Unless the actual music is being stored in the database as binary, I highly doubt that the database would be even close to 1GB if all they do is maintain track information and point to a filepath. SQLite scales well to around 4GB, according to some sources I've read in the past.
"Why was this guy modded a troll? He's absolutely right. blushes. thanks... I didn't expect to get modded up to max, but being marked down as a troll seemed very harsh to me."
Don't feel bad, my reply to your post got modded troll as well. Even though I said people *should* know how the underlying algorithms and data structures work; but in real life we use the structures and algorithms provided to us in the libraries and frameworks we use.
Why was this guy modded a troll? He's absolutely right. When is the last time someone coded a data structure or algorithm they learned in a CS class? Stacks, linked lists, searching, sorting....its all in our favorite frameworks. The only guys actually coding this kind of stuff are the ones not using these types of frameworks - presumably people that do things like write device drivers.
And to be honest, I'm perfectly happy using someone else's implementation of a linked list, or of a sort. I still think its important to know how these things work; but there's no reason to go out and implement all of this stuff when some guy that specializes in the field already wrote it for me.
"Now that people know how to do a lot of these advanced features and got use to them, they got frustrated when other word processors don't have or they don't know where the features they enjoy are. That being said because Microsoft successfully monopolized the Office software, they don't need advertise all there features all the time."
Well, that, or the new ribbon interface puts the "unknown" features in front of the user, making Clippy pretty much useless.
"I keep hearing this argument about someone being a coder , but not a designer/architect/whatever. As if being a coder is the easy bit but the real hard stuff is coming up with a flowchart, a few verbose word documents and spending half of every working day in meetings talking to similar talent vacuums."
I know what you mean, the way some people talk you'd think that that the architects were the ones using their brains and that coders are nothing but secretaries that speak "java/c#/whatever."
But I think what people mean when they say this is that there is a difference between a coder that simply knows the syntax of a language and basically translates the manual process into a program, no matter how inefficient and one who thinks the problem through and builds applications that are more efficient and that can be expanded on.
NASA has one incident like this in its nearly 50 years of history and they think they need to change their screening policy? I'd say they had a great run, and that this incident was a fluke.
Also, it seems that this particular astronaut had lots of stress related to being a single parent. I can't help but feel that NASA would not send parents (single or otherwise) of small children on very long missions. Maybe I'm wrong, but it I'd think that this is just begging for psychological issues to bubble up over time.
"It's been very cool. But quite expensive. Leaving a comment on/. with those two letters would have been cheaper by far. And with more visibility becasuse/. is more visited than Flightware.Com."
Maybe, but I think the demographics are slightly different. That, or maybe I'm the only one on Slashdot that can't afford a private jet:(
"of course you are right - there's going to be site specific biases. however, these numbers should be weighted by the fact that MS shoves IE down everyones throat. some/most people will not know there's a choice, some will but won't know how to change and some might feel comfortable trusting MS more than left-field heretics. so one could argue that browser stats are as much an indication of visitor IQ than a true reflection of *choice*."
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "shoving down everyone's throat." If you mean the inability to (easily, and completely) uninstall IE, then yes, I agree that MS should allow users to remove it completely. Still, that's hardly shoving anything down anyone's throat, as after you install another browser you can always not use IE.
Every modern OS comes with a web browser. Does Apple force Safari down people's throats? Does Red Hard force Fire Fox down people's throats?
How would the typical Windows user even get Fire Fox easily without a browser included in the system? And finally, people not knowing about alternatives to IE is not really Microsoft's problem (and I'm not implying that you said it was). MS simply provides the bare bone tools (not that some of those tools are by any means very good...) to Windows users, its up to the user to obtain everything else.
"Underscoring the fact that the "developer" didn't understand what was going on, there was a disclaimer on the page that the form only works on "Internet Explorer and other browsers that support ASP"."
Unfortunately there are lots of developers like this; essentially they only know how to use a small number of tools and have no understanding whatsoever of how these tools work "under the hood." Everything will go go fine until one day when something breaks or their tools don't work as they expected, at which point they start implementing real ugly hacks to get the code to work, or put up ridiculous requirements such as "works on IE only."
Good developers usually try to dig deep. They understand the environment their code is running on, have a good understanding of how the framework their code uses (i.e..NET, J2EE, etc.) works, and so on.
