The fact that software development is often outsourced, off-shored, and then off-shored again should make it quite clear that the work quality of the average developer is about the same as cheap commodity coffee beans.
First off, Stonebreaker has a vested commercial interest in the matter. Take everything he says with a grain of salt. Actually, take the whole damned salt lick. Secondly, whether data is stored by columns or rows is not a concern for the interface of an RDBMS. That is a physical implementation detail that any RDBMS could do. Don't forget Codd's 12 Rules. Pay close attention to Rule 8.
The push for "software as a service" is nothing more than a push for centralized timesharing. Except for a few situations (e.g. call centers), the advantages of a thick desktop far outweigh the negatives. The computer manufacturers were saddened when everyone switched from million dollar machines with extensive maintenance contracts that serviced a couple dozen users to desktop machines managed in-house.
The deal with Microsoft was pure genius. With Microsoft backing out of every part of the deal, they'll eventually be able to sue for breach of contract among other things.
At work, we don't use spamassassin. There are better, albeit more expensive tools that provide everything spamassassin does and more at a fraction of the cpu usage. You're doing about four times what my mail system handles on average. Our filtering system alone uses seven machines. Out of our entire load, less than 100,000 legitimate messages are received each day. The amount of legitimate mail is statistically insignificant. It's easier to say we receive 100% spam.
Rather than subjecting ourselves to the whims of a DNSBL operator, we run our own internal blacklist. Without it, the mail system would not work at all. Sure, we have just as many false positives as typical DNSBLs, but at least the blame rests squarely on my shoulders. Since I'm only a phone call or email away and actually care about paying customers, there's plenty of incentive to fix any problems. Additionally, the list isn't really a DNSBL. Rather, the blocks happen on a load balancer/firewall. Why waste resources with a DNS query?
NEVER use a DNSBL as an absolute block
on
Choosing a Good DNSBL
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
DNSBLs are subject to the whims of some of the most unreliable and whiny schmucks on the face of the planet. NEVER under any circumstances use a single DNSBL as an absolute block. Use it to increment a score along the lines of Spam Assassin that will eventually hit a threshold, preferably with a minimal content-based component. Don't even think about using multiple hits on multiple lists as a gauge of spam-worthiness. The amount of inbreeding and sharing among lists is disgustingly high. Not even the Spamhaus aggregate is trustworthy these days.
Spammers can get around blacklists anyways. They're about as effective as locking a door made of tissue paper. The number of false positives is high. The amount of spam blocked is negligible. My suggestion is to abandon the idea altogether.
OLPC needs the cheapest components possible. As such, they need more transistors packed into a smaller area. Moore's Law makes cheaper equipment possible.
Nina's parents managed to get custody of the kids. They fled to Russia and are staying there. I've said it from the beginning that Nina Reiser fled to Russia. Has anyone bothered to look for her there? With the kids staying in Russia because "they're too afraid to go back to the US", that just seems to indicate even more that she's there.
First off, the majority of digital photos are never printed. As it turns out, Kodak and other film and paper manufacturers bet their future on printed digital photos around 1995, including at-home inkjet prints. For the past decade they have been hemorrhaging money due to losses on their digital-oriented businesses. The "faster, cheaper, doesn't have to be better" mentality of the digital age has brought photography to a point where crappy snapshots with a.7 megapixel camera integrated in a cell phone that barely works for voice calls can be considered "good enough."
You can have your new and shiny rubbish. I'll stick with my Bessa, Tri-X, and a bunch of smelly chemicals. While your mom may say your photo is beautiful, I have people throwing money at me for my photos and I have to continually turn down requests to shoot various events.
Now that I have my B&W bigotry out of the way, back on subject. A couple of years ago I decided to test the longevity of inkjet prints on various papers. After seeing prints disappear in a few months from certain combinations, I went to Office Depot with $500. I purchased the low end Epson at the time, a set of ink cartridges, and one pack of every single paper in stock. First off, Kodak inkjet papers and Epson inks don't work well together. I made two test prints on every single paper. One would be kept sandwiched between layers of acid-and-lignen-free card stock in archival conditions. The second would be placed on the wall of a utility room without any environmental controls, exposed to the horrid bleaching effects of fluorescent light. Two years in only two samples show degradation, and only one of those exhibited more fading in uv light. Neither of the degraded samples were intended for inkjet photo prints.
