"But while a trip into a black hole would mean certain death, a wormhole might spit you out into a parallel universe with its own stars and planets."
Err.. something's gotta be wrong here. First of all, let's face it: you'll be dead never mind if it's a portal or not. The fact that my energy will somehow exit on the other end offers little comfort, knowing that to be alive, I need to also have my structure preserved.
The idea about wormholes was introduced when experimenting (mathematically) what would the opposite of a black hole be, using just the known laws of physics and math.
The thing is, most objects in the universe have their exact opposite version (the most trivial example being matter and antimatter), so scientists thought the same might apply to black holes. Lots of new object classes were prophesied this way.
Thus, the concept of a while hole was born, which is not like a black hole at all: instead of only sucking in matter and energy (ignoring Hawking radiation for a moment), white holes can only emit matter and energy. Naturally, this posed the question, where is this matter coming from? And the obvious answer was: from a blackhole that's elsewhere. So a wormhole is in fact the whole mechanism where a black hole is tied to a white hole, and whatever falls in a black hole, comes out the white hole.
So I don't know what those scientists are talking about, but either is the article written very poorly, or the term "wormhole" is being used totally inappropriately here.
A "wormhole" can't look the same as "blackhole". It's like saying that a computer (the whole thing) may look to a keyboard (the input only). A wormhole isn't some sci-fi generic space warp where you put your ship to go to Degoba.
And you're definitely dead either way, but if you're brave, up on the next shuttle and go try it, in case a wormhole is passing by.
However, that doesn't matter - ALL software comes with a "disclaimer for every time time something screws up". That is, unless you can show me an example of commercial-grade software that does not have such disclaimers - because I can't think of any.
There's a difference between accepting a legal disclaimer, and accepting you can actually lose your data any day, and the company will barely care about it.
All software has disclaimers, but if major corporate software like for example IIS.NET or Oracle was randomly corrupting and losing data all the time, people would definitely not be ok with it, would they.
The EULA doesn't override common sense, or does it. It doesn't override any laws as well, as a matter of fact.
If you find this stuff interesting, check out a book called Parasite Rex. It has all the gory details of these and a bunch of other parasites. For example, there's a fluke that lives in a snail, but needs to enter a bird to complete it's life cycle. It actually pushes the snail's eyestalk out and waves around to get the attention of predators.
It's quite scary. Another examples I know of is a parasite that infects grasshopers. It makes the grasshoper seek water ponds/lakes and jump in it and drown. The parasite eggs need water.
Another parasite infecting rats, makes them seek cats (they naturally, of course, avoid cats) to get eaten. The cat spreads the parasite around with its excrements.
If you read a lot of this stuff you may become paranoid about what kind of human brain infecting parasite can evolve, that will significantly change your behavior, more or less as an episode taken out of the Twilight Zone.
Evolution thought usually comes up with the simplest and most efficient solution, and this solution so far seems making the host suicidal in an appropriate manner and nothing more.
This is an interesting problem for Microsoft. Yes, we know - they can burn through this money and not lose it, they can take billion dollar losses every year on the Xbox and not care, blah, blah, blah - but sooner or later, profits *do* matter to your bottom line.
You don't really know how it affects their bottom line until you see the whole picture. All of their side business - how much money it made them in.. Windows sales? It's not so obvious is it.
Integration and convenience provides a natural lock-in effect. Microsoft knows that the way the industry is going, its Windows application lock-in is weaking last few years, and it's a trend that'll continue in the future.
What they do, all the time, is create plenty and plenty of auxiliary businesses that act like pathways leading in one way or another, to Windows. They can lose billions from XBox 360 every year and not care, but NOT because they've got money to waste, but because it helps them support their Windows market share.
It's similar to what Google, is doing last few years too. In lots of their free offerings they don't serve ads, Gmail pop3 access, Google News, Google Desktop Search, Picassa etc. So they don't turn profit there, they lose, because there's development and deployment cost for all this. But one way or another, indirectly, it brings you back to searching in Google more often, or watching their ads, which helps their bottom line.
