Not quite. By definition, half of the population is of below-average intelligence: at or below 100 IQ points. Right now, average isn't going too far and seems to be getting worse by the day (see: idiocracy), but that doesn't mean it always has or will be the case. Yes, when you fit a bell curve to the entire human population, half by definition have to fall on the left side, but that entire bell curve can (and does) still shift relative to a point that one might consider "smart".
Now I agree that doesn't mean that stupid people should become fraud victims (unless I profit, in which case all bets are off), I just felt the need to be pedantic especially given the context of the discussion.
True. But to be fair, Finder still doesn't have tabs (nor does Vista for that matter; both of them need to get on that). I think both sides have a fair amount of clumsiness to them, at least as far as the file browser goes. The desktop UI as a whole is fairly polished on both sides (though I'd say Microsoft may have spent a little too much time waxing when there were still dings that needed fixing), though the accessibility of system preferences really went straight to hell with Vista.
Windows at its core has been getting increasingly stable over the years. Out of the box, both XP and Vista are pretty solid. Unfortunately, as soon as third-party software or drivers get involved (which is to say, almost immediately), that often falls right off. A year and a half in, I still can't get a nVidia GPU driver that doesn't cause my system standby to bugger out, at least as of a couple weeks ago when I last tried (and failed, gave up, and re-wiped that hard drive and set it back to work as another storage device). The UI has a level of polish that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out anymore; unfortunately, they moved so much stuff around to so many even more unintuitive locations than they were in XP that I couldn't use it if I wanted to, driver issues notwithstanding.
OS X I still feel has a very clumsy file browsing interface. I understand that it's intended to be much more search-driven which is fantastic for documents (and sometimes images and media files). Unfortunately, half of my day is spent in TextMate writing code, and spotlight tends to choke in that department. The autocomplete in the Cmd-shift-g go to folder dialog really sucks compared to the dropdowns in Windows, and I'd rather stay on the keyboard than bounce between it and the mouse when browsing files.
I can't speak about Linux at all, being the non-Linux-using blaspheme of a Slashdotter that I am. The last time I tried I hated it, but I only gave it about five minutes before realizing I didn't care. My understanding is that they've made a lot of progress, but that doesn't greatly affect me right now./whine
That works great if it's just a bunch of hot air, but that's not always the case. That could very seriously backfire. Ever called a poker bluff only to find out it wasn't a bluff? You're out some money. I'm sure you can determine what happens when we're calling a non-bluff about space flight or some missile program.
I'm normally not a big fan of the 'better safe than sorry' approach as it takes all the fun out of things, but you don't need to be excessively reckless either.
HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Strict? I always use the latter and need to use the hack I described above. Or maybe I just do it out of habit at this point... I honestly don't remember.
That's no different than the NFL going people who don't license their use of "Super Bowl" - douchey, but very typical of sporting organizations. I expect that "March Madness" incurs the same wrath, among others.
Of course that doesn't make it OK, but neither is the assumption that the organizer owns the copyright on players' actions and thus ban the use of "professional" cameras from the games by non-press.
FWIW, I wouldn't be at all surprised for there to be some sort of revolt against copyright in its current form. It happened with DRM, and is happening with people fighting back against the RIAA litigation movement, and those that are familiar with the situation certainly seem to be informing others about the absurdity of the current situation.
I just want most of my web shit to work in *one* browser before I worry about how it works in every browser.
If it doesn't work the same in every browser, nobody's going to implement it. For the most part, the days of making new IE-only sites are gone; any web developer worth his (or her?) salt will not be tying things down to a specific rendering environment. Which means that, with SVG per your example, people aren't going to use it until it works well in all reasonably-current browsers, or until it can be implemented fully in current browsers with a graceful degradation in non-compliant browsers (such as CSS-styled unordered lists: the fallback isn't pretty, but it's at least accessible)
Don't misinterpret that as not implementing things that require hacks or stupid workarounds, though. If you don't do that, you can't even center a div consistently across IE (#yourdivsparent{text-align:center;}#yourdiv{text-align:left;}) and non-IE (#yourdiv{margin:0 auto;}).
