Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.
This is what got them into trouble, besides, "Aiding and Abetting", (spare me the jurisdictional nonsense please) since even companies that don't seriously object to their software ending up on torrent sites start looking at the bottom line and looking at all the money someone else is making from their product and they are not getting a cut of it.
Greed on all of the parties sides is the problem. If the torrent sites, pointers, indices's, maps, sources, call them what you will because the notion of a site pointing to the place to get illegal copies of software and the actual place the binary resides is a very very blurry legal line indeed, would start cutting checks to the people who actively sell their software which cost them real money to produce, this then might be something that simply goes on with no one complaining.
US Air Force - Uhmm Hey Sony, we will by 2,200 of these baby's from you cause we think they can really do the thing we want. If they really really does the thing we want we will by 220,000 of them next cycle.
There is nothing wrong with Python that a block closure character wouldn't cure; but sadly the fucking IDIOTS who decided that a fucking INDENT aka a TAB is proper for a block closure more then deserve the scorn that has been heaped upon them and if I ran the Epiphany project I would have done the same but I am sure they did what they did for a myriad of other reasons.
When the language gets a block closure character I will actually look it it's utility, until then it goes on the scrap pile.
If you know anything about electronic components then you know there is a great deal of difference in the quality of components. There are 1% resisters and there are 10% resisters, the same thing with capacitors, coils, and yes DACS, Laser Diodes etc. etc.
If a device is built using the cheapest components built to usable, yet fairly gross tolerances then the final assembly will be of inferior quality to the one built with components that are built to tighter tolerances and will perform in a superior manner.
Put another way, the cheaply made CD player might introduce timing errors so your digital output ( a square wave in which the length of the ON portion of the wave is either slightly long or slightly short, and we all know that milliseconds count in digital right? ) which in turn will introduce distortion to the signal that is ultimately converted to an analog signal.
Not so much. A lot of what makes a CD player really perform well is the laser diode, focusing mechanism and lenses. I suspect though cannot prove that the stuff from Creek Audio contains better then average diodes, way better then average lenses and a similarly superior electromechanical focusing mechanism.
[X] My wristwatch battery never goes dead because it does not have one It is a self winding watch as long as I can move, it will wind and tell accurate time.
You're stating the desired effect (what hifi equipment manufacturer Quad used to call the 'straight wire with gain'). However, this goal is not attainable. Every electrical or mechanical construct will introduce some distortion. Cheap or badly made equipment produces more distortion. Your recommendation is sound though.;-)
Indeed your statement is true; however, it is a goal that is worth pushing as hard as one can to get as close as possible. The best of the mass produced stuff these days still seems to be McIntosh.
The difference is is construction and circuit quality. I happened to get my hands on one their units quite by accident, and a very happy one at that. My kids school was having a "Get rid of you electronic junk" drive ( the state of California will pay the disposal company 20 cents a pound and the company splits if 50-50 with the school ) and someone from my wifes work sent along a CD player in a box saying it does not work.
So into the garage it went, to of course be promptly forgotten. FF about 4 months and I am doing a garage clean-out one Saturday and I find the thing. I figure what the heck and plug it in. The thing seems to work just fine, and I mean WAY fine. So I start popping different CD's in it. I have one that had been rattling around in the car for quite some time and it is just scratched all to hell, wont play in the car stereo anymore and the machine plays if perfectly and I mean it does not miss a beat and the sound quality is better then any CD player I have used.
First of all people who purchase Monster Cables, Gold Plated Cables, and all that crap are utterly clueless. The gold is plated and only a couple or angstroms thick, in other words it is worthless.
A thing or two about cables...
For carrying the output of the main amplifier to the speakers, ANY cable that can handle the power load without overheating and starting your house on fire will work fine. We are talking high voltage and current levels.
Signal cables... We are talking millivolts here. They need to be well shielded and well built that is about it and the mechanical connection needs to fit securely.
In ANY audio system there are two critical components: A. The device that produces the music from the source ( tape, phonograph, tuner, cd player ). and B. the device that takes the amplified electronic signal and turns it back into sound waves and those are the speakers, everything else is BS when it comes to all those flowery terms that audiophiles use.
The Pre-Amplifier ( often sold as a seperate component). If it produces and undistorted wave form from it's minimum to it's maximum power output ( measured in millivolts ) with a flat frequency response in it's specified spectrum and performs the correct equalization according to the RIAA specifications ( especially critical for vinyl ) then it will introduce nothing to alter the sound.