Fortunately, I think many of the crappy developers got fired after the bubble burst a few years ago, though their code will still be with us for quite a while longer.
"Anyone who's used MySpace knows that in order to see the bulletins on one's "My Bulletin Space", you have to be on a user's friend list (even the article admits "bulletin feature...sends messages to all of a user's 'friends' "). In order to be on a user's friend list, they must accept you as a friend (by clicking the accept button when they receive a request) or they must ask you to be their friend. Anyone who received bulletins from this guy either wanted/accepted it, or were just plain stupid (then again, this is MySpace) because on every single bulletin message there is a "Delete from friends" button in the bottom right corner.
I don't mean to be defending any spammers, but seriously, what? This makes no sense."
I can understand myspace trying to reduce spam... but I think they may be going about it wrong. I created a myspace profile named "BookGoldMine.com" and all I did was send a friend request to people from one of my former schools, I never sent out a bulletin or anything like that. Three days laters I find my account deleted. Apparently bands can do this to promote, but a website promoting free books can't. Gee, that makes sense.
"3000 hits to the main page in 45 minutes. I've got to find better hosting."
I wasn't able to get to the site, and I don't know how much data your pulling from the database on that page.... but did you cache the data being returned from the database?
My site, also on a shared hosting platform (cheap plug alert: www.bookgoldmine.com) received similar traffic when it got on StumbleUpon and it handled it quite well. I made heavy use of caching, which is what probably did the trick.
Also, my back end is SQLite (www.sqlite.org). In the past I've had issues with databases on shared hosting plans. Basically the web servers had terrific uptime, but the database uptime was mediocre, at best. Even when the db (I've used both MySQL and SQL Server on shared hosting plans, MySQL fared worse, probably because the plan is cheaper and more people are on those servers) was up, performance often stinks because there are many other sites hitting those db severs... which means plenty of badly written queries hitting the same db server.
I figured I might as well use SQLite, which is very fast and scales well up to about 4GB (my database is about 1.5MB right now @ 161 books, so I'll never get close to even.5GB). The db is actually part of your program, that is, it runs on the web server. Since from my experience the web server uptime is much better than the db server on these plans, this solution made sense to me. Of course, if I ever need to use some sort of load balancing system I'll probably need to port this system to a RDMS, but I'll worry about that when the time comes. If your site doesn't have a large number of users PUSHING data at the same time (SQLite's is ACID compliant, but the locking system is not as eloquent as the ones used by RDMSs) then you may want to consider using it as your back end, especially if you continue to have problems.
I had an issue during the Christmas season that occurred with a Google Checkout purchase, though I'm not sure if the problem was with Buy.com or with Google Checkout. I ordered a last minute gift on December 14th. Apparently the order was canceled, but I didn't receive and email telling me this until the 21st, which meant that if I wanted to get a gift for this person by Christmas morning, I had to partake in mall madness - fighting for parking spaces, huge crowds, and all of the good stuff being sold out.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one that had this issue, and I'm sure that this sort of thing happens much more often during the holidays, so I'm wondering if the approval rating would have been higher if Google had launched this service well before the holidays, where there would be less vendor (and Google) screw ups.
Also, getting from Buy.com to Google Check Out wasn't very intuitive, it took me a few minutes to figure it out. This isn't Google's fault, though this definately had a negative effect on my buying experience. Had Google not been offering $10 off of my purchase, I would have given up and used a credit card instead.
"Open Source is always superior to proprietary (long term), for the simple fact that Open Source gets fixed faster, and by a bigger pool of coding talent."
While I agree that Fire Fox is superior to IE (at least right now, IE7 was a rush job; I'm sure that IE8 will be more carefully laid out), I'd be careful about saying that OSS is always superior than closed source. Long term, this MAY be true for the popular packages (i.e. Linux, Fire Fox, eclipse), though for less popular packages I often find the quality of OSS to be lacking. I'm guessing that the developers move on to something else and nobody really takes over the project, while in a proprietary package the vendor has an incentive to keep the product fresh so that people keep buying it.
The IT world (or at least developers, don't know about the other guys) is indeed a small world (and in the US it seems to be getting smaller). The guy you reject may one day be your boss, or a client, or a guy that you may want to hire another day.