While I certainly can't speak for the Mac community as a whole, I'd personally much rather see an effective revamp of the Flip4Mac WMA/WMV codec pack rather than WMP11OSX. With the latter, I'd have to write off media using MS codecs entirely as I won't touch any version of WMP with a 10-foot pole; at least with the former I'm not bothered by it.
Ideally, decoding at the very least would be open-sourced and dropped into Perian (which should be integrated directly into the next version of OS X, IMO), though I don't see it happening any time soon. The more they lower the barrier to entry on using their products, the greater the adoption they'll see. Flip4Mac is a half-assed, third-party implementation that works very poorly and is a pain to get even to that state, the net result of which is that sites or products using that format/codec lose my business or attention very quickly (I doubt that they know that, as they'd likely switch to an open standard that anyone can use easily).
Microsoft is a big company with a lot of smart people. I'd like to think that at least one of them realizes that trying to lock people into using their products works against them, as third parties (website owners and such) have to account for non-MS visitors/customers. If MS was using open standards (at least for viewing... if they want to charge for a media encoder, that's fine by me), ANYONE would be able to easily view content that's wrapped up around an MS-designed open standard, which could in turn sell more encoder licenses. OTOH, having it wrapped in an inaccessible format forces those third parties to account for people that don't have access to that format, so they'll opt for something more available like AAC/h.264.
Make your money on content producers, charging them for encoder licenses and such. The vast majority of content out there isn't worth paying for a decoder license, so it will go unwatched. Everybody loses. I don't think anyone thinks for a second that YouTube would have anywhere near it's current level of success if you had to pay Adobe for Flash Player (never mind the Flash platform as a whole). Granted I realize that's not the best example with Linux/Flash issues, but it's at least free as in beer which is what 99% of the population cares about.
Indeed it is. But free speech - political or otherwise - can still be harassment, which remains illegal. I'm hardly an expert on tort law (hell, I don't know if harassment is even falls into the category), but I see no reason you couldn't sue if not press criminal charges if it's serious enough.
Let's also realize that there is indeed a (quite significant) distinction between "pedophiles" and "child molesters". By definition, only one of those groups has actually acted on their generally-regarded-as-perverse desires; I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which one of the above labels is for that group. I'm not saying that there aren't there aren't people who fall into both groups (and I suppose if you're really screwed up in the head, you could end up as a child molester who isn't a pedophile... but that's unlikely to say the least), but the group to target with the slander is the one that actually does the damage.
I'll not make a statement about whether being a pedophile is "okay" as that's really a moral issue rather than a legal one (as far as I'm concerned, what you do in your own mind is your business so long as it stays there; legally, thoughtcrime doesn't yet exist). Obviously being a child molester is not okay, and I wholeheartedly agree that they should be locked up. I expect that quite a number of people would have consenting relations with a minor if the opportunity arose, but that whole "consenting" thing is key to the situation - they're generally not the people we need to keep an eye on.
By and large I agree with what you're saying... but let's be mindful of our terminology and not attack the wrong group. One is a very small subset of the other, not unlike traitors being a small subset of communists.
Could you explain how that behavior would change at all with the advent of IPv6? I'm certainly not claiming you're wrong, but until I have a direct pipeline to the internet running to the house, I still have to go through some sort of ISP.
The no server clauses are absolutely BS, but my current ISP (Charter) doesn't seem to care, or at least do anything about it. I don't have a static IP (thanks, DynDNS), but they don't block incoming on port 80 so for demoing work to clients and accessing my local install of SugarCRM from the road, I don't have to mess with alternate ports.
Having said that, the mainstream use of home servers are still a way off. If/when they exist in the mainsteam, it'll almost certainly be primarily for media and document access (basically SFTP or some sort of wide-area Samba, and probably a long-range Bonjour broadcast for grabbing your iTunes library). The vast majority have no interest in running their own website; having some sort of presence via Wordpress, Blogger, or maybe whatever the modern-day equivalent of Geocities is will be more than enough for most people. The slashdot crowd are the exception to the rule, with a small cluster of boxes running homebrew apps and doubling as a replacement for the furnace. The spam implications of a home-based email/SMTP server make me slightly nauseous, and I envision VOIP remaining relatively peer-to-peer for the foreseeable future. Don't get me wrong - I want them to stop fucking around with what I can do with my connection... I just don't see it being that big of an issue. When configuring a DNS server becomes as simple as plugging in a toaster, we'll talk.