The database grew in size to more than 12 gigabytes, and the period restructuring required to ensure accuracy could see the system, which is now used by more than 150 staff, taken offline for two hours at a stretch.
"Right now, we're on a not very powerful Windows box," Couglin said.
Uhmm, maybe it's some other Google, right...?
I can't be reading a press release from Google, the one that has more or less a copy of the whole Internet on its servers, whining about the difficulties of managing a small database on a slow Windows machine.
Good company? Normally they pay the shareholders, not pocket the money. Anyway, it's a non-profit organaization you cynical bastard.;)
The company producing the actual laptop (same one that makes half the laptops in the world for other companies anyway), is very far from being non-profit, and this company is the one to sell the commercial version.
Drop Vista and install Linux and you can save a few bucks
Actually that'll increase the price quite a few bucks. If current experience amounts to anything, the bottom line is that Vista license costs are offset significantly by the "craplets" (demo programs and adware) preinstalled on today's average Windows machine.
On Linux you don't have a lot of commercial software, so no craplets. And due to the nature of Linux, and how friendly it is to your average Joe consumer, expect companies to factor in much higher support costs.
It seems to me that they could probably get the first batch paid for by us geeks who have been drooling over the OLPC hardware for a while.
Hell, I'd pony up ~$400-$500 for a unit. I wonder how many orders at that price point would be enough to get manufacturing cranking.
You're welcome to do so, early adopter!
I'll buy one of the $80 units as prices drop down with mass production, and if the units begins to show any promise of delivering what their promised.
Those machines aren't charity-ware, governments pay a modest sum (even for poor governments, $175 per machine isn't a lot, in fact poor governments are known to not spend their money quite efficiently, judging from the country I myself live in) and invest in their medium to long term future.
Whether OLPC turns a success or a failure, your willingness to donate would go in vain, the company producing the OLPC will surely pocket the difference for the commercial units itself, as any good company would.
Go back 30 years and substitute "the mainframe goes down". That's how it was before the "personal computer" was invented. Now we'll come full circle. The same system, one central computer and many users, and with it one central point of failure.
That's something I've been always saying, and I knew it many people should recognize the same "pendulum" development of "standalone" and "mainframe".
We're already seeing the signs of the pendulum going back fromt he second iteration of "mainframe" (being web services). And this is products like Apollo, or Firefox's 3 embeded SQLite etc.
In few years we'll have the browser replaced by a set of platforms that sustain many capabilities when offline, and doing this by having ability to cache and query complex assets, basically like a tiny db+web server running on your own PC.
When you get the chance to hook online: you synch your PC up, and when it's offline, you can still operate with that data.
This way the resposnibility of backing up falls back again to you and the online service "accidentally" erasing half your mail wouldn't be such a disaster.
Yes, exactly. That is NOT funny but insightful. Almost all of these services are in beta. What the hell are you doing using Gmail for your corporate services?
What is *google* doing pushing their beta services to corporate clients? Right now, the whole "beta forever" thing just has become a very lame disclaimer for every time something screws up.
With proprietary software, much of it in a legacy stage, keeping corporations using Windows PCs, it seems like Apple's business plan should be obvious:
1. Buy Parallels, and
2. Include it free with every new Mac sold through business channels.
Congratulations. Now there's nothing stopping corporations from making the switch.
Parallels alone can't run Windows software, so the plan would be more like:
1. Buy Parallels 2. Buy Microsoft 3. Include Parallels with Windows XP/Vista free on every Mac
Muahaha, with a plan this perfect, I'd totally ruin Microsoft!
The lack of compassion and respect for human life some people are showing here scares me far more than any lack of compassion for consumer rights the MPAA has shown.
When MPAA shows "lack of compassion", it ruins the lifes of countless number of people with fraudilent suits and by harming innovation in the digital media business.
When Slashdotters show "lack of compassion", they trash some clueless guy, who, just like you, me, and any human on Earth, will die at some point. Death is not a license to rewrite history for the sake of "compassion". The guy did a lot of harm.
