attacked by a furious, silly looking man, then you should atone for your sin of being born a man by attending $1000s of dollars worth of therapy sessions to convince yourself that "testosterone == bad".
The people that have dismissed the ability of Linux to penetrate the desktop market have always pointed to apps that people need to run on Windows, reluctance to switch, etc. But the resurgence of popularity of Macs, something that makes me feel like I'm on a timewarp to 1993, shows that a large mass of people are fed up with Windows and just want a stable OS to do work on.
I hope soon we'll see all the computer-illiterate hipsters bragging about their Linux laptops and desktops.
As a native of the region and living now in obnoxiously-sunny southern California, I can only dream of how much better use those panels would be put to in the empty deserts of Nevada or Arizona. Instead, more prime southern Ontario farmland will be sitting under solar panels that wait for the weak sun to peak out half the year, and Ontario tax-payers will foot the bill, indirectly through subsidy, for this inefficiency.
This money would be better spent harvesting the cold, strong winds Ontario has in abundance.
This is exactly my point. Nuclear submarines have been floating around our oceans for quite some time, and it's not news. The Russians are doing this on a larger scale now, to provide power not just for the vessel itself, but for a town. Seems to make a lot of sense as a way of transmitting power to far-flung spots of the Russian hinterland.
Why aren't these groups up in arms about nuclear-powered subs that have navigated our oceans for quite some time? How is this really any different on a fundamental level?
you'd have a rampage every year. In the US 30,000 people took their own lives in 2001 . The UT clock tower shooter in 1966 was later shown to be suffering from a brain tumor. The United States is an affluent but high-pressure society. Not everyone will be able to take the pressures, especially if they are genetically predisposed to depression or other psychological problems. A small percentage will turn violent.
These people need to be diagnosed early and treated proactively; taking guns out of people hands will not make a difference. If this shooter was intent on killing, he'd have brought a machete to school if a gun wasn't readily available.
Our planet is not necessarily overpopulated. The problem is the impact that those 6 billion or so are having. More specifically, the impact that a minority of those 6 billion are having.
If there were only 2 billion people consuming resources at the rate of Americans, our situation would be more dire.
Having said that, the impact of dumping long-buried carbon into the atmosphere to fuel our energy-hungry habits is almost certainly far worse than the impact of reducing the energy level of the jet stream by a tiny fraction.
This is not true. While Canada is certainly closer in wages to the US than, say, India, there is still a significant difference, especially for high-education jobs, that lures talent away.
I am a Canadian working the in US purely because I can get paid anywhere from 1.5-2x the salary for the same work. Not to mention there are more jobs. The only reason there aren't more Canadians working in the US is that we are famously stubborn and working in the US is akin to selling your soul. Well, America, you have my soul, and I'm happier (and wealthier) for it. Luckily for us, we do get a bit of a pass on the H1-B restrictions and have our own special TN-1 visa (that is not subject to yearly limits), but it would be nice if the US and Canada would be more like the EU and have a much more open job market between them.
I wouldn't overstate the shift towards LA though. Anything media-related could have a home here, but LA does not attract the same people silicon valley does. Struggling actresses will serve java, but not code it.
I know personally of several web companies that have suffered huge attrition and are unable to fill positions due to a (relative) dearth of talent in SoCal. If these companies were in silicon valley things would be different, I'm sure.
While perhaps not the richest or largest state in the union, Illinois still has an economy nearly the size of the Netherlands and can afford to throw money away on Windows. The rest of the world, meanwhile, will continue to innovate with OSS and leave the US with bloated, expensive systems to maintain
The US and Canada have different issues when it comes to immigration. Canada is far easier to get into, relatively speaking, but we don't respect the skills that they have in certain areas (medical, legal, etc.) for bureaucratic reasons. IT is not one of those fields. We also let in a lot more per capita . Skilled immigrants have a lot more trouble to get in to the US to begin with, because of an (understandable) greater fear of terrorism. As a result, many skilled immigrants end up in countries like Canada, Australia, etc. instead and those countries benefit at America's expense. This is what Gates is talking about.