Retouching IS an evil which destroys the essence of photography. It's about capturing reality, not presenting an ideal.
Only if we take your opinion of what constitutes "the essence of photography" as fact (which we... don't).
From a photojournalism standpoint, you're absolutely correct.
From an artistic standpoint, you couldn't be further from the truth.
From a capturing memories standpoint, it depends on the person and the situation - while most people want things to seem accurate, I think they'd prefer a retouched photo if it makes the memory seem that much fonder. Photoshopping someone who wasn't at the event at all is taking it too far IMO, but if I had a client that wanted it done, I wouldn't turn down the business. Film developers very frequently oversaturate the colors in the prints as it tends to make people happier with the results (of course, most people would be shocked and outraged to learn as much, but what they don't know won't hurt them) - it's not entirely unlike TV retailers cranking up the brightness and contrast at the expense of color accuracy and image quality, as at the end of the day it tends to sell more units.
Now we're not really saying two different things here, other than what makes up the essence of photography. But for technical limitations alone, some amount of manipulation tends to be necessary in order to preserve accuracy, as counter-intuitive as that may sound (today's sensors, and most film for that matter, simply can't handle the same dynamic lighting range as the human eye; dodging and burning tends to bring the photo into a range as you would actually perceive it)
Well that whole 640k thing with regard to IP addresses has been largely negated by the adoption of routers within the home. Back when cable/DSL adoption was first starting, many people would end up with a switch and then have to call up the ISP for a second IP address. And with several computers in every home these days (not to mention other devices that grab IP addresses - games consoles, WiFi cell phones, network printers, etc), that plausibly could have become a very big issue very quickly. I've got at least a dozen pieces of hardware that consume a local IP address (not to mention the two or three VMs I have going at any given time), and it's a very good thing they don't each consume a slot in the worldwide public address space.
For all practical purposes, even an A.B.C.D.E would probably be enough thanks to routers - that still gives us ~1 trillion unique IPs worldwide. Of course if we were to make the switch it would make sense to give us the additional headroom. I'm hardly intimately familiar with the inner workings of IPv6 but assume it has benefits beyond mere address space, but the added complication to sysadmins of dealing with something like "2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:0000:1428:57ab" (thanks, Wikipedia) is simply a nightmare in the making. Four bytes versus sixteen? I can remember which computer is 192.168.0.11 on my local network easily enough (and could certainly remember my public IP if I were bothered, as it never seems to change despite not paying for static), but you can practically smell the smoke coming out of my head after just looking at that.
It's certainly forward-thinking, but having (estimated) fewer atoms in the universe than IPv6 addresses available is just slightly overkill, doncha think?
How big is your organization? Is $50 * that number less than your salary? About about $50/yr/head as compared to $outlook/3yrs/head+you?
While I'm certainly not doubting your abilities, one of the two outages you experienced could have been prevented by using a hosted solution from someone with hardware infrastructure like Google's. Is it worth the other risks (privacy, availability, data confidentiality and portability, etc)? It depends on the situation, but I'd suggest probably not for most large companies.
On the flip side... there's that whole Outlook thing. For whatever reason, even the MS-hating Slashdot folk tend to moisten slightly at the thought of a good Exchange server, but I've never had anything but bad experiences with it (both through Outlook and OWA). Maybe it was the fault of the server's configuration, but in my experience it's remarkably slow, has terrible spam filtering, and I could hardly draw up a clumsier interface (though that, of course, is personal opinion). Gmail, OTOH, is always quite zippy for me, has secretary-quality spam filtering, has not only a useful search but a good one, doesn't cause god-awful conflicts with catalogs for the indexing service, etc. For me, it just works so much better - I can get more done in less time and with fewer outbursts of carnal rage *ahem* err, less frustration.
As good as you may be at keeping your Exchange setup happy, I'd bet there are at least a dozen other people in similar position that aren't as qualified to do so. While you've been able to deliver five nines of uptime, most setups aren't going to experience that level of bliss. For personal and small biz use, Gmail has been fantastic. Including the brief service interruption last week (that lasted what... half an hour? I certainly didn't notice any more if it went longer), there have been maybe two hours where I've been unable to get to my gmail account since... 2003? Four and a half nines sure as hell isn't bad for something that's cost me exactly $0, especially considering that most of my experience with Exchange has shown it's lucky to hit three.