Oh wait, thoughtcrime is just as bad as real crime, right.
I'd press it, just to silence you all, annoying naggers.
Further more, EU is on the way to make illegal copying into actual full-fledged theft, by law. With all extras. Let's see how will you be able to argue on a technicality then.
Don't you think that's the whole problem with today's society in general?
Turn on any of the 24 hour "news" channels and you can see what happens when they subscribe to your doctrine (i.e. "breaking news", "unsubstantiated reports", "we're first with the story!"). It no longer becomes news. How do you separate fact from hearsey?
If you think this is a "problem" you can go back to medieval ages, where doctors cured tooth ache with a red hot metal stick poked in your ear, and you could get death penalty for claiming Earth isn't flat.
The information reach of an average citizen today goes way over what top secret intelligence organizations had to live with just 20 years ago. With more information, comes more noise. But for a smart person, filtering out the noise by matching multiple sources and arriving at satisfactory results is far easier, compared to a smart person with a blank sheet of paper on front of him.
Any time I read about a lithium battery catching fire, I always wonder why the reporting sources don't educate the public about the inherent danger of a lithium fire, specifically the fact that water really isn't a good thing to be putting on it.
Can you please let us know what we put on it? Copper powder and so on, is kinda hard thing to wear in your pocket at all times, in case your laptop melts and catches fire.
"What is exciting about this tool or blog engine is that even a lay person can easily master its use and get his or her blog up and running in no time"
Right.. so I guess this is why it needed a whole book about it? You can't claim both now, can you.
WordPress is one of those things that are easy to copy/paste and bang, you have a blog. But you better not want to customize or extend it, since like most open source PHP projects, it has no signs that it had any architecture to begin with. Just random individials slapped pieces of PHP and HTML randomly in the codebase until it seemed to do what they want.
It's possible that the Wii's lack of processing power makes it unsuitable for these games.
As developers learn to take advantage of the 360 and the PS3(!), expect this to happen more and more often.
Lack of processing power, didn't stop high energy games like Need for Speed Underground to be ported (and successfully) to any platform under the Sun, including Nintendo DS and PSP.
Wii has enough power to transfer the feel and gameplay of any high-end PS3 game. All it takes is cutting few effects and reducing the number of polygons here and there.
It's more an issue of market: will Wii users by some brutal World War II shooter (for ex.) as well as it'll sell on PS3? Their marketing research says no, at least not welll enough so they break even on such a port. So they didn't do it.
I visit game news sites daily, and have never even heard of these two games.
Now you know the reason this article exists. On the surface it's an article about XBOX360 games losing exclusivity. However, on second read:
"IO Interactive's Kane & Lynch is a strange and mysterious action game that focuses on the relationship between two men on opposite sides of a deal gone wrong. The developer is best known for the Hitman series, so stealth and careful gunplay are likely to be the order of the day. As for Crossfire, information is somewhat scarce, but the Pivotal Games-developed title is a two-player co-op FPS that revolves around two government agents on a mission behind enemy lines."... "From the looks of these two games, this is a solid win for the PS3: two more quality games to add to the growing list of the PS3's star software."
What actually happened is you were introduced to two games you never heard of, and they were placed as "two quality games" to add to the "growing list of PS3's star software".
Given the amount of information we know is on Wikipedia, putting 2000 articles seems highly insufficient. Another thing is, informations dates really fast these days, and their efforts will quickly age.
Wouldn't it be much smarter if they wrote a little system to prepare those torrents automatically, say, every week, and include much larger fraction of the articles. Reviewing for vandalism is something that should happen for the online version of Wikipedia naturally by the existing editors (similar to OSS "stable" version vs "development" version).
In the 21-st Century, having enough information and always up to date is more important than accuracy. Reading an article where 20% of the info is wrong is better than no article at all. We still know it's Wikipedia and can use critical though process to check additional sources when we get to an Internet connection or the library.