The Amplifier. If it produces and undistorted wave form from it's minimum to it's maximum power ( measured in watts ) output with a flat frequency response in it's specified spectrum rating then it will introduce nothing to alter the sound.
The Speakers. If the speakers produce the same wave form, without distortio then it will not alter the sound.
The biggest problem with almost EVERY music system being built today is the fact that the power supply is inadequate and that the components are quite often under rated for the power that the amplifier is specified to produce. If an amplifier is designed to put out 100 watts of audio power then it's power supply should be able to provide at least 1000 watts to the final amplification stage to handle transients, especially in the lower frequency ranges and the components of the amplifier should be able to handle ALL of that power, and the amplifier will never clip and distort your signal.
So the moral of the story is.... Spend the biggest portion of your audio budget on 1. The Speakers and 2. The sound source component, if you listen to vinyl, spend it on the best turntable and cartridge you can afford, if you are a CD person I suggest Creek Audio ( over a thousand bucks for a SINGLE cd player, but they simply are the best ). As far as I can tell, no company is manufacturing tape recorders other then Nagra which are mono and are used pretty much exclusively in the film industry. You can still find good reel-to-reel and some professional cassette equipment on ebay and there are companies still manufacturing tape for at least reel-to-reel.
I stand corrected, it was Muliplan, Excel 1.0 was for the Mac.
But the rest of my claim is true, Quattro Pro was a killer Spreadsheet and if it hadn't been for Lotus's Lawsuit ( which went all the way to the supreme court and Lotus finally lost there, it was a tie vote because one Justice recused themself and the ruling or the lower court stood ) QPro would more then likely have been the default spreadsheet today as it was FAR superior to anything out there. Now the very FIRST spreadsheet to have tabbed sheets as I discovered was BoeingCalc, but if you actually tried to use their tabs the thing was SO slow as to be unusable.
Apple x86 machines use Intel processors and Intel chip sets but they are custom MB's manufactured BY apple and therefor can have many things in them that are in fact proprietary, they might in fact have a modified custom microcode on the chips that they pay Intel to install. Just as the early Macintosh had about half or so of the OS burned into ROMS on the MB that that their OS would not even boot without.
Just as an the program for an ECU for a Ford wont work in the ECU for a Chevy OSX is not designed for just ANY x86 hardware. And like ODBII allows you to talk to the software in the ECU for a FORD just the same as an ECU for a Chevy, TCP/IP allows you to talk to OSX just like it lets you talk to WIndows.
You can purchase a copy of OSX at an apple store, you can then tinker with it all you want. You can install it on whatever hardware you own. You can modify and recompile any part of OSX for any purpose that suits you, but you cannot sell the code you modified. What you can do is publish the instructions on how to make the changes to suit a particular purpose eg: "Change line 31 of file X to read Y and recompile it." and in doing so not violate Apples copyright.
I think if Psystar had published a program, or set of programs to allow the end user to cause the appropriate modifications to OSX and re-build it they might have had a leg to stand on but IANAL.
Ok I have mod points, and since there is no mod "You are full of it" I will have to reply, although I am sure that i will be hit for it...
FoxPro (bought by MS), was way better than the dBase (bought by Borland). And, Access was a better desktop database than anything else out there.
FoxPro was a dBase clone and the only thing it did better was a compiler, and a pretty slow one at that. Early versions of Access were a piece of crap. If DataEase had not bet the farm on OS/2 then they would have smoked Access so badly that MS would have been forced to buy the company, wait for it.... Oh yes they did try and buy the company once, but Arun Gupta ( rip ) did not sell because their product was better then dBase, FoxPro and Pradox combined.
Excel was better than Quattro, and I'm sorry, Word was better than Word Perfect for Windows, by far. My favorite Word Process was Samna AmiPro, which, probably would have ruled them all had Lotus not bought them and screwed it up.
Oh please. Quattro Pro was eating everyones lunch! It was faster the either Lotus or Excel, had a native GUI mode before their was a GUI to be had ( Lotus had a very bad add-in to get it into graphics mode and Excel had none ), had far more standard financial and statistical functions and had spreadsheet tabs first as well not to mention the easiest to create 3D graphs out there. Borland spent just about all the money they had at the time defending themselves against Lotus in the "look and feel" lawsuit wars ( if Jim Manzi walked up to me today I would put the little bitch on the ground ) that they ultimately won, but were left drastically weakened from not to mention that their development efforts for Quattro were frozen for about two years. As to your assertion for Word -v- Word Perfect that was the very beginning of the "Teddy Bear" wars, small wonder that Word came out on top.