My conclusion: Inkjet prints, at least with Epson inks and proper inkjet paper, are damned good. As long as you avoid the cheap stuff, your prints will last for many years. Will they last as long as an archival-grade silver gelatin (black and white) print? I'll let you know in 150 years. Will they last longer than an RA2 print from the late 1970s or early 80s or even one of the early RA4 prints from the same era? They already have. Will they last as long as modern RA4 prints? It's entirely possible.
I will say this. Unless the prices for inkjet paper have dropped significantly over the past year (I haven't checked), digital RA4 prints are significantly cheaper. When I began this test, the cheapest paper was $0.254 per 4x6 print not including the ink! Add another $0.40 for the inks, and it's a losing situation, especially for the good papers that cost over $0.50 each sheet. With Adorama's digital print service charging $0.19 for a 4x6 print, it's rather silly to print at home. Even with shipping via priority mail, ten digital RA4 prints are cheaper than inkjet prints.
My favorite papers were from Ilford, Epson, Canon, Fujifilm, and Office Depot. It was impossible to choose a favorite between those five. Each had subtle unique qualities. Least favorite was Kodak, mainly because it didn't absorb the Epson ink. The best value was the Office Depot paper. Personally, I'm more loyal to Ilford for reasons that should be obvious to anyone that does black and white work.
Most "programmers" seem to have a difficult time churning out normal, non-parallel code that runs, much less code that is bug free. Do you seriously think your average code monkey reusing snippets from the language-of-the-week cookbook is going to be able to wrap his head around something that actually requires a little thought?
If you actually care about your code and making proper releases, use Vesta. Transparent version control that even tracks changes between proper check-ins (real "sub" versions). Built-in build system that beats the pants off of Make. It even has dependency tracking to the point that you not only keep your code under version control, but the entire build system. That's right. You can actually go back and build release 21 with the tools used to build release 21. It's sort of like ClearCase but without all the headache. Did I mention it's open source?
The first time I used Vesta, it was a life-changing experience. It's nice to see something that isn't a rehash of the 1960s
First off, the fresher the better. Coffee is chock-full of volatile oils that give it that wonderful aroma and flavor. Unfortunately they breakdown over time, say, after a couple weeks. Extremely dark roasts kill most of those oils during roasting, leaving wonderful bean-shaped lumps of charcoal, although it does prolong the useful, but not as tasty, shelf life of the beans. I prefer to buy from roasters that ship same day.
I prefer using a manual lever-operated espresso machine. My main machine is a la Pavoni Europiccola. I bought mine used off eBay a while back. As they're fairly simple devices, they last forever. Replace the gaskets every few years, replace the heating element at longer intervals, and it's as good as new. My grinder is the cheap and trusty Rancilio Rocky. I use a nice Reg Barber tamper, and standard brown demitasse cups. I prefer drinking coffee the consistency of melted butter. It's easy to achieve with this combination.
I can't stress this enough. KEEP YOUR EQUIPMENT CLEAN. As mentioned earlier, coffee oils go rancid. When mixed with heat and water, that gunk clings to metal and plastic like nobody's business and will make even the best coffee taste worse than the worst coffee on a clean machine.
So that gets me thinking. We can get all these non-violent offenders out of jail, and have them join the Army to clear their records. They only pay the low-level grunts about $20k per year. Much cheaper than sitting around in prison being unproductive.
Actually they didn't do that last time. They split Ma' Bell into her individual operating units. Even the LATA thing replicated pre-divestiture business plans. The post-divestiture restrictions weren't tight enough. They worked for a few years until the correct palms were greased...
Bellsouth, err, AT&T is evil. They've made sure DSL is unprofitable for ISPs other than their own. Why in the hell it's not regulated like other services is beyond me. The sad part is that Bell even gets tax payer money to pay for their infrastructure. Any other entity that comes in and wants to offer alternatives, even going so far as to roll out their own fiber and copper, can't get those some benefits.