Take the few minutes and send a letter. People do hold grudges, and it can bite you or your company in the ass one day. Besides, even if it doesn't, its the right thing to do.
"I was just wondering how come everyone wants penguin power these days, but at the same time they are not willing to invest time/sweat in it."
The same reason I want a 6 pack without doing sit ups.
Seriously speaking though, he probably just wants a PC in his living room, and being that the PS3 is already in his living room, this setup makes sense. Whether gentoo is a good choice for a newbie or not, I don't know. Last time I looked (a while back) it didn't seem very friendly to new comers.
"It's been proven that Microsoft has dominated the market not by creating a superior product, but by superior (often times unethical) business practices. Their goal is to do whatever it takes to dominate the market and this is a result of that. The fact of the matter is that many Microsoft products are infact lacking in areas that they didn't need to focus on in order to gain market superiority. Competitors then need to target a different market and create a superior product in order to attempt to compete with Microsoft products. Do OS X and Linux, firefox and Opera seem to have less faults than they actually do because less people use them? Yes. Is that the only reason? No. Don't simply dismiss non-microsoft products based on the fact that they don't control the majority of the market."
How can you prove something that is subjective?
Many people (believe it or not), know about Linux and OSX, and still think that Windows is the better OS. Even many open source advocates think that Office is still the best collection of business application apps.
Did their marketing strategy help them get up top? Of course. But, believe it or not, it wasn't all marketing. Many people actually buy MS products because they liked them, not because they were tricked by a marketing gimmick.
That said, I do agree with you, Linux and OSX would most likely fare (much?) better than Windows even if they were just as popular; though there definately would be many more reports issues reported than there are now because of the low (compared to Windows) popularity of the two systems.
I imagine (and hope) that Vista will bring Windows security in line with *NIX (or at least close).
"I think it's a chicken and egg proposition. We use x86, because we use it. Historically, this is because of the popularity of the PC. A lot of people bought them. A lot of software was written for them. Other architectures did not succeed to displace the PC, because of the reluctance of people to abandon their software. Now, with years and years of this happening, the PC has actually become the most performant platform in its price class, while simultaneously becoming powerful enough that it could rival Real computers.
Slowly, other architectures became more like PCs: Alpha's got PCI buses, Power Macs got PCI buses, Sun workstations got PCI buses, etc. Eventually, the same happened to the CPUs: the Alpha line was discontinued, Sun started shipping x86-64 systems, and Apple started shipping x86 systems. The reason this happened is that most of the action was in the PC world; other platforms just couldn't keep up, in price and performance."
This is yet another case of a company/product/architecture being on top because it was the first to be good enough and cheap enough to get the job done right. Once the position became cemented your position on top, companies started to improve on the product so that people wouldn't eventually move on to other, better solutions.
Windows got up top this way, X86 got up top this way, and Ford got up top this way (Ford also shows us that being up top doesn't last forever).
Companies/Products that were first (or near first), but didn't get one of the other variables right (in both cases, price) include Apple and 3D0.
At first I agreed with what some other folks here said, if the advertisements are not intrusive then its OK. But even something like Google Adwords has potential of tainting the integrity of Wikipedia. Adwords on wiki could be a cash cow for Google, and I can imagine a scenario (whether it is likely or not, I don't know) where Google bumps up how much Wikipedia makes per click (or per 1000 impressions, or whatever) in exchange for only positive articles about Google.
That said, if they need the money to continue functioning, than let them do what they need to and trust that the editors do the right thing. I'd rather have an ad supported wiki than no wiki, but if possible it would be nice if they remained how they are.
"1)There's no damn difference between a myspace account and a personal webpage people have had since the 90s
2)Nobody really reads the damn things anyway- people love writing due to the sheer egotism of it, but nobody really reads the damn things except the
small circle of friends they'd talk to anyway."
I agree, to a large extent. For anybody that is looking for a simple profile, Myspace is NOT the answer. For one, the pages are very slow (I dread when my girlfriend "asks" (more like forces) me to add a comment to her myspace page because the pages load so slowly. Plus there's a limit to how many images you can have, and your page is covered in ads.