Microsoft got to where it is today mostly by illegal business practices and FUD, if it had truly been a level playing field it would be a very very different software landscape out there. If Microsoft could not get a company that was building better and in many many cases FAR better software to allow themselves to be purchased then they would simply check in to a near by Hotel suite and start offering money that could not be ignored to the target companies best and brightest and destroying the company that way. This is not urban legend this is established fact and oh by the way if you doubt it, just ask Borland since The Traitor Anders now works their as well.
Well, I do, and sheesh ease up dude. Line 1 was obviously a joke. And yes, MS-SQL has come a long way way, even to the point of being able to be almost on par with Oracle but always misses the mark somehow and being able to be massively scaled up is one of those marks.
If Microsoft really wants to take their SQL Server to the next level they would do well to port it to a *nix flavor so they could run it on a Mainframe or even something like Google's distributed context, but, we all know they wont.
Lack of imagination is another problem when people look at the dry subject of data storage and retrieval. Yes at some point the math has to work, but in the meantime looking outside the box and taking an RDBMS in different and new directions within the engine itself can give those mountains of scale that are the holy grail these days.
While I was writing that paragraph I thought it might be interesting to take a structure such as an n-node b-tree and then make the leaves table references and the nodes pointers to those tables and overlay that structural idea into a single table. That single table could then be queried to gain access to a very interesting amount of data. Now if the leaves are not required to be unique, then the entry that would normal be a record pointer could then be an instance pointer, or a server pointer, cluster pointer and simply take the original query and have the result be returned from just about anywhere.
Ehh someone undoubtedly thought of that already...
Now as a kid who had a fairly vast comic book collection I would read them a lot, and well looked at the drawings as well ( Mrs. Fantastic was pretty dang hot ) and I doubt I am any worse for the exposure.
Fast Forward 40 years and now I have an 8 year old. He just finished reading Tom Sawyer for school and was completely absorbed by it and it had very few simple line drawing illustrations. He is trending toward books with few illustrations and I am really ok with that.
I am not sure if that is a product of both me and my wife reading to him almost every night since he was old enough to do something more then drool and stair at us or not but I like to think it is. I am also not sure if it is a product of very very little video based entertainment. He gets no TV during the week and although he can have pretty much as much as he can stomach on the weekends he does end up doing more reading and Lego stuff.
Please keep in mind that your mileage may be extremely different and my way is by no means the only or best way, it is simply the way I chose.
Full Disclosure - I install and maintain GroupWise Systems and could be considered a fanboi, but I also like GMail and use it. for personal accounts.
That said, if you really compare the two Gmail falls WAY short of GroupWise in the follwing areas:
Folders - Sorry the Gmail tag system does not cut it since everything is STILL in your main mailbox.
Views - You get ONE view of your stuff whereas with GroupWise you can setup any type of view you would care to have.
Hit the Road Capability - With Groupwise, plug your laptop into the net, slurp down any portion of your mail,calender,to-do lists, appointments,notes etc. etc. then unplug and continue to write new mail, setup appointments, do anything you can do. Next time you plug in to the net, it just syncs and all your pending mail is sent, appointments, etc. etc.
GroupWise is MAPI complient, gmail is not.
Complete office and or process automation either through the local API or the server API via SOAP.
Built in Document libraries with full version control, check in, check out et. all.
The ability to pull a message BACK ( it it is unread and not outside of your local domain, if it is unread the recipients never even know it was ever there. ).
The server agents run on, NetWare, Windows and Linux servers
Has a built-in NNP client.
Can interface via any other mail client via IMAP, POP, etc.
The e-mail database is UNCRACKABLE. Even if someone swiped your entire mail database, it is first encrypted, then compressed, good luck cracking that.
It lives on YOUR servers, either in your office or COLO'd
The list goes on and on. Some of the things the article does NOT say is that it will cost the city of LA MORE to run the Google mail System by about a cool million a year. There are many security issues and questions. The LA City councel is very skeptical of this whole thing. I personally doubt that the conversion will be successful and the city of LA is going to spend a boat load of tax payer money for something that is not going to work.
With the comm system you can have it just on the headphones, just on the speaker or both.