The telcos need to be trimmed down and split up. One company needs to be responsible for the actual outside plant and the network that carries that to the actual central offices. Exchange (voice) and data services could then be carried by any telco that interconnects to that network. No telco would be an ILEC. The outside plant/carrier company would be barred from offering any other goods or services other than getting voice or bits from point A and point B within a limited region.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Stop thinking in terms of nerdboy novelty and think in terms of how it affects your mom. I call this The Mom Factor. Mom doesn't care about programming (assuming she's not a programmer). Mom doesn't care that it's a 3.2GHz processor with DDR2 800 RAM instead of DDR2 600. 99% of computer users are like proto-Mom. They really would care more about the color of the box instead of what's inside. Why should they care what's inside?
The ultimate in usability for computers is a box that magically works when plugged in. Green button that says "GO" optional.
The AS/400 (renamed iSeries, and later i5) is much more complex than you may expect. The code generated by compilers is closer to java bytecode than x86 object code. It's then converted to native code later on. As long as the original bytecode-equivalent is still there, it's going to run on new implementations without "recompilation".
The zSeries was the 64-bitting of the S/390 line. That too is a bit more complicated transition, but I don't have enough knowledge to ramble on about it.
Intel didn't kill the UNIX workstation market. The refusal of the UNIX workstation and server vendors to make something affordable in the face of cheap sufficiently speedy cheap machines brought their timely end. Entry-level is not equal to the salary of the person running the machine! Sun eventually realized this and has been making affordable truly entry-level systems for several years now.
Architecture is meaningless for the end user
on
Why Do We Use x86 CPUs?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Architecture is meaningless for the end user and almost meaningless for the application developer. The preferences of OS designers and compiler writers are meaningless unless it can somehow Make Things Better for the end user.
Wait, so shipping everyone off to college to get an MBA as they don't want to be a skilled factory worker is a bad thing? Who would have thought. Not everyone can be an office worker.
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With all that DEC intellectual property they managed to grab, bring back the Alpha and make a 72-bit PDP-10.
The fact that software development is often outsourced, off-shored, and then off-shored again should make it quite clear that the work quality of the average developer is about the same as cheap commodity coffee beans.
First off, Stonebreaker has a vested commercial interest in the matter. Take everything he says with a grain of salt. Actually, take the whole damned salt lick. Secondly, whether data is stored by columns or rows is not a concern for the interface of an RDBMS. That is a physical implementation detail that any RDBMS could do. Don't forget Codd's 12 Rules. Pay close attention to Rule 8.
Subject says it all. Procmail v1.0 was released in 1991. That's a little earlier than 1997...
The push for "software as a service" is nothing more than a push for centralized timesharing. Except for a few situations (e.g. call centers), the advantages of a thick desktop far outweigh the negatives. The computer manufacturers were saddened when everyone switched from million dollar machines with extensive maintenance contracts that serviced a couple dozen users to desktop machines managed in-house.
The deal with Microsoft was pure genius. With Microsoft backing out of every part of the deal, they'll eventually be able to sue for breach of contract among other things.
It's called Dad's Leather Belt. I say beat the child.
At work, we don't use spamassassin. There are better, albeit more expensive tools that provide everything spamassassin does and more at a fraction of the cpu usage. You're doing about four times what my mail system handles on average. Our filtering system alone uses seven machines. Out of our entire load, less than 100,000 legitimate messages are received each day. The amount of legitimate mail is statistically insignificant. It's easier to say we receive 100% spam.
Rather than subjecting ourselves to the whims of a DNSBL operator, we run our own internal blacklist. Without it, the mail system would not work at all. Sure, we have just as many false positives as typical DNSBLs, but at least the blame rests squarely on my shoulders. Since I'm only a phone call or email away and actually care about paying customers, there's plenty of incentive to fix any problems. Additionally, the list isn't really a DNSBL. Rather, the blocks happen on a load balancer/firewall. Why waste resources with a DNS query?