It really makes a difference what quality CFL bulbs you get. If you buy the cheapest Ikea brand, 3 for $5, the light quality is atrocious and barely acceptable as an outdoor porch light. If you spend money on the higher quality bulbs, the light produced is almost as good as incandescent, IMO, especially if you have a translucent filter like a lamp shade or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently blogged on this, but essentially, as long as your average PHP developer thinks of MySQL as a glorified flat file system to place their serialized PHP objects, an always-available, pay-as-you-go distributed database is going to revolutionize application development in the coming years. For those that want to keep control of their data, HBase is coming along quite nicely.
Offshoring is happening in plenty of other 'rigorous' fields as well: medical tourism is a huge and expanding field. I personally know of several people taking exotic vacations to places like India, had a hip replaced, some dental work done, rested and recovered, flown back and still come out far better than had they paid for the service in the US.
They are also watching YouTube siphon off considerable amounts of their viewership, a bunch of eyeballs that they could make much more effective use of if they controlled access.
I do'nt think the big media companies see the internet as a bad thing - quite the opposite, i think they see huge potential because the internet lets you measure advertising performance. They really want to see who is stupid enough to buy Product X after coming to watch an online version of Living Lohan or whatever drivel they come up with next. Entrenched interests are the only thing that keep this from progressing faster.
I'm sure a stationary robot could stir my soup.
Europe is becoming "more" Slavic and Latin? You seem to be confusing Germanic with European.
$response = "Hibernate has its benefits, but you don't need to rework your whole data access layer to get protection from SQL injection, ";
$solution = "just use prepared statements " ;
$_GET = "and smack (with a blunt object) any developer that concatenates untrusted input during code review ";
echo $response + $solution + $_GET;
"These are doing multiple-master replication, with one acting as Slashdot's single write-only DB, and the other acting as a reader."
Isn't that a contradiction? If you have only one write DB, why do you need multiple masters, aren't the other 6 just slaves at that point? Or are there separate master/slave pairs (I'm assuming these are MySQL databases)
I should restate, as you make a valid point. Climate change will always have a political component, but in most countries that political component surrounds what to _do_ about climate change, not whether climate change is a problem or not.
When I said "politicize", I meant to take something relatively clear cut and accepted as fact by a great majority of scientists, and introduce an element of speculation and debate in the public arena which is largely fantasy and should be left to the experts to sort out (which they have mostly done).
Climate change is fact, and solid science. Only in countries where there is a strong vested interest in maintaining the status quo has the issue been politicized.
and proper use of privileges, views, etc. to limit access to data is almost a non-existent thing in a lot of companies I've worked for. All it takes is one "power user" with access to all columns in a customer table to have this problem.
Any DBA interested in keeping his job would go out of his way to design an HR database to prevent only key users from accessing the column 'employee.salary'. Qualified email addresses, a valuable commodity when sold on the spam black market, need to be treated the same way.
I agree with you that the author has not made a single insightful comment. But you are looking at MySQL as an Oracle DBA which isn't much better. I don't disagree with any of your points - they are all valid issues and are a result of MySQL not being used extensively on Big Iron in favour of clusters of commodity hardware. It comes down to the right tool for the job, and writing and architecting your application with the strengths and weaknesses of the DBMS in mind. Database neutrality is a great ideal, but for anything high-performance its unrealistic, and when taking an application written for one database and running it on another, downright unfair
e.g: Limit of 1024 current transactions (bug 26590). Why are you running so many simultaneous transactions on one box? Partition your data and take advantage of the fact that MySQL runs incredibly fast on cheap hardware and that you aren't limited by license cost.
If large web-based social networking sites with millions of hits per day can make MySQL work for their needs, it can work for you too. Don't expect your application written for Oracle to run flawlessly on MySQL without some tweaking, though.