I have missed ATC calls before do to tons of chatter, but after a minute or two they call again, especially if you are getting close to your decent point.
My PWAG ( pilots wild ass guess ) is that they were simply engrossed in whatever they were doing and had the speakers either turned WAY down or off and had the headsets dangling around their necks and hence didn't hear the calls.
Some other guesses besides sleeping ( not unheard of since it is REALLY boring at 36K on auto pilot cruise and there is really NOTHING for the pilots to do ) is that they were doing each other, a flight attendant or whatever.
The action of the FAA to revoke their certificates ( it is not a license, it is a certificate ) is a bit heavy handed since they now have to find a new career. They have 10 days from notification in which to file an appeal, but I cannot for the life of me ponder what the appeal would be based on. Now as far as I can tell, they did not violate a specific rule of Title 14, Part 91, of the Code of Federal Regulations so that may be the basis for an appeal since the administrator has to base the revocation on existing regulations. I for one would have opted for a restriction on their certificates removing their ATP ( Airline Transport Pilot ) endorsement so they could at least fly cargo, just not carry passengers.
Never the less, losing situational awareness for at least 30 minutes ( they were about 15 minutes past the airport )is pretty much inexcusable for so many reasons that need not be reiterated by me since I think you can come up with plenty on your own.
The auto pilot simply maintained the last course, speed and altitude it was ordered to fly at, hence it was not off course.
There is a silent (but my guess is not for much longer) alert on the primary flight display telling the pilot that the autopilot no longer has a waypoint in which to continue on to so the autopilot does what it is programmed to do, keep flying the airplane straight and level.
Now depending on how the AP is setup for a particular flight is will use a pre-loaded approach to an airport and begin the approach based on airspeed, altitude and winds to ensure that the aircraft descends within acceptable parameters.
Every commercial airport has published departure and approach routes, the enroute portion of the flight can be most anything. If you are curious about the various approaches and departures this link has a listing of all IAP's (Instrument Approach Procedures) and STARS (Standard Terminal ARivalS) for KSFO (San Francisco International) and most any other commercial airport.
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Quoted from the TorrentFreak website..
Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.
This is what got them into trouble, besides, "Aiding and Abetting", (spare me the jurisdictional nonsense please) since even companies that don't seriously object to their software ending up on torrent sites start looking at the bottom line and looking at all the money someone else is making from their product and they are not getting a cut of it.
Greed on all of the parties sides is the problem. If the torrent sites, pointers, indices's, maps, sources, call them what you will because the notion of a site pointing to the place to get illegal copies of software and the actual place the binary resides is a very very blurry legal line indeed, would start cutting checks to the people who actively sell their software which cost them real money to produce, this then might be something that simply goes on with no one complaining.
A project with no documentation and the comments stripped out, Qel Surpise!
A shopping cart should be simple and small. It should be unobtrusive.
What it should do is give you the calls to display, review, modify, fill your shopping cart, check out and take a payment.
Nothing more, nothing less.
At that point you can integrate it into whatever web site your building using your styling and markup.
This ain't brain surgery, it is a database. and the most complex thing should be a bit of javascript to update the totals.
US Air Force - Uhmm Hey Sony, we will by 2,200 of these baby's from you cause we think they can really do the thing we want. If they really really does the thing we want we will by 220,000 of them next cycle.
Sony - Ohhh thank you very much!
US Air Force - Now about that pesky EULA?
Sony - What is this Eee You La you speak of?
US Air Force - Thank you very much
There is nothing wrong with Python that a block closure character wouldn't cure; but sadly the fucking IDIOTS who decided that a fucking INDENT aka a TAB is proper for a block closure more then deserve the scorn that has been heaped upon them and if I ran the Epiphany project I would have done the same but I am sure they did what they did for a myriad of other reasons.
When the language gets a block closure character I will actually look it it's utility, until then it goes on the scrap pile.
If you know anything about electronic components then you know there is a great deal of difference in the quality of components. There are 1% resisters and there are 10% resisters, the same thing with capacitors, coils, and yes DACS, Laser Diodes etc. etc.
If a device is built using the cheapest components built to usable, yet fairly gross tolerances then the final assembly will be of inferior quality to the one built with components that are built to tighter tolerances and will perform in a superior manner.