DNSBLs are subject to the whims of some of the most unreliable and whiny schmucks on the face of the planet. NEVER under any circumstances use a single DNSBL as an absolute block. Use it to increment a score along the lines of Spam Assassin that will eventually hit a threshold, preferably with a minimal content-based component. Don't even think about using multiple hits on multiple lists as a gauge of spam-worthiness. The amount of inbreeding and sharing among lists is disgustingly high. Not even the Spamhaus aggregate is trustworthy these days.
Spammers can get around blacklists anyways. They're about as effective as locking a door made of tissue paper. The number of false positives is high. The amount of spam blocked is negligible. My suggestion is to abandon the idea altogether.
OLPC needs the cheapest components possible. As such, they need more transistors packed into a smaller area. Moore's Law makes cheaper equipment possible.
Nina's parents managed to get custody of the kids. They fled to Russia and are staying there. I've said it from the beginning that Nina Reiser fled to Russia. Has anyone bothered to look for her there? With the kids staying in Russia because "they're too afraid to go back to the US", that just seems to indicate even more that she's there.
First off, the majority of digital photos are never printed. As it turns out, Kodak and other film and paper manufacturers bet their future on printed digital photos around 1995, including at-home inkjet prints. For the past decade they have been hemorrhaging money due to losses on their digital-oriented businesses. The "faster, cheaper, doesn't have to be better" mentality of the digital age has brought photography to a point where crappy snapshots with a .7 megapixel camera integrated in a cell phone that barely works for voice calls can be considered "good enough."
You can have your new and shiny rubbish. I'll stick with my Bessa, Tri-X, and a bunch of smelly chemicals. While your mom may say your photo is beautiful, I have people throwing money at me for my photos and I have to continually turn down requests to shoot various events.
Now that I have my B&W bigotry out of the way, back on subject. A couple of years ago I decided to test the longevity of inkjet prints on various papers. After seeing prints disappear in a few months from certain combinations, I went to Office Depot with $500. I purchased the low end Epson at the time, a set of ink cartridges, and one pack of every single paper in stock. First off, Kodak inkjet papers and Epson inks don't work well together. I made two test prints on every single paper. One would be kept sandwiched between layers of acid-and-lignen-free card stock in archival conditions. The second would be placed on the wall of a utility room without any environmental controls, exposed to the horrid bleaching effects of fluorescent light. Two years in only two samples show degradation, and only one of those exhibited more fading in uv light. Neither of the degraded samples were intended for inkjet photo prints.
My conclusion: Inkjet prints, at least with Epson inks and proper inkjet paper, are damned good. As long as you avoid the cheap stuff, your prints will last for many years. Will they last as long as an archival-grade silver gelatin (black and white) print? I'll let you know in 150 years. Will they last longer than an RA2 print from the late 1970s or early 80s or even one of the early RA4 prints from the same era? They already have. Will they last as long as modern RA4 prints? It's entirely possible.
I will say this. Unless the prices for inkjet paper have dropped significantly over the past year (I haven't checked), digital RA4 prints are significantly cheaper. When I began this test, the cheapest paper was $0.254 per 4x6 print not including the ink! Add another $0.40 for the inks, and it's a losing situation, especially for the good papers that cost over $0.50 each sheet. With Adorama's digital print service charging $0.19 for a 4x6 print, it's rather silly to print at home. Even with shipping via priority mail, ten digital RA4 prints are cheaper than inkjet prints.
My favorite papers were from Ilford, Epson, Canon, Fujifilm, and Office Depot. It was impossible to choose a favorite between those five. Each had subtle unique qualities. Least favorite was Kodak, mainly because it didn't absorb the Epson ink. The best value was the Office Depot paper. Personally, I'm more loyal to Ilford for reasons that should be obvious to anyone that does black and white work.
Most "programmers" seem to have a difficult time churning out normal, non-parallel code that runs, much less code that is bug free. Do you seriously think your average code monkey reusing snippets from the language-of-the-week cookbook is going to be able to wrap his head around something that actually requires a little thought?
If you actually care about your code and making proper releases, use Vesta. Transparent version control that even tracks changes between proper check-ins (real "sub" versions). Built-in build system that beats the pants off of Make. It even has dependency tracking to the point that you not only keep your code under version control, but the entire build system. That's right. You can actually go back and build release 21 with the tools used to build release 21. It's sort of like ClearCase but without all the headache. Did I mention it's open source?