Does it have its limitations? Sure. There's still no push service, and I always find the calendar invites to be a little funky (and, of course, you can't just tab between calendar and email like you can in Outlook unless you actually have two browser tabs open; this happens to work better for me but that's again personal preference). You've entrusted your data to Google and more significantly to a third party, but then again there are about a dozen companies on the planet with their level of hardware infrastructure (so that whole enterprise hardware thing is a non-issue) and any possible software corruption at their end could just as easily happen on a local system - unless you WROTE Exchange, you can't really trust it more or less than any other system.
By all means, if what you have works then use it. I personally have only had negative experiences with Exchange-based systems; quite honestly, something like that could be a deciding factor for me between two reasonably matched hypothetical employers.
So then keep it very vague - "While I haven't done any research on the matter in order to avoid the possibility of willful infringement, I expect that there exists out there either a patent or accepted technique (as is often the case with software) that would invalidate our patent claim; in both cases, this would result in an invalidated patent request and very likely unnecessary costs to the company."
Before now, nobody understood why I have all of my computers sitting on top of turntables. Now I'll just point them to your post, since they couldn't fathom what I meant when I said it makes it run faster.
I had also tried mounting them in a paint can shaker to get at least another 15Hz out of the CPU, but I couldn't stand the noise.
That comes at the expense of a LOT of usually-unnecessary disk/network activity, as you're calling the thing ALL THE DAMN TIME. Just imagine if Facebook or Yahoo logged every query executed. Maybe it helps during the early debugging stages of smaller apps/sites, but your logs would get out of control faster than you can imagine on larger utilities... they'd need some sort of gigantic SAN just for the log file.
Or did you mean that you only log failed queries? That would make a hell of a lot more sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. By definition, half of the population is of below-average intelligence: at or below 100 IQ points. Right now, average isn't going too far and seems to be getting worse by the day (see: idiocracy), but that doesn't mean it always has or will be the case. Yes, when you fit a bell curve to the entire human population, half by definition have to fall on the left side, but that entire bell curve can (and does) still shift relative to a point that one might consider "smart".
Now I agree that doesn't mean that stupid people should become fraud victims (unless I profit, in which case all bets are off), I just felt the need to be pedantic especially given the context of the discussion.
True. But to be fair, Finder still doesn't have tabs (nor does Vista for that matter; both of them need to get on that). I think both sides have a fair amount of clumsiness to them, at least as far as the file browser goes. The desktop UI as a whole is fairly polished on both sides (though I'd say Microsoft may have spent a little too much time waxing when there were still dings that needed fixing), though the accessibility of system preferences really went straight to hell with Vista.
Windows at its core has been getting increasingly stable over the years. Out of the box, both XP and Vista are pretty solid. Unfortunately, as soon as third-party software or drivers get involved (which is to say, almost immediately), that often falls right off. A year and a half in, I still can't get a nVidia GPU driver that doesn't cause my system standby to bugger out, at least as of a couple weeks ago when I last tried (and failed, gave up, and re-wiped that hard drive and set it back to work as another storage device). The UI has a level of polish that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out anymore; unfortunately, they moved so much stuff around to so many even more unintuitive locations than they were in XP that I couldn't use it if I wanted to, driver issues notwithstanding.
OS X I still feel has a very clumsy file browsing interface. I understand that it's intended to be much more search-driven which is fantastic for documents (and sometimes images and media files). Unfortunately, half of my day is spent in TextMate writing code, and spotlight tends to choke in that department. The autocomplete in the Cmd-shift-g go to folder dialog really sucks compared to the dropdowns in Windows, and I'd rather stay on the keyboard than bounce between it and the mouse when browsing files.
I can't speak about Linux at all, being the non-Linux-using blaspheme of a Slashdotter that I am. The last time I tried I hated it, but I only gave it about five minutes before realizing I didn't care. My understanding is that they've made a lot of progress, but that doesn't greatly affect me right now. /whine
That works great if it's just a bunch of hot air, but that's not always the case. That could very seriously backfire. Ever called a poker bluff only to find out it wasn't a bluff? You're out some money. I'm sure you can determine what happens when we're calling a non-bluff about space flight or some missile program.