Another flaw of this project, is that by handpicking the articles, it automatically means I can't download a localized version of that DVD.
And right now I really needed the localized version, to distribute to a set of computers without connection in a local school. Bummers.
Your Post "InnoDB is the slower, but safer/transaction-able way to use MySQL. In an earlier blog entry "let's get a real database", Google revealed they run AdWords/AdSense on MySQL, and they rolled up their own transactions as they went for speed with MySQL. Now we see they changed their mind."
You're right, the last one "MySQL" should've been "MyISAM".
Ah, but your reasoning does only work in a perfect free market where there are many manufacturers of a good and that the entry of market is easy. (The latter is clearly not the case in chip manufacturing) So, when one company goes down, another can pick up. New companies emerge all the time. This is economy 101.
Life's more complex than economy 101. If AMD goes down, IBM would go down too, as both companies cooperate tightly to produce both of their chips (and while IBM doesn't make x86 chips, it makes the quite popular Cell chips, the chips in XBox360, and lots of other embeded platforms).
Second, x86 is here to stay, so being the second on the market with all the expertize, staff and assets of AMD is still a very lucrative thing to invest in / buy, even if AMD has a terrible year or two and goes bankrupt, because it'll be much cheaper for a new competition to pick where AMD left, than start on its own.
If AMD completely fails to get out of tihs situation, I expect IBM will either buy/merge with it, because of its own interests (there's also reportedly interest in IBM to produce x86 chips). Either way we're stick with both Intel and AMD.
The best we could do for them is encourage them to do their best, and we do this by doing the best for us: buying the better chips. Not buying the worse chips.
Slashdot Mirror
"But while a trip into a black hole would mean certain death, a wormhole might spit you out into a parallel universe with its own stars and planets."
Err.. something's gotta be wrong here. First of all, let's face it: you'll be dead never mind if it's a portal or not. The fact that my energy will somehow exit on the other end offers little comfort, knowing that to be alive, I need to also have my structure preserved.
The idea about wormholes was introduced when experimenting (mathematically) what would the opposite of a black hole be, using just the known laws of physics and math.
The thing is, most objects in the universe have their exact opposite version (the most trivial example being matter and antimatter), so scientists thought the same might apply to black holes. Lots of new object classes were prophesied this way.
Thus, the concept of a while hole was born, which is not like a black hole at all: instead of only sucking in matter and energy (ignoring Hawking radiation for a moment), white holes can only emit matter and energy. Naturally, this posed the question, where is this matter coming from? And the obvious answer was: from a blackhole that's elsewhere. So a wormhole is in fact the whole mechanism where a black hole is tied to a white hole, and whatever falls in a black hole, comes out the white hole.
So I don't know what those scientists are talking about, but either is the article written very poorly, or the term "wormhole" is being used totally inappropriately here.
A "wormhole" can't look the same as "blackhole". It's like saying that a computer (the whole thing) may look to a keyboard (the input only). A wormhole isn't some sci-fi generic space warp where you put your ship to go to Degoba.
And you're definitely dead either way, but if you're brave, up on the next shuttle and go try it, in case a wormhole is passing by.
However, that doesn't matter - ALL software comes with a "disclaimer for every time time something screws up". That is, unless you can show me an example of commercial-grade software that does not have such disclaimers - because I can't think of any.
There's a difference between accepting a legal disclaimer, and accepting you can actually lose your data any day, and the company will barely care about it.
All software has disclaimers, but if major corporate software like for example IIS.NET or Oracle was randomly corrupting and losing data all the time, people would definitely not be ok with it, would they.
The EULA doesn't override common sense, or does it. It doesn't override any laws as well, as a matter of fact.
If you find this stuff interesting, check out a book called Parasite Rex. It has all the gory details of these and a bunch of other parasites. For example, there's a fluke that lives in a snail, but needs to enter a bird to complete it's life cycle. It actually pushes the snail's eyestalk out and waves around to get the attention of predators.