What Myspace IS good for, at least for people in their teens and twenties, is locating people that you haven't talked to in a while. It's not so much that Myspace is a powerful search engine or anything, it isn't. If everyone had personal web pages Google would be just as (probably more so) effective. But Myspace has reached that critical "everyone HAS to have one" stage where everyone ages 13-28 (maybe older) who might not have had a web page to has a myspace page. Because of its centralizing nature, it makes finding old friends/being found by old friends that much easier. This is its biggest asset. This is similar to how Windows got so popular... certainly not the best, but it reached a critical mass of users, so developers HAVE to develop for it, attracting even more users. Even if you hate the OS, you have to buy it because its the only one that will run the app you need.
Eventually though many people will realize that a) no one is reading their stuff, so why bother writing, or b) they can move to a niche site where there are people that WILL read their writings. Once enough people leave, Myspace will no longer be good at the one thing it is currently good at; and it will be a shell of its former self. Unlike Windows, people are not attached to their social network site and this will happen very quickly. See AOL for an example of this in another domain. I predict by 2009 Myspace will be largely forgotten (still around, but no one will care).
"Are you serious? Do you think that MySql for a developer is equivalent to wrench for a mechanic? What about people who develop device drivers? What about people who write the kernel? I can go on and on for fields that have just no need / use for MySql or any other database. Not everybody in this world is doing *exactly* what you are doing."
Not to mention not everybody has to use his Db of choice.
This article is an okay overview of many of ways virtualization is now being used. As an aside, has anyone else noticed Apple seems to be missing the boat this time? They're certainly benefitting from virtualization with several players in the market providing emulation solutions and tools now that they are on Intel, but Apple themselves seem to have done nothing and not even provided a strategy. Servers are moving to more virtual servers on one real machine, but OS X's license forbids it from fulfilling that role. Tools for using OS X as a thin client for accessing remote virtual machines are likewise weak. Apple hasn't even provided a virtual machine for their customers to emulate old macs so that users can run OS 9 apps on the new intel machines and they restrict redistribution of their ROM files to make 3rd parties unable to do this. No mention of adding VM technology to OS X has been heard, despite its inclusion in the Linux kernel among others.
Does Apple have something against VM technology? Are they simply behind the times and failing to see the potential?"
I imagine this is due to to Apple wanting to keep OSX from being installed on plain vanilla boxes. I suppose they could allow OSX to run on a virtual machine being hosted by an Apple, though I am unsure if any of the current VM software tells the virtualized OS what kind of OS the host is running. As far as I know though, the VM doesn't even know it's a VM (though I've seen an assembly code snippet of a way to do so, though this still does not tell the VM what kind of OS the host is running).
"I guess I can understand polygraphy IF it's at all accurate. After all, they are dealing with dangerous (from a proliferation standpoint) materials and experiments critical to national security. As for drug testing, I think it should only happen if an employee is exhibiting other problems at work, if then. And it also depends what drug is being tested for. Is there any evidence that enjoying the occasional herbal treat harms work performance in any material way?"
They are NOT accurate. A friend of mine lied for a large number of questions (stupid stuff he did in college), and he passed with flying colors.
Is he the exception to the rule? Maybe, but I doubt it. I just think the polygraph "works" on psychological level rather than a physiological level, and that anybody that understands this can easily beat the test.
I don't even think that the employers even CARE if the test is accurate. First, it weeds out a lot of the types of people that the employer doesn't want, such as drug users. Many people won't apply for the job if they think they will fail the polygraph. Second, from my understanding, the person giving the polygraph tries to intimidate you, and I imagine a lot of people "crack" and tell the truth when being intimidated while strapped to a machine. So even though the test may not be so accurate, it still gives employers decent results (from their point of view).
I wouldn't be so adverse to these types of exams if they didn't categorize you as a criminal or drug addict because you did something stupid years ago. Instead of asking "Have you ever smoked marijuana?," wouldn't it be more fair (and relevant to the employer) to ask "have you smoked marijuana in the past 5 years?"
People do stupid things growing up; but most people DO grow up. Personally, I think we should judge people on the things they do as adults, not as teenagers or college students.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless the actual music is being stored in the database as binary, I highly doubt that the database would be even close to 1GB if all they do is maintain track information and point to a filepath. SQLite scales well to around 4GB, according to some sources I've read in the past.