I'm normally not a big fan of the 'better safe than sorry' approach as it takes all the fun out of things, but you don't need to be excessively reckless either.
HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Strict? I always use the latter and need to use the hack I described above. Or maybe I just do it out of habit at this point... I honestly don't remember.
That's no different than the NFL going people who don't license their use of "Super Bowl" - douchey, but very typical of sporting organizations. I expect that "March Madness" incurs the same wrath, among others.
Of course that doesn't make it OK, but neither is the assumption that the organizer owns the copyright on players' actions and thus ban the use of "professional" cameras from the games by non-press.
FWIW, I wouldn't be at all surprised for there to be some sort of revolt against copyright in its current form. It happened with DRM, and is happening with people fighting back against the RIAA litigation movement, and those that are familiar with the situation certainly seem to be informing others about the absurdity of the current situation.
If it doesn't work the same in every browser, nobody's going to implement it. For the most part, the days of making new IE-only sites are gone; any web developer worth his (or her?) salt will not be tying things down to a specific rendering environment. Which means that, with SVG per your example, people aren't going to use it until it works well in all reasonably-current browsers, or until it can be implemented fully in current browsers with a graceful degradation in non-compliant browsers (such as CSS-styled unordered lists: the fallback isn't pretty, but it's at least accessible)
Don't misinterpret that as not implementing things that require hacks or stupid workarounds, though. If you don't do that, you can't even center a div consistently across IE (#yourdivsparent{text-align:center;}#yourdiv{text-align:left;}) and non-IE (#yourdiv{margin:0 auto;}).
While I certainly can't speak for the Mac community as a whole, I'd personally much rather see an effective revamp of the Flip4Mac WMA/WMV codec pack rather than WMP11OSX. With the latter, I'd have to write off media using MS codecs entirely as I won't touch any version of WMP with a 10-foot pole; at least with the former I'm not bothered by it.
Ideally, decoding at the very least would be open-sourced and dropped into Perian (which should be integrated directly into the next version of OS X, IMO), though I don't see it happening any time soon. The more they lower the barrier to entry on using their products, the greater the adoption they'll see. Flip4Mac is a half-assed, third-party implementation that works very poorly and is a pain to get even to that state, the net result of which is that sites or products using that format/codec lose my business or attention very quickly (I doubt that they know that, as they'd likely switch to an open standard that anyone can use easily).
Microsoft is a big company with a lot of smart people. I'd like to think that at least one of them realizes that trying to lock people into using their products works against them, as third parties (website owners and such) have to account for non-MS visitors/customers. If MS was using open standards (at least for viewing... if they want to charge for a media encoder, that's fine by me), ANYONE would be able to easily view content that's wrapped up around an MS-designed open standard, which could in turn sell more encoder licenses. OTOH, having it wrapped in an inaccessible format forces those third parties to account for people that don't have access to that format, so they'll opt for something more available like AAC/h.264.
Make your money on content producers, charging them for encoder licenses and such. The vast majority of content out there isn't worth paying for a decoder license, so it will go unwatched. Everybody loses. I don't think anyone thinks for a second that YouTube would have anywhere near it's current level of success if you had to pay Adobe for Flash Player (never mind the Flash platform as a whole). Granted I realize that's not the best example with Linux/Flash issues, but it's at least free as in beer which is what 99% of the population cares about.
Americans, then? Don't worry, most of us are more than confused enough that this extra tidbit won't make a difference ;)
Indeed it is. But free speech - political or otherwise - can still be harassment, which remains illegal. I'm hardly an expert on tort law (hell, I don't know if harassment is even falls into the category), but I see no reason you couldn't sue if not press criminal charges if it's serious enough.
Let's also realize that there is indeed a (quite significant) distinction between "pedophiles" and "child molesters". By definition, only one of those groups has actually acted on their generally-regarded-as-perverse desires; I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which one of the above labels is for that group. I'm not saying that there aren't there aren't people who fall into both groups (and I suppose if you're really screwed up in the head, you could end up as a child molester who isn't a pedophile... but that's unlikely to say the least), but the group to target with the slander is the one that actually does the damage.