It's quite scary. Another examples I know of is a parasite that infects grasshopers. It makes the grasshoper seek water ponds/lakes and jump in it and drown. The parasite eggs need water.
Another parasite infecting rats, makes them seek cats (they naturally, of course, avoid cats) to get eaten. The cat spreads the parasite around with its excrements.
If you read a lot of this stuff you may become paranoid about what kind of human brain infecting parasite can evolve, that will significantly change your behavior, more or less as an episode taken out of the Twilight Zone.
Evolution thought usually comes up with the simplest and most efficient solution, and this solution so far seems making the host suicidal in an appropriate manner and nothing more.
This is an interesting problem for Microsoft. Yes, we know - they can burn through this money and not lose it, they can take billion dollar losses every year on the Xbox and not care, blah, blah, blah - but sooner or later, profits *do* matter to your bottom line.
You don't really know how it affects their bottom line until you see the whole picture. All of their side business - how much money it made them in.. Windows sales? It's not so obvious is it.
Integration and convenience provides a natural lock-in effect. Microsoft knows that the way the industry is going, its Windows application lock-in is weaking last few years, and it's a trend that'll continue in the future.
What they do, all the time, is create plenty and plenty of auxiliary businesses that act like pathways leading in one way or another, to Windows. They can lose billions from XBox 360 every year and not care, but NOT because they've got money to waste, but because it helps them support their Windows market share.
It's similar to what Google, is doing last few years too. In lots of their free offerings they don't serve ads, Gmail pop3 access, Google News, Google Desktop Search, Picassa etc. So they don't turn profit there, they lose, because there's development and deployment cost for all this. But one way or another, indirectly, it brings you back to searching in Google more often, or watching their ads, which helps their bottom line.
Uhmm, maybe it's some other Google, right...?
I can't be reading a press release from Google, the one that has more or less a copy of the whole Internet on its servers, whining about the difficulties of managing a small database on a slow Windows machine.
I never understood the whole, "LINUX ONLY!" developers.
What's there to understand. Lots of idealism, poor job, lots of time to post on Slashdot.
You just said what I thought about it better than I ever could. Thanks!
Yea, he kinda said using Windows will make you rich. Of course, I think he did more than this, but Windows users at least have something to hope for.
Good company? Normally they pay the shareholders, not pocket the money. Anyway, it's a non-profit organaization you cynical bastard. ;)
The company producing the actual laptop (same one that makes half the laptops in the world for other companies anyway), is very far from being non-profit, and this company is the one to sell the commercial version.
Drop Vista and install Linux and you can save a few bucks
Actually that'll increase the price quite a few bucks. If current experience amounts to anything, the bottom line is that Vista license costs are offset significantly by the "craplets" (demo programs and adware) preinstalled on today's average Windows machine.
On Linux you don't have a lot of commercial software, so no craplets. And due to the nature of Linux, and how friendly it is to your average Joe consumer, expect companies to factor in much higher support costs.
It seems to me that they could probably get the first batch paid for by us geeks who have been drooling over the OLPC hardware for a while.
Hell, I'd pony up ~$400-$500 for a unit. I wonder how many orders at that price point would be enough to get manufacturing cranking.
You're welcome to do so, early adopter!
I'll buy one of the $80 units as prices drop down with mass production, and if the units begins to show any promise of delivering what their promised.
Those machines aren't charity-ware, governments pay a modest sum (even for poor governments, $175 per machine isn't a lot, in fact poor governments are known to not spend their money quite efficiently, judging from the country I myself live in) and invest in their medium to long term future.
Whether OLPC turns a success or a failure, your willingness to donate would go in vain, the company producing the OLPC will surely pocket the difference for the commercial units itself, as any good company would.
wasn't the first sign of skynet a loss of performance and outages in large distributed computing networks?
I wonder how much more of this can we take before forgetting Terminator was really a movie and start a religion based upon it.
I bet the Bible started this way.