"Why was this guy modded a troll? He's absolutely right.
blushes. thanks... I didn't expect to get modded up to max, but being marked down as a troll seemed very harsh to me."
Don't feel bad, my reply to your post got modded troll as well. Even though I said people *should* know how the underlying algorithms and data structures work; but in real life we use the structures and algorithms provided to us in the libraries and frameworks we use.
Why was this guy modded a troll? He's absolutely right. When is the last time someone coded a data structure or algorithm they learned in a CS class? Stacks, linked lists, searching, sorting....its all in our favorite frameworks. The only guys actually coding this kind of stuff are the ones not using these types of frameworks - presumably people that do things like write device drivers.
And to be honest, I'm perfectly happy using someone else's implementation of a linked list, or of a sort. I still think its important to know how these things work; but there's no reason to go out and implement all of this stuff when some guy that specializes in the field already wrote it for me.
It would really suck though, if you were to get laid off....now you're out of a job and a home.
Crackdown does a pretty good job integrating ads into the game. If this is far as they take than I'm happy.
"Now that people know how to do a lot of these advanced features and got use to them, they got frustrated when other word processors don't have or they don't know where the features they enjoy are. That being said because Microsoft successfully monopolized the Office software, they don't need advertise all there features all the time."
Well, that, or the new ribbon interface puts the "unknown" features in front of the user, making Clippy pretty much useless.
"I keep hearing this argument about someone being a coder , but not a designer/architect/whatever. As if being a coder is the easy bit but the real hard stuff is coming up with a flowchart, a few verbose word documents and spending half of every working day in meetings talking to similar talent vacuums."
I know what you mean, the way some people talk you'd think that that the architects were the ones using their brains and that coders are nothing but secretaries that speak "java/c#/whatever."
But I think what people mean when they say this is that there is a difference between a coder that simply knows the syntax of a language and basically translates the manual process into a program, no matter how inefficient and one who thinks the problem through and builds applications that are more efficient and that can be expanded on.
NASA has one incident like this in its nearly 50 years of history and they think they need to change their screening policy? I'd say they had a great run, and that this incident was a fluke.
Also, it seems that this particular astronaut had lots of stress related to being a single parent. I can't help but feel that NASA would not send parents (single or otherwise) of small children on very long missions. Maybe I'm wrong, but it I'd think that this is just begging for psychological issues to bubble up over time.
"It's been very cool. But quite expensive. /. with those two letters would have been cheaper by far. /. is more visited than Flightware.Com."
:(
Leaving a comment on
And with more visibility becasuse
Maybe, but I think the demographics are slightly different. That, or maybe I'm the only one on Slashdot that can't afford a private jet
"of course you are right - there's going to be site specific biases. however, these numbers should be weighted by the fact that MS shoves IE down everyones throat. some/most people will not know there's a choice, some will but won't know how to change and some might feel comfortable trusting MS more than left-field heretics. so one could argue that browser stats are as much an indication of visitor IQ than a true reflection of *choice*."
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "shoving down everyone's throat." If you mean the inability to (easily, and completely) uninstall IE, then yes, I agree that MS should allow users to remove it completely. Still, that's hardly shoving anything down anyone's throat, as after you install another browser you can always not use IE.
Every modern OS comes with a web browser. Does Apple force Safari down people's throats? Does Red Hard force Fire Fox down people's throats?
How would the typical Windows user even get Fire Fox easily without a browser included in the system? And finally, people not knowing about alternatives to IE is not really Microsoft's problem (and I'm not implying that you said it was). MS simply provides the bare bone tools (not that some of those tools are by any means very good...) to Windows users, its up to the user to obtain everything else.
Out of curiosity, how do you find the jump from business applications development to game programming (even if you're doing it just for fun).
"Underscoring the fact that the "developer" didn't understand what was going on, there was a disclaimer on the page that the form only works on "Internet Explorer and other browsers that support ASP"."
.NET, J2EE, etc.) works, and so on.
Unfortunately there are lots of developers like this; essentially they only know how to use a small number of tools and have no understanding whatsoever of how these tools work "under the hood." Everything will go go fine until one day when something breaks or their tools don't work as they expected, at which point they start implementing real ugly hacks to get the code to work, or put up ridiculous requirements such as "works on IE only."