Put another way, the cheaply made CD player might introduce timing errors so your digital output ( a square wave in which the length of the ON portion of the wave is either slightly long or slightly short, and we all know that milliseconds count in digital right? ) which in turn will introduce distortion to the signal that is ultimately converted to an analog signal.
Not so much. A lot of what makes a CD player really perform well is the laser diode, focusing mechanism and lenses. I suspect though cannot prove that the stuff from Creek Audio contains better then average diodes, way better then average lenses and a similarly superior electromechanical focusing mechanism.
[X] My wristwatch battery never goes dead because it does not have one It is a self winding watch as long as I can move, it will wind and tell accurate time.
You're stating the desired effect (what hifi equipment manufacturer Quad used to call the 'straight wire with gain'). However, this goal is not attainable. Every electrical or mechanical construct will introduce some distortion. Cheap or badly made equipment produces more distortion. Your recommendation is sound though. ;-)
Indeed your statement is true; however, it is a goal that is worth pushing as hard as one can to get as close as possible. The best of the mass produced stuff these days still seems to be McIntosh.
The difference is is construction and circuit quality. I happened to get my hands on one their units quite by accident, and a very happy one at that. My kids school was having a "Get rid of you electronic junk" drive ( the state of California will pay the disposal company 20 cents a pound and the company splits if 50-50 with the school ) and someone from my wifes work sent along a CD player in a box saying it does not work.
So into the garage it went, to of course be promptly forgotten. FF about 4 months and I am doing a garage clean-out one Saturday and I find the thing. I figure what the heck and plug it in. The thing seems to work just fine, and I mean WAY fine. So I start popping different CD's in it. I have one that had been rattling around in the car for quite some time and it is just scratched all to hell, wont play in the car stereo anymore and the machine plays if perfectly and I mean it does not miss a beat and the sound quality is better then any CD player I have used.
First of all people who purchase Monster Cables, Gold Plated Cables, and all that crap are utterly clueless. The gold is plated and only a couple or angstroms thick, in other words it is worthless.
A thing or two about cables...
For carrying the output of the main amplifier to the speakers, ANY cable that can handle the power load without overheating and starting your house on fire will work fine. We are talking high voltage and current levels.
Signal cables... We are talking millivolts here. They need to be well shielded and well built that is about it and the mechanical connection needs to fit securely.
In ANY audio system there are two critical components: A. The device that produces the music from the source ( tape, phonograph, tuner, cd player ). and B. the device that takes the amplified electronic signal and turns it back into sound waves and those are the speakers, everything else is BS when it comes to all those flowery terms that audiophiles use.
The Pre-Amplifier ( often sold as a seperate component). If it produces and undistorted wave form from it's minimum to it's maximum power output ( measured in millivolts ) with a flat frequency response in it's specified spectrum and performs the correct equalization according to the RIAA specifications ( especially critical for vinyl ) then it will introduce nothing to alter the sound.
The Amplifier. If it produces and undistorted wave form from it's minimum to it's maximum power ( measured in watts ) output with a flat frequency response in it's specified spectrum rating then it will introduce nothing to alter the sound.
The Speakers. If the speakers produce the same wave form, without distortio then it will not alter the sound.
The biggest problem with almost EVERY music system being built today is the fact that the power supply is inadequate and that the components are quite often under rated for the power that the amplifier is specified to produce. If an amplifier is designed to put out 100 watts of audio power then it's power supply should be able to provide at least 1000 watts to the final amplification stage to handle transients, especially in the lower frequency ranges and the components of the amplifier should be able to handle ALL of that power, and the amplifier will never clip and distort your signal.
So the moral of the story is.... Spend the biggest portion of your audio budget on 1. The Speakers and 2. The sound source component, if you listen to vinyl, spend it on the best turntable and cartridge you can afford, if you are a CD person I suggest Creek Audio ( over a thousand bucks for a SINGLE cd player, but they simply are the best ). As far as I can tell, no company is manufacturing tape recorders other then Nagra which are mono and are used pretty much exclusively in the film industry. You can still find good reel-to-reel and some professional cassette equipment on ebay and there are companies still manufacturing tape for at least reel-to-reel.
I stand corrected, it was Muliplan, Excel 1.0 was for the Mac.
But the rest of my claim is true, Quattro Pro was a killer Spreadsheet and if it hadn't been for Lotus's Lawsuit ( which went all the way to the supreme court and Lotus finally lost there, it was a tie vote because one Justice recused themself and the ruling or the lower court stood ) QPro would more then likely have been the default spreadsheet today as it was FAR superior to anything out there. Now the very FIRST spreadsheet to have tabbed sheets as I discovered was BoeingCalc, but if you actually tried to use their tabs the thing was SO slow as to be unusable.