I'll not make a statement about whether being a pedophile is "okay" as that's really a moral issue rather than a legal one (as far as I'm concerned, what you do in your own mind is your business so long as it stays there; legally, thoughtcrime doesn't yet exist). Obviously being a child molester is not okay, and I wholeheartedly agree that they should be locked up. I expect that quite a number of people would have consenting relations with a minor if the opportunity arose, but that whole "consenting" thing is key to the situation - they're generally not the people we need to keep an eye on.
By and large I agree with what you're saying... but let's be mindful of our terminology and not attack the wrong group. One is a very small subset of the other, not unlike traitors being a small subset of communists.
Could you explain how that behavior would change at all with the advent of IPv6? I'm certainly not claiming you're wrong, but until I have a direct pipeline to the internet running to the house, I still have to go through some sort of ISP.
The no server clauses are absolutely BS, but my current ISP (Charter) doesn't seem to care, or at least do anything about it. I don't have a static IP (thanks, DynDNS), but they don't block incoming on port 80 so for demoing work to clients and accessing my local install of SugarCRM from the road, I don't have to mess with alternate ports.
Having said that, the mainstream use of home servers are still a way off. If/when they exist in the mainsteam, it'll almost certainly be primarily for media and document access (basically SFTP or some sort of wide-area Samba, and probably a long-range Bonjour broadcast for grabbing your iTunes library). The vast majority have no interest in running their own website; having some sort of presence via Wordpress, Blogger, or maybe whatever the modern-day equivalent of Geocities is will be more than enough for most people. The slashdot crowd are the exception to the rule, with a small cluster of boxes running homebrew apps and doubling as a replacement for the furnace. The spam implications of a home-based email/SMTP server make me slightly nauseous, and I envision VOIP remaining relatively peer-to-peer for the foreseeable future. Don't get me wrong - I want them to stop fucking around with what I can do with my connection... I just don't see it being that big of an issue. When configuring a DNS server becomes as simple as plugging in a toaster, we'll talk.
Good thing, because there are over a million folks on Slashdot. And now we all know.
How are you posting to Slashdot if not already at a computer screen?
Only if we take your opinion of what constitutes "the essence of photography" as fact (which we... don't).
From a photojournalism standpoint, you're absolutely correct.
From an artistic standpoint, you couldn't be further from the truth.
From a capturing memories standpoint, it depends on the person and the situation - while most people want things to seem accurate, I think they'd prefer a retouched photo if it makes the memory seem that much fonder. Photoshopping someone who wasn't at the event at all is taking it too far IMO, but if I had a client that wanted it done, I wouldn't turn down the business. Film developers very frequently oversaturate the colors in the prints as it tends to make people happier with the results (of course, most people would be shocked and outraged to learn as much, but what they don't know won't hurt them) - it's not entirely unlike TV retailers cranking up the brightness and contrast at the expense of color accuracy and image quality, as at the end of the day it tends to sell more units.
Now we're not really saying two different things here, other than what makes up the essence of photography. But for technical limitations alone, some amount of manipulation tends to be necessary in order to preserve accuracy, as counter-intuitive as that may sound (today's sensors, and most film for that matter, simply can't handle the same dynamic lighting range as the human eye; dodging and burning tends to bring the photo into a range as you would actually perceive it)
Shouldn't them backing out like that count just as much against them as losing outright? Talk about abuse of the legal system...
Well that whole 640k thing with regard to IP addresses has been largely negated by the adoption of routers within the home. Back when cable/DSL adoption was first starting, many people would end up with a switch and then have to call up the ISP for a second IP address. And with several computers in every home these days (not to mention other devices that grab IP addresses - games consoles, WiFi cell phones, network printers, etc), that plausibly could have become a very big issue very quickly. I've got at least a dozen pieces of hardware that consume a local IP address (not to mention the two or three VMs I have going at any given time), and it's a very good thing they don't each consume a slot in the worldwide public address space.
