justinsb

80 ms·

661.
by justinsb 15y ago
I read Microsoft's original change of wording completely differently - it wasn't that they had defeated Linux, it was that Windows had already lost (largely because their competitors changed the game.) Competitors no longer compete only wi
662.
by justinsb 15y ago
This benchmark is probably accurate, but not necessarily fair. Here's why: If all the systems have to do a table scan (complete scan of the data), then you're (almost always) I/O bound. Because we're relying on sequential I/O, a good hard
663.
by justinsb 15y ago
I definitely agree. But the Python crowd seems very opposed to threads on many levels, and I think there's a place for a language which deliberately excludes the complexity of threading.
664.
by justinsb 15y ago
I think garbage collection is an even better answer, because you don't pay a penalty when copying pointers. I hope someone does a good port of Python/Jython to the Java 7 JVM - it seems the easiest way to get a good garbage collector (and J
665.
by justinsb 15y ago
Right. I think that backing dictionary could probably be replaced with a more thread-friendly implementation, even if we have to offer reduced guarantees.
666.
by justinsb 15y ago
I think this patch could certainly do with revisiting: 1) reference counting used atomic operations on Windows but on Linux used a full pthread mutex; if that was necessarily back when the patch was written it's definitely not necessarily t
667.
by justinsb 15y ago
I think you've missed the point here: without patents, we'd devise something else to protect drugs. It's not the case that just because you can reverse engineer something, it's good for society that you're allowed to copy it. At least in
668.
by justinsb 15y ago
Thanks ... looks like it's time to sign up for MileWise!
669.
by justinsb 15y ago
So does milewise scrape the airline sites for award travel? Does it also integrate with ITA or similar? I ask because (1) the airline websites tend to be _really_ slow and (2) they tend not to find the cheapest/best flights - an ITA search
670.
by justinsb 15y ago
What I was getting at is that most(?) compounds probably exist somewhere in nature already, so copyright wouldn't apply without modification. I think that means you'd have to copyright the compound in a novel field of use e.g. "for use in
671.
by justinsb 15y ago
It's a nice idea, but I suspect that if you were to tweak copyright law to apply to chemical compounds used as drugs (e.g. field of use restrictions) you'd end up with patents.
672.
by justinsb 15y ago
This already happens: if you're a corporation promising to create jobs, you can negotiate with government for tax breaks. I believe Twitter negotiated with San Francisco city government to get their payroll tax breaks by threatening to lea
673.
by justinsb 15y ago
Wow - looks like you're right! I dug into the presentation (link below, important slide is #33) and Amazon are now claiming that all their web servers run on AWS. It's only their webservers (not their DBs, load-balancers or "services" whi
674.
by justinsb 15y ago
Do you have a source for Amazon.com running on AWS or AWS technology? As far as I know, they've never gone on the record with that.
675.
by justinsb 15y ago
"English sayings, phrases and quotes" would come under copyright law instead of patent law, but can still enjoy IP protection.
676.
by justinsb 15y ago
Perhaps these patent deals that are putting a price on inventions (particularly at the billion dollar valuation level) will encourage companies to spend _more_ on R&D - hiring more highly skilled workers - because they can create releva
677.
by justinsb 15y ago
Stac Electronics is an example of Microsoft doing exactly what you described; it was patent - not copyright - law that allowed Stac to collect damages.
678.
by justinsb 15y ago
In this case the patent is related to PacketVideo's business.
679.
by justinsb 15y ago
We had a really old version of Monopoly growing up, and the rules said something like "Players may make any agreements they wish" (the rules don't say that now). That's what real Monopoly is about in my book: deal-making rather than gambli
680.
by justinsb 15y ago
Definitely hear you on that one! It only really works if you can put up with a service going down for a while (e.g. not customer facing, or one back-end in a web cluster with a load balancer in front). I can see how that wouldn't work for
681.
by justinsb 15y ago
For the Java OOM analyzer, did you look at creating a heapdump automatically (using -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError), and then using the Memory Analyzer Toolkit ( http://www.eclipse.org/mat/ )? I can see that your approach is (presumably) m
682.
by justinsb 15y ago
Does anyone know why Amazon doesn't already have to charge sales tax, by virtue of their California offices (e.g IMDB, A9 & Alexa)?
683.
by justinsb 15y ago
Is "Business Accounting for Dummies" (as recommended in the accounting video) really the best book? It looks like it's meant for the UK, as well as being both out of print and not very highly rated on Amazon.. Maybe you meant "Accounting
684.
by justinsb 15y ago
Totally agree that SLAs are not a guarantee of service - I don't believe I said they were, and I was trying to make the exact same point: too many people treat them as if they were a guarantee, even when they carry only token penalty clause
685.
by justinsb 15y ago
Sorry, not too many details yet - let us finish it first :-) Commodity hardware though, and quorum-style failure-tolerance characteristics.
686.
by justinsb 15y ago
A healthy skepticism, then: nothing wrong with that. It's a speculative project with a big payoff if it succeeds, and I wouldn't ask you to believe until we've shown a working product. Your good wishes are appreciated though!
687.
by justinsb 15y ago
You've totally hit the nail on the head there. Up until a month ago, it was a fairly obsessive compulsion around performance. Durability and reliability are features of the design, so it was about getting performance under the design. How
688.
by justinsb 15y ago
Note to self: must blog more :-)
689.
by justinsb 15y ago
Certainly it is possible to engineer a hot standby solution for MySQL databases using DRBD, or synchronous replication etc. There's a choice between engineering an endless series of fixes like that, or re-examining the problem space and bu
690.
by justinsb 15y ago
OLTP. I personally believe Hadoop has got the OLAP problem-space covered.

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