Dude, do you have proof?
Play not with the reputation of the Kahn for he is my god and tho shalt be smitten down for thein heresy!
If you don't see anything wrong with that, then there is something so wrong with you on so many levels that I cannot even begin to describe them.
And don't forget the $200,000.00 ( USD ) bag of tools floating about, NASA ( one employee in particular ) would like to have it back!.
Apple x86 machines use Intel processors and Intel chip sets but they are custom MB's manufactured BY apple and therefor can have many things in them that are in fact proprietary, they might in fact have a modified custom microcode on the chips that they pay Intel to install. Just as the early Macintosh had about half or so of the OS burned into ROMS on the MB that that their OS would not even boot without.
Just as an the program for an ECU for a Ford wont work in the ECU for a Chevy OSX is not designed for just ANY x86 hardware. And like ODBII allows you to talk to the software in the ECU for a FORD just the same as an ECU for a Chevy, TCP/IP allows you to talk to OSX just like it lets you talk to WIndows.
You are wrong...
You can purchase a copy of OSX at an apple store, you can then tinker with it all you want. You can install it on whatever hardware you own. You can modify and recompile any part of OSX for any purpose that suits you, but you cannot sell the code you modified. What you can do is publish the instructions on how to make the changes to suit a particular purpose eg: "Change line 31 of file X to read Y and recompile it." and in doing so not violate Apples copyright.
I think if Psystar had published a program, or set of programs to allow the end user to cause the appropriate modifications to OSX and re-build it they might have had a leg to stand on but IANAL.
Ok I have mod points, and since there is no mod "You are full of it" I will have to reply, although I am sure that i will be hit for it...
FoxPro (bought by MS), was way better than the dBase (bought by Borland). And, Access was a better desktop database than anything else out there.
FoxPro was a dBase clone and the only thing it did better was a compiler, and a pretty slow one at that. Early versions of Access were a piece of crap. If DataEase had not bet the farm on OS/2 then they would have smoked Access so badly that MS would have been forced to buy the company, wait for it.... Oh yes they did try and buy the company once, but Arun Gupta ( rip ) did not sell because their product was better then dBase, FoxPro and Pradox combined.
Excel was better than Quattro, and I'm sorry, Word was better than Word Perfect for Windows, by far. My favorite Word Process was Samna AmiPro, which, probably would have ruled them all had Lotus not bought them and screwed it up.
Oh please. Quattro Pro was eating everyones lunch! It was faster the either Lotus or Excel, had a native GUI mode before their was a GUI to be had ( Lotus had a very bad add-in to get it into graphics mode and Excel had none ), had far more standard financial and statistical functions and had spreadsheet tabs first as well not to mention the easiest to create 3D graphs out there. Borland spent just about all the money they had at the time defending themselves against Lotus in the "look and feel" lawsuit wars ( if Jim Manzi walked up to me today I would put the little bitch on the ground ) that they ultimately won, but were left drastically weakened from not to mention that their development efforts for Quattro were frozen for about two years. As to your assertion for Word -v- Word Perfect that was the very beginning of the "Teddy Bear" wars, small wonder that Word came out on top.
Microsoft got to where it is today mostly by illegal business practices and FUD, if it had truly been a level playing field it would be a very very different software landscape out there. If Microsoft could not get a company that was building better and in many many cases FAR better software to allow themselves to be purchased then they would simply check in to a near by Hotel suite and start offering money that could not be ignored to the target companies best and brightest and destroying the company that way. This is not urban legend this is established fact and oh by the way if you doubt it, just ask Borland since The Traitor Anders now works their as well.
Well, I do, and sheesh ease up dude. Line 1 was obviously a joke. And yes, MS-SQL has come a long way way, even to the point of being able to be almost on par with Oracle but always misses the mark somehow and being able to be massively scaled up is one of those marks.
If Microsoft really wants to take their SQL Server to the next level they would do well to port it to a *nix flavor so they could run it on a Mainframe or even something like Google's distributed context, but, we all know they wont.
WOW! Do you get ahold of an older SyBase version?!
But seriously, yeah even MS-SQL can hang in if you set up it up just so and never let MS patch the thing forever after.