For all practical purposes, even an A.B.C.D.E would probably be enough thanks to routers - that still gives us ~1 trillion unique IPs worldwide. Of course if we were to make the switch it would make sense to give us the additional headroom. I'm hardly intimately familiar with the inner workings of IPv6 but assume it has benefits beyond mere address space, but the added complication to sysadmins of dealing with something like "2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:0000:1428:57ab" (thanks, Wikipedia) is simply a nightmare in the making. Four bytes versus sixteen? I can remember which computer is 192.168.0.11 on my local network easily enough (and could certainly remember my public IP if I were bothered, as it never seems to change despite not paying for static), but you can practically smell the smoke coming out of my head after just looking at that.
It's certainly forward-thinking, but having (estimated) fewer atoms in the universe than IPv6 addresses available is just slightly overkill, doncha think?
So what you're saying is that you've been buying used CDs since ~1984.
Which, I take it, is why your post was not signed "Summer Glau".
How big is your organization? Is $50 * that number less than your salary? About about $50/yr/head as compared to $outlook/3yrs/head+you?
While I'm certainly not doubting your abilities, one of the two outages you experienced could have been prevented by using a hosted solution from someone with hardware infrastructure like Google's. Is it worth the other risks (privacy, availability, data confidentiality and portability, etc)? It depends on the situation, but I'd suggest probably not for most large companies.
On the flip side... there's that whole Outlook thing. For whatever reason, even the MS-hating Slashdot folk tend to moisten slightly at the thought of a good Exchange server, but I've never had anything but bad experiences with it (both through Outlook and OWA). Maybe it was the fault of the server's configuration, but in my experience it's remarkably slow, has terrible spam filtering, and I could hardly draw up a clumsier interface (though that, of course, is personal opinion). Gmail, OTOH, is always quite zippy for me, has secretary-quality spam filtering, has not only a useful search but a good one, doesn't cause god-awful conflicts with catalogs for the indexing service, etc. For me, it just works so much better - I can get more done in less time and with fewer outbursts of carnal rage *ahem* err, less frustration.
As good as you may be at keeping your Exchange setup happy, I'd bet there are at least a dozen other people in similar position that aren't as qualified to do so. While you've been able to deliver five nines of uptime, most setups aren't going to experience that level of bliss. For personal and small biz use, Gmail has been fantastic. Including the brief service interruption last week (that lasted what... half an hour? I certainly didn't notice any more if it went longer), there have been maybe two hours where I've been unable to get to my gmail account since... 2003? Four and a half nines sure as hell isn't bad for something that's cost me exactly $0, especially considering that most of my experience with Exchange has shown it's lucky to hit three.
Does it have its limitations? Sure. There's still no push service, and I always find the calendar invites to be a little funky (and, of course, you can't just tab between calendar and email like you can in Outlook unless you actually have two browser tabs open; this happens to work better for me but that's again personal preference). You've entrusted your data to Google and more significantly to a third party, but then again there are about a dozen companies on the planet with their level of hardware infrastructure (so that whole enterprise hardware thing is a non-issue) and any possible software corruption at their end could just as easily happen on a local system - unless you WROTE Exchange, you can't really trust it more or less than any other system.
By all means, if what you have works then use it. I personally have only had negative experiences with Exchange-based systems; quite honestly, something like that could be a deciding factor for me between two reasonably matched hypothetical employers.
So then keep it very vague - "While I haven't done any research on the matter in order to avoid the possibility of willful infringement, I expect that there exists out there either a patent or accepted technique (as is often the case with software) that would invalidate our patent claim; in both cases, this would result in an invalidated patent request and very likely unnecessary costs to the company."
But I second the lawyers.
Before now, nobody understood why I have all of my computers sitting on top of turntables. Now I'll just point them to your post, since they couldn't fathom what I meant when I said it makes it run faster.
I had also tried mounting them in a paint can shaker to get at least another 15Hz out of the CPU, but I couldn't stand the noise.
That comes at the expense of a LOT of usually-unnecessary disk/network activity, as you're calling the thing ALL THE DAMN TIME. Just imagine if Facebook or Yahoo logged every query executed. Maybe it helps during the early debugging stages of smaller apps/sites, but your logs would get out of control faster than you can imagine on larger utilities... they'd need some sort of gigantic SAN just for the log file.
Or did you mean that you only log failed queries? That would make a hell of a lot more sense.
We tried that. Then they started suing us. And in almost all cases, winning. Face it: the system is fucked.
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot stops trying it's jokes on YOU!
Fail.