The fact that biofuels are introducing competition for scarce food resources is a regulatory problem, not a problem with biofuels themselves. There need to be laws in place to prevent the food supply from competing with the biofuel supply. eg. only waste oils/alcohols, oils derived from inedible crops using land not fit for human consumption, etc. should be permissible as 'fuel'. This will be a net positive for the environment, as more existing carbon in the atmosphere will be utilised as unused swathes of land are brought under heavier agricultural development with hardy crops like mustard seed.
And on that note, here is a test for high testosterone:
If you find funny this video of an investigative reporter in Toronto being attacked by a furious, silly looking man, then you should atone for your sin of being born a man by attending $1000s of dollars worth of therapy sessions to convince yourself that "testosterone == bad".
The people that have dismissed the ability of Linux to penetrate the desktop market have always pointed to apps that people need to run on Windows, reluctance to switch, etc. But the resurgence of popularity of Macs, something that makes me feel like I'm on a timewarp to 1993, shows that a large mass of people are fed up with Windows and just want a stable OS to do work on.
I hope soon we'll see all the computer-illiterate hipsters bragging about their Linux laptops and desktops.
As a native of the region and living now in obnoxiously-sunny southern California, I can only dream of how much better use those panels would be put to in the empty deserts of Nevada or Arizona. Instead, more prime southern Ontario farmland will be sitting under solar panels that wait for the weak sun to peak out half the year, and Ontario tax-payers will foot the bill, indirectly through subsidy, for this inefficiency.
This money would be better spent harvesting the cold, strong winds Ontario has in abundance.
This is exactly my point. Nuclear submarines have been floating around our oceans for quite some time, and it's not news. The Russians are doing this on a larger scale now, to provide power not just for the vessel itself, but for a town. Seems to make a lot of sense as a way of transmitting power to far-flung spots of the Russian hinterland.
Why aren't these groups up in arms about nuclear-powered subs that have navigated our oceans for quite some time? How is this really any different on a fundamental level?
These people need to be diagnosed early and treated proactively; taking guns out of people hands will not make a difference. If this shooter was intent on killing, he'd have brought a machete to school if a gun wasn't readily available.
Our planet is not necessarily overpopulated. The problem is the impact that those 6 billion or so are having. More specifically, the impact that a minority of those 6 billion are having.
If there were only 2 billion people consuming resources at the rate of Americans, our situation would be more dire.
Having said that, the impact of dumping long-buried carbon into the atmosphere to fuel our energy-hungry habits is almost certainly far worse than the impact of reducing the energy level of the jet stream by a tiny fraction.
This is not true. While Canada is certainly closer in wages to the US than, say, India, there is still a significant difference, especially for high-education jobs, that lures talent away.
I am a Canadian working the in US purely because I can get paid anywhere from 1.5-2x the salary for the same work. Not to mention there are more jobs. The only reason there aren't more Canadians working in the US is that we are famously stubborn and working in the US is akin to selling your soul. Well, America, you have my soul, and I'm happier (and wealthier) for it. Luckily for us, we do get a bit of a pass on the H1-B restrictions and have our own special TN-1 visa (that is not subject to yearly limits), but it would be nice if the US and Canada would be more like the EU and have a much more open job market between them.
I wouldn't overstate the shift towards LA though. Anything media-related could have a home here, but LA does not attract the same people silicon valley does. Struggling actresses will serve java, but not code it.
I know personally of several web companies that have suffered huge attrition and are unable to fill positions due to a (relative) dearth of talent in SoCal. If these companies were in silicon valley things would be different, I'm sure.
While perhaps not the richest or largest state in the union, Illinois still has an economy nearly the size of the Netherlands and can afford to throw money away on Windows. The rest of the world, meanwhile, will continue to innovate with OSS and leave the US with bloated, expensive systems to maintain
It really makes a difference what quality CFL bulbs you get. If you buy the cheapest Ikea brand, 3 for $5, the light quality is atrocious and barely acceptable as an outdoor porch light. If you spend money on the higher quality bulbs, the light produced is almost as good as incandescent, IMO, especially if you have a translucent filter like a lamp shade or whatever.
Proxy servers aren't exactly a new idea...