Well said.
Lack of imagination is another problem when people look at the dry subject of data storage and retrieval. Yes at some point the math has to work, but in the meantime looking outside the box and taking an RDBMS in different and new directions within the engine itself can give those mountains of scale that are the holy grail these days.
While I was writing that paragraph I thought it might be interesting to take a structure such as an n-node b-tree and then make the leaves table references and the nodes pointers to those tables and overlay that structural idea into a single table. That single table could then be queried to gain access to a very interesting amount of data. Now if the leaves are not required to be unique, then the entry that would normal be a record pointer could then be an instance pointer, or a server pointer, cluster pointer and simply take the original query and have the result be returned from just about anywhere.
Ehh someone undoubtedly thought of that already...
Now as a kid who had a fairly vast comic book collection I would read them a lot, and well looked at the drawings as well ( Mrs. Fantastic was pretty dang hot ) and I doubt I am any worse for the exposure.
Fast Forward 40 years and now I have an 8 year old. He just finished reading Tom Sawyer for school and was completely absorbed by it and it had very few simple line drawing illustrations. He is trending toward books with few illustrations and I am really ok with that.
I am not sure if that is a product of both me and my wife reading to him almost every night since he was old enough to do something more then drool and stair at us or not but I like to think it is. I am also not sure if it is a product of very very little video based entertainment. He gets no TV during the week and although he can have pretty much as much as he can stomach on the weekends he does end up doing more reading and Lego stuff.
Please keep in mind that your mileage may be extremely different and my way is by no means the only or best way, it is simply the way I chose.
Full Disclosure - I install and maintain GroupWise Systems and could be considered a fanboi, but I also like GMail and use it. for personal accounts.
That said, if you really compare the two Gmail falls WAY short of GroupWise in the follwing areas:
Complete office and or process automation either through the local API or the server API via SOAP.
The list goes on and on. Some of the things the article does NOT say is that it will cost the city of LA MORE to run the Google mail System by about a cool million a year. There are many security issues and questions. The LA City councel is very skeptical of this whole thing. I personally doubt that the conversion will be successful and the city of LA is going to spend a boat load of tax payer money for something that is not going to work.
Well......
With the comm system you can have it just on the headphones, just on the speaker or both.
I have missed ATC calls before do to tons of chatter, but after a minute or two they call again, especially if you are getting close to your decent point.
My PWAG ( pilots wild ass guess ) is that they were simply engrossed in whatever they were doing and had the speakers either turned WAY down or off and had the headsets dangling around their necks and hence didn't hear the calls.
Some other guesses besides sleeping ( not unheard of since it is REALLY boring at 36K on auto pilot cruise and there is really NOTHING for the pilots to do ) is that they were doing each other, a flight attendant or whatever.
The action of the FAA to revoke their certificates ( it is not a license, it is a certificate ) is a bit heavy handed since they now have to find a new career. They have 10 days from notification in which to file an appeal, but I cannot for the life of me ponder what the appeal would be based on. Now as far as I can tell, they did not violate a specific rule of Title 14, Part 91, of the Code of Federal Regulations so that may be the basis for an appeal since the administrator has to base the revocation on existing regulations. I for one would have opted for a restriction on their certificates removing their ATP ( Airline Transport Pilot ) endorsement so they could at least fly cargo, just not carry passengers.
Never the less, losing situational awareness for at least 30 minutes ( they were about 15 minutes past the airport )is pretty much inexcusable for so many reasons that need not be reiterated by me since I think you can come up with plenty on your own.
There is nothing to be baffled about.
The auto pilot simply maintained the last course, speed and altitude it was ordered to fly at, hence it was not off course.
There is a silent (but my guess is not for much longer) alert on the primary flight display telling the pilot that the autopilot no longer has a waypoint in which to continue on to so the autopilot does what it is programmed to do, keep flying the airplane straight and level.
Now depending on how the AP is setup for a particular flight is will use a pre-loaded approach to an airport and begin the approach based on airspeed, altitude and winds to ensure that the aircraft descends within acceptable parameters.
Every commercial airport has published departure and approach routes, the enroute portion of the flight can be most anything. If you are curious about the various approaches and departures this link has a listing of all IAP's (Instrument Approach Procedures) and STARS (Standard Terminal ARivalS) for KSFO (San Francisco International) and most any other commercial airport.
And yes I am a pilot.
Hmmmm dead link there,,,,