Good developers usually try to dig deep. They understand the environment their code is running on, have a good understanding of how the framework their code uses (i.e.
Fortunately, I think many of the crappy developers got fired after the bubble burst a few years ago, though their code will still be with us for quite a while longer.
"Anyone who's used MySpace knows that in order to see the bulletins on one's "My Bulletin Space", you have to be on a user's friend list (even the article admits "bulletin feature...sends messages to all of a user's 'friends' "). In order to be on a user's friend list, they must accept you as a friend (by clicking the accept button when they receive a request) or they must ask you to be their friend. Anyone who received bulletins from this guy either wanted/accepted it, or were just plain stupid (then again, this is MySpace) because on every single bulletin message there is a "Delete from friends" button in the bottom right corner.
I don't mean to be defending any spammers, but seriously, what? This makes no sense."
I can understand myspace trying to reduce spam... but I think they may be going about it wrong. I created a myspace profile named "BookGoldMine.com" and all I did was send a friend request to people from one of my former schools, I never sent out a bulletin or anything like that. Three days laters I find my account deleted. Apparently bands can do this to promote, but a website promoting free books can't. Gee, that makes sense.
"3000 hits to the main page in 45 minutes. I've got to find better hosting."
.5GB). The db is actually part of your program, that is, it runs on the web server. Since from my experience the web server uptime is much better than the db server on these plans, this solution made sense to me. Of course, if I ever need to use some sort of load balancing system I'll probably need to port this system to a RDMS, but I'll worry about that when the time comes. If your site doesn't have a large number of users PUSHING data at the same time (SQLite's is ACID compliant, but the locking system is not as eloquent as the ones used by RDMSs) then you may want to consider using it as your back end, especially if you continue to have problems.
I wasn't able to get to the site, and I don't know how much data your pulling from the database on that page.... but did you cache the data being returned from the database?
My site, also on a shared hosting platform (cheap plug alert: www.bookgoldmine.com) received similar traffic when it got on StumbleUpon and it handled it quite well. I made heavy use of caching, which is what probably did the trick.
Also, my back end is SQLite (www.sqlite.org). In the past I've had issues with databases on shared hosting plans. Basically the web servers had terrific uptime, but the database uptime was mediocre, at best. Even when the db (I've used both MySQL and SQL Server on shared hosting plans, MySQL fared worse, probably because the plan is cheaper and more people are on those servers) was up, performance often stinks because there are many other sites hitting those db severs... which means plenty of badly written queries hitting the same db server.
I figured I might as well use SQLite, which is very fast and scales well up to about 4GB (my database is about 1.5MB right now @ 161 books, so I'll never get close to even
I had an issue during the Christmas season that occurred with a Google Checkout purchase, though I'm not sure if the problem was with Buy.com or with Google Checkout. I ordered a last minute gift on December 14th. Apparently the order was canceled, but I didn't receive and email telling me this until the 21st, which meant that if I wanted to get a gift for this person by Christmas morning, I had to partake in mall madness - fighting for parking spaces, huge crowds, and all of the good stuff being sold out.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one that had this issue, and I'm sure that this sort of thing happens much more often during the holidays, so I'm wondering if the approval rating would have been higher if Google had launched this service well before the holidays, where there would be less vendor (and Google) screw ups.
Also, getting from Buy.com to Google Check Out wasn't very intuitive, it took me a few minutes to figure it out. This isn't Google's fault, though this definately had a negative effect on my buying experience. Had Google not been offering $10 off of my purchase, I would have given up and used a credit card instead.
"Open Source is always superior to proprietary (long term), for the simple fact that Open Source gets fixed faster, and by a bigger pool of coding talent."
While I agree that Fire Fox is superior to IE (at least right now, IE7 was a rush job; I'm sure that IE8 will be more carefully laid out), I'd be careful about saying that OSS is always superior than closed source. Long term, this MAY be true for the popular packages (i.e. Linux, Fire Fox, eclipse), though for less popular packages I often find the quality of OSS to be lacking. I'm guessing that the developers move on to something else and nobody really takes over the project, while in a proprietary package the vendor has an incentive to keep the product fresh so that people keep buying it.