Go back 30 years and substitute "the mainframe goes down". That's how it was before the "personal computer" was invented. Now we'll come full circle. The same system, one central computer and many users, and with it one central point of failure.
That's something I've been always saying, and I knew it many people should recognize the same "pendulum" development of "standalone" and "mainframe".
We're already seeing the signs of the pendulum going back fromt he second iteration of "mainframe" (being web services). And this is products like Apollo, or Firefox's 3 embeded SQLite etc.
In few years we'll have the browser replaced by a set of platforms that sustain many capabilities when offline, and doing this by having ability to cache and query complex assets, basically like a tiny db+web server running on your own PC.
When you get the chance to hook online: you synch your PC up, and when it's offline, you can still operate with that data.
This way the resposnibility of backing up falls back again to you and the online service "accidentally" erasing half your mail wouldn't be such a disaster.
Yes, exactly. That is NOT funny but insightful. Almost all of these services are in beta. What the hell are you doing using Gmail for your corporate services?
What is *google* doing pushing their beta services to corporate clients? Right now, the whole "beta forever" thing just has become a very lame disclaimer for every time something screws up.
Parallels alone can't run Windows software, so the plan would be more like:
1. Buy Parallels
2. Buy Microsoft
3. Include Parallels with Windows XP/Vista free on every Mac
Muahaha, with a plan this perfect, I'd totally ruin Microsoft!
The lack of compassion and respect for human life some people are showing here scares me far more than any lack of compassion for consumer rights the MPAA has shown.
When MPAA shows "lack of compassion", it ruins the lifes of countless number of people with fraudilent suits and by harming innovation in the digital media business.
When Slashdotters show "lack of compassion", they trash some clueless guy, who, just like you, me, and any human on Earth, will die at some point. Death is not a license to rewrite history for the sake of "compassion". The guy did a lot of harm.
Oh wait, thoughtcrime is just as bad as real crime, right.
Making a copy of something is not "stealing".
If I had a big red button in front of me saying:
"CLICK TO MAKE INFRINGEMENT THEFT"
I'd press it, just to silence you all, annoying naggers.
Further more, EU is on the way to make illegal copying into actual full-fledged theft, by law. With all extras. Let's see how will you be able to argue on a technicality then.
If the MPAA sold fruit .. You wouldn't be allowed to make a banana split, and you'd only be able to eat a slice banana with Kelloggs brand cereals.
If MPAA sold fruit, I'd feed a banana in my DVD drive, and get out 100 bananas for free. You can clearly see the problem MPAA has to meet.
Not defending their actions, but come on.
Don't you think that's the whole problem with today's society in general?
Turn on any of the 24 hour "news" channels and you can see what happens when they subscribe to your doctrine (i.e. "breaking news", "unsubstantiated reports", "we're first with the story!"). It no longer becomes news. How do you separate fact from hearsey?
If you think this is a "problem" you can go back to medieval ages, where doctors cured tooth ache with a red hot metal stick poked in your ear, and you could get death penalty for claiming Earth isn't flat.
The information reach of an average citizen today goes way over what top secret intelligence organizations had to live with just 20 years ago. With more information, comes more noise. But for a smart person, filtering out the noise by matching multiple sources and arriving at satisfactory results is far easier, compared to a smart person with a blank sheet of paper on front of him.
Any time I read about a lithium battery catching fire, I always wonder why the reporting sources don't educate the public about the inherent danger of a lithium fire, specifically the fact that water really isn't a good thing to be putting on it.
Can you please let us know what we put on it? Copper powder and so on, is kinda hard thing to wear in your pocket at all times, in case your laptop melts and catches fire.
"What is exciting about this tool or blog engine is that even a lay person can easily master its use and get his or her blog up and running in no time"
Right.. so I guess this is why it needed a whole book about it? You can't claim both now, can you.
WordPress is one of those things that are easy to copy/paste and bang, you have a blog. But you better not want to customize or extend it, since like most open source PHP projects, it has no signs that it had any architecture to begin with. Just random individials slapped pieces of PHP and HTML randomly in the codebase until it seemed to do what they want.