The first time I used Vesta, it was a life-changing experience. It's nice to see something that isn't a rehash of the 1960s
First off, the fresher the better. Coffee is chock-full of volatile oils that give it that wonderful aroma and flavor. Unfortunately they breakdown over time, say, after a couple weeks. Extremely dark roasts kill most of those oils during roasting, leaving wonderful bean-shaped lumps of charcoal, although it does prolong the useful, but not as tasty, shelf life of the beans. I prefer to buy from roasters that ship same day.
I prefer using a manual lever-operated espresso machine. My main machine is a la Pavoni Europiccola. I bought mine used off eBay a while back. As they're fairly simple devices, they last forever. Replace the gaskets every few years, replace the heating element at longer intervals, and it's as good as new. My grinder is the cheap and trusty Rancilio Rocky. I use a nice Reg Barber tamper, and standard brown demitasse cups. I prefer drinking coffee the consistency of melted butter. It's easy to achieve with this combination.
I can't stress this enough. KEEP YOUR EQUIPMENT CLEAN. As mentioned earlier, coffee oils go rancid. When mixed with heat and water, that gunk clings to metal and plastic like nobody's business and will make even the best coffee taste worse than the worst coffee on a clean machine.
So that gets me thinking. We can get all these non-violent offenders out of jail, and have them join the Army to clear their records. They only pay the low-level grunts about $20k per year. Much cheaper than sitting around in prison being unproductive.
Actually they didn't do that last time. They split Ma' Bell into her individual operating units. Even the LATA thing replicated pre-divestiture business plans. The post-divestiture restrictions weren't tight enough. They worked for a few years until the correct palms were greased...
Bellsouth, err, AT&T is evil. They've made sure DSL is unprofitable for ISPs other than their own. Why in the hell it's not regulated like other services is beyond me. The sad part is that Bell even gets tax payer money to pay for their infrastructure. Any other entity that comes in and wants to offer alternatives, even going so far as to roll out their own fiber and copper, can't get those some benefits.
The telcos need to be trimmed down and split up. One company needs to be responsible for the actual outside plant and the network that carries that to the actual central offices. Exchange (voice) and data services could then be carried by any telco that interconnects to that network. No telco would be an ILEC. The outside plant/carrier company would be barred from offering any other goods or services other than getting voice or bits from point A and point B within a limited region.
I don't have anything else to say.
Stop thinking in terms of nerdboy novelty and think in terms of how it affects your mom. I call this The Mom Factor. Mom doesn't care about programming (assuming she's not a programmer). Mom doesn't care that it's a 3.2GHz processor with DDR2 800 RAM instead of DDR2 600. 99% of computer users are like proto-Mom. They really would care more about the color of the box instead of what's inside. Why should they care what's inside?
The ultimate in usability for computers is a box that magically works when plugged in. Green button that says "GO" optional.
The AS/400 (renamed iSeries, and later i5) is much more complex than you may expect. The code generated by compilers is closer to java bytecode than x86 object code. It's then converted to native code later on. As long as the original bytecode-equivalent is still there, it's going to run on new implementations without "recompilation".
The zSeries was the 64-bitting of the S/390 line. That too is a bit more complicated transition, but I don't have enough knowledge to ramble on about it.
Intel didn't kill the UNIX workstation market. The refusal of the UNIX workstation and server vendors to make something affordable in the face of cheap sufficiently speedy cheap machines brought their timely end. Entry-level is not equal to the salary of the person running the machine! Sun eventually realized this and has been making affordable truly entry-level systems for several years now.
Architecture is meaningless for the end user and almost meaningless for the application developer. The preferences of OS designers and compiler writers are meaningless unless it can somehow Make Things Better for the end user.
Wait, so shipping everyone off to college to get an MBA as they don't want to be a skilled factory worker is a bad thing? Who would have thought. Not everyone can be an office worker.
Well, you sir, are obviously a terrorist. If you're not a terrorist, then you have nothing to hide. Why do you hate America?