Anyway, that's just my observation.
The IT world (or at least developers, don't know about the other guys) is indeed a small world (and in the US it seems to be getting smaller). The guy you reject may one day be your boss, or a client, or a guy that you may want to hire another day.
Take the few minutes and send a letter. People do hold grudges, and it can bite you or your company in the ass one day. Besides, even if it doesn't, its the right thing to do.
"I was just wondering how come everyone wants penguin power these days, but at the same time they are not willing to invest time/sweat in it."
The same reason I want a 6 pack without doing sit ups.
Seriously speaking though, he probably just wants a PC in his living room, and being that the PS3 is already in his living room, this setup makes sense. Whether gentoo is a good choice for a newbie or not, I don't know. Last time I looked (a while back) it didn't seem very friendly to new comers.
"It's been proven that Microsoft has dominated the market not by creating a superior product, but by superior (often times unethical) business practices. Their goal is to do whatever it takes to dominate the market and this is a result of that. The fact of the matter is that many Microsoft products are infact lacking in areas that they didn't need to focus on in order to gain market superiority. Competitors then need to target a different market and create a superior product in order to attempt to compete with Microsoft products. Do OS X and Linux, firefox and Opera seem to have less faults than they actually do because less people use them? Yes. Is that the only reason? No. Don't simply dismiss non-microsoft products based on the fact that they don't control the majority of the market."
How can you prove something that is subjective?
Many people (believe it or not), know about Linux and OSX, and still think that Windows is the better OS. Even many open source advocates think that Office is still the best collection of business application apps.
Did their marketing strategy help them get up top? Of course. But, believe it or not, it wasn't all marketing. Many people actually buy MS products because they liked them, not because they were tricked by a marketing gimmick.
That said, I do agree with you, Linux and OSX would most likely fare (much?) better than Windows even if they were just as popular; though there definately would be many more reports issues reported than there are now because of the low (compared to Windows) popularity of the two systems.
I imagine (and hope) that Vista will bring Windows security in line with *NIX (or at least close).
"I think it's a chicken and egg proposition. We use x86, because we use it. Historically, this is because of the popularity of the PC. A lot of people bought them. A lot of software was written for them. Other architectures did not succeed to displace the PC, because of the reluctance of people to abandon their software. Now, with years and years of this happening, the PC has actually become the most performant platform in its price class, while simultaneously becoming powerful enough that it could rival Real computers.
Slowly, other architectures became more like PCs: Alpha's got PCI buses, Power Macs got PCI buses, Sun workstations got PCI buses, etc. Eventually, the same happened to the CPUs: the Alpha line was discontinued, Sun started shipping x86-64 systems, and Apple started shipping x86 systems. The reason this happened is that most of the action was in the PC world; other platforms just couldn't keep up, in price and performance."
This is yet another case of a company/product/architecture being on top because it was the first to be good enough and cheap enough to get the job done right. Once the position became cemented your position on top, companies started to improve on the product so that people wouldn't eventually move on to other, better solutions.
Windows got up top this way, X86 got up top this way, and Ford got up top this way (Ford also shows us that being up top doesn't last forever).
Companies/Products that were first (or near first), but didn't get one of the other variables right (in both cases, price) include Apple and 3D0.
At first I agreed with what some other folks here said, if the advertisements are not intrusive then its OK. But even something like Google Adwords has potential of tainting the integrity of Wikipedia. Adwords on wiki could be a cash cow for Google, and I can imagine a scenario (whether it is likely or not, I don't know) where Google bumps up how much Wikipedia makes per click (or per 1000 impressions, or whatever) in exchange for only positive articles about Google.
That said, if they need the money to continue functioning, than let them do what they need to and trust that the editors do the right thing. I'd rather have an ad supported wiki than no wiki, but if possible it would be nice if they remained how they are.
"1)There's no damn difference between a myspace account and a personal webpage people have had since the 90s
2)Nobody really reads the damn things anyway- people love writing due to the sheer egotism of it, but nobody really reads the damn things except the
small circle of friends they'd talk to anyway."
I agree, to a large extent. For anybody that is looking for a simple profile, Myspace is NOT the answer. For one, the pages are very slow (I dread when my girlfriend "asks" (more like forces) me to add a comment to her myspace page because the pages load so slowly. Plus there's a limit to how many images you can have, and your page is covered in ads.