It's possible that the Wii's lack of processing power makes it unsuitable for these games.
As developers learn to take advantage of the 360 and the PS3(!), expect this to happen more and more often.
Lack of processing power, didn't stop high energy games like Need for Speed Underground to be ported (and successfully) to any platform under the Sun, including Nintendo DS and PSP.
Wii has enough power to transfer the feel and gameplay of any high-end PS3 game. All it takes is cutting few effects and reducing the number of polygons here and there.
It's more an issue of market: will Wii users by some brutal World War II shooter (for ex.) as well as it'll sell on PS3? Their marketing research says no, at least not welll enough so they break even on such a port. So they didn't do it.
I visit game news sites daily, and have never even heard of these two games.
... "From the looks of these two games, this is a solid win for the PS3: two more quality games to add to the growing list of the PS3's star software."
Now you know the reason this article exists. On the surface it's an article about XBOX360 games losing exclusivity. However, on second read:
"IO Interactive's Kane & Lynch is a strange and mysterious action game that focuses on the relationship between two men on opposite sides of a deal gone wrong. The developer is best known for the Hitman series, so stealth and careful gunplay are likely to be the order of the day. As for Crossfire, information is somewhat scarce, but the Pivotal Games-developed title is a two-player co-op FPS that revolves around two government agents on a mission behind enemy lines."
What actually happened is you were introduced to two games you never heard of, and they were placed as "two quality games" to add to the "growing list of PS3's star software".
Ninja advertisement at its best.
Given the amount of information we know is on Wikipedia, putting 2000 articles seems highly insufficient. Another thing is, informations dates really fast these days, and their efforts will quickly age.
Wouldn't it be much smarter if they wrote a little system to prepare those torrents automatically, say, every week, and include much larger fraction of the articles. Reviewing for vandalism is something that should happen for the online version of Wikipedia naturally by the existing editors (similar to OSS "stable" version vs "development" version).
In the 21-st Century, having enough information and always up to date is more important than accuracy. Reading an article where 20% of the info is wrong is better than no article at all. We still know it's Wikipedia and can use critical though process to check additional sources when we get to an Internet connection or the library.
Another flaw of this project, is that by handpicking the articles, it automatically means I can't download a localized version of that DVD.
And right now I really needed the localized version, to distribute to a set of computers without connection in a local school. Bummers.
Only way forward is automatization.
Your Post
"InnoDB is the slower, but safer/transaction-able way to use MySQL. In an earlier blog entry "let's get a real database", Google revealed they run AdWords/AdSense on MySQL, and they rolled up their own transactions as they went for speed with MySQL. Now we see they changed their mind."
You're right, the last one "MySQL" should've been "MyISAM".
Isolation.. I have no bloody idea on how to simulate.
People achieve (a form of) this by using table locks (which MyISAM supports). Of course, you can't really roll it back automatically.
Ah, but your reasoning does only work in a perfect free market where there are many manufacturers of a good and that the entry of market is easy. (The latter is clearly not the case in chip manufacturing) So, when one company goes down, another can pick up. New companies emerge all the time. This is economy 101.
Life's more complex than economy 101. If AMD goes down, IBM would go down too, as both companies cooperate tightly to produce both of their chips (and while IBM doesn't make x86 chips, it makes the quite popular Cell chips, the chips in XBox360, and lots of other embeded platforms).
Second, x86 is here to stay, so being the second on the market with all the expertize, staff and assets of AMD is still a very lucrative thing to invest in / buy, even if AMD has a terrible year or two and goes bankrupt, because it'll be much cheaper for a new competition to pick where AMD left, than start on its own.
If AMD completely fails to get out of tihs situation, I expect IBM will either buy/merge with it, because of its own interests (there's also reportedly interest in IBM to produce x86 chips). Either way we're stick with both Intel and AMD.
The best we could do for them is encourage them to do their best, and we do this by doing the best for us: buying the better chips. Not buying the worse chips.