What Myspace IS good for, at least for people in their teens and twenties, is locating people that you haven't talked to in a while. It's not so much that Myspace is a powerful search engine or anything, it isn't. If everyone had personal web pages Google would be just as (probably more so) effective. But Myspace has reached that critical "everyone HAS to have one" stage where everyone ages 13-28 (maybe older) who might not have had a web page to has a myspace page. Because of its centralizing nature, it makes finding old friends/being found by old friends that much easier. This is its biggest asset. This is similar to how Windows got so popular... certainly not the best, but it reached a critical mass of users, so developers HAVE to develop for it, attracting even more users. Even if you hate the OS, you have to buy it because its the only one that will run the app you need.
Eventually though many people will realize that a) no one is reading their stuff, so why bother writing, or b) they can move to a niche site where there are people that WILL read their writings. Once enough people leave, Myspace will no longer be good at the one thing it is currently good at; and it will be a shell of its former self. Unlike Windows, people are not attached to their social network site and this will happen very quickly. See AOL for an example of this in another domain. I predict by 2009 Myspace will be largely forgotten (still around, but no one will care).
"Are you serious? Do you think that MySql for a developer is equivalent to wrench for a mechanic? What about people who develop device drivers? What about people who write the kernel? I can go on and on for fields that have just no need / use for MySql or any other database. Not everybody in this world is doing *exactly* what you are doing."
Not to mention not everybody has to use his Db of choice.
"
This article is an okay overview of many of ways virtualization is now being used. As an aside, has anyone else noticed Apple seems to be missing the boat this time? They're certainly benefitting from virtualization with several players in the market providing emulation solutions and tools now that they are on Intel, but Apple themselves seem to have done nothing and not even provided a strategy. Servers are moving to more virtual servers on one real machine, but OS X's license forbids it from fulfilling that role. Tools for using OS X as a thin client for accessing remote virtual machines are likewise weak. Apple hasn't even provided a virtual machine for their customers to emulate old macs so that users can run OS 9 apps on the new intel machines and they restrict redistribution of their ROM files to make 3rd parties unable to do this. No mention of adding VM technology to OS X has been heard, despite its inclusion in the Linux kernel among others.
Does Apple have something against VM technology? Are they simply behind the times and failing to see the potential?"
I imagine this is due to to Apple wanting to keep OSX from being installed on plain vanilla boxes. I suppose they could allow OSX to run on a virtual machine being hosted by an Apple, though I am unsure if any of the current VM software tells the virtualized OS what kind of OS the host is running. As far as I know though, the VM doesn't even know it's a VM (though I've seen an assembly code snippet of a way to do so, though this still does not tell the VM what kind of OS the host is running).
"I guess I can understand polygraphy IF it's at all accurate. After all, they are dealing with dangerous (from a proliferation standpoint) materials and experiments critical to national security. As for drug testing, I think it should only happen if an employee is exhibiting other problems at work, if then. And it also depends what drug is being tested for. Is there any evidence that enjoying the occasional herbal treat harms work performance in any material way?"
They are NOT accurate. A friend of mine lied for a large number of questions (stupid stuff he did in college), and he passed with flying colors.
Is he the exception to the rule? Maybe, but I doubt it. I just think the polygraph "works" on psychological level rather than a physiological level, and that anybody that understands this can easily beat the test.
I don't even think that the employers even CARE if the test is accurate. First, it weeds out a lot of the types of people that the employer doesn't want, such as drug users. Many people won't apply for the job if they think they will fail the polygraph. Second, from my understanding, the person giving the polygraph tries to intimidate you, and I imagine a lot of people "crack" and tell the truth when being intimidated while strapped to a machine. So even though the test may not be so accurate, it still gives employers decent results (from their point of view).
I wouldn't be so adverse to these types of exams if they didn't categorize you as a criminal or drug addict because you did something stupid years ago. Instead of asking "Have you ever smoked marijuana?," wouldn't it be more fair (and relevant to the employer) to ask "have you smoked marijuana in the past 5 years?"
People do stupid things growing up; but most people DO grow up. Personally, I think we should judge people on the things they do as adults, not as teenagers or college students.