A few years ago I looked up what's available to make a kid interested in programming when I found this. I ended up spending quite a few days doing my own little project... that I'm almost not ashamed to link here ;-).
Why is insolvency not an option for a country? It was in Sweden, which is doing fine now, and in Argentina more recently. Oh look, there's a whole lot more of them[1]. It only isn't an option for a member state of the EU. I sure don't see how Germany's strategy of starving those already struggling economies to death is going to work out.
For a country whose sole gdp generator is the banking sector, with that amount of foreign holdings it would be fatal. I'd only imagine how their relationship with Russia would be if Cyprus null'ed their holdings.
I may be exaggerating, but think of it as Switzerland losing it's bank sector. How would you begin to build up a new economy which, as of yet, biggest sector is banking, for instance. Think of the large population that would be instantly out of work.
At least, that's my guess at why an insolvency wouldn't be the best option for Cyprus.
Not that I don't agree that Switzerland loosing its finance industry would be a big blow for the country, but let's get some perspective: Banking is less than half the size of Switzerland's manufacturing industry in terms of income - in terms of workforce it's more like a third to a quarter. In international comparison, Switzerland's service industry isn't excessively large. I'd argue the country's economy would somehow survive it.
Ok sorry, I was wrong about Sweden - I thought the nation defaulted in the 90ies, but it was in fact 'only' a big chunk of their financial industry[1]. It seems that they came very close though, and the way they resolved it doesn't appear to be by tight economic grip either - the state poured 4% of their GDP into the system. However - and that's an important point that apparently went forgotten in the last US crisis - they also took the chance to regulate the financial industry more tightly, in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Hm, while the economist's article points out how messy the process became, it doesn't makes an evaluation of how the default actually affected the argentinian economy.
I think that Greece and Argentina will make a good examples for comparisons of different approaches, when both recover economically (if they do recover, that is).
I'd really like to see a usability study between Vim experts (10y+ usage) and Sublime Text 2 (1y+ usage) experts on a keyboard+good touchpad combo. We could even do it in theory by counting number of actions and assume the APM in vim to be 10% higher (which is quite optimistic).
> Yes, I understand that it's a pain for new Chrome developers to have to understand the permission system among other things. I liked the easy ACLs of Chrome when I started.
That's a good thing IMO. Anyone who doesn't understand permissions and how to handle them, shouldn't be able to release anything in any app store.
You probably knew this, but you can write and distribute Chrome extensions without having to upload them to the chrome app^Wweb store.
Second, I've tried to work twice with Doing-It-Right (i.e., fine-grain) permission systems. Once with apparmor and earlier with SE Linux. With AppArmor, I wanted to set up rules to prevent Skype from reading any except a couple of directories. The sheer number of permissions I had to configure was exhausting and I gave up. Maybe I missed something simple, but that's why I'm not clamoring for the current simple, but coarse-grain permission system to be abandoned.
Well yes, grown-over-time permission systems are also at fault when it comes to the lack of security in third party extensions/apps. IMO unix is still the standard in terms of simplicity and power of permissions - if the system architect separates concerns correctly into different base entities ('files'), the permission system just falls into place. You know what other system did this pretty much perfectly? Lotus Notes. Yes, I'm serious - it's a document based DBMS with per-document permissions where everything is a document, including the application design, contacts, logs, calendar entries. Too bad its UI is still stuck in the early 90ies.
I'm very interested in this, in fact I'm planning on rolling an iOS based couchDB solution for a company sometime this summer. Could you comment on some key differences between pouchDB and touchDB? Did you also try to simply run ARM compiled couchDB on iOS? If yes, how was the performance there? I've read that initializing takes about 10 seconds - I'd be willing to swallow that if the subsequent interactions are smooth.
How about the initial replication of larger databases? Do you roll out an initial version directly in your app or do you have some file based download of a snapshot?
The key differences between touchDB and pouchDB is that touch is written for ios and pouch is written for web browsers, if you are building for ios and not using phonegap then I suggest using touchdb. It is also the more mature of the 2 but hopefully we arent too far behind with pouch.
I used to work for Couchbase on the arm compiled couchdb mobile versions, mainly android but either way I wouldnt hugely recommend using them, they always worked against the grain of the platform, never had great performance and due to those reasons they didnt really get widely adopted and therefore I wouldnt trust their stability across a variety of platforms and use cases.
The problems with arm compiled couchdb is the reason TouchDB was made, and similiarly with PouchDB / TouchDB for android and CouchDB I hope we get to the point were there is an out of the box sync solution that works great on every platform, it doesnt feel too far away.
For large initial datasets I have tried taking a dump of the database and importing it on first load, it worked however replication has been more than sufficient for my use cases right now. Once pouch has stabilised and released there are a lot of low hanging fruit that can be done to optimise replication (and in particular for first load).
The TouchDB project was started at Couchbase, and since then we have ramped up our investment in mobile sync. The key thing about this project is that its designed to be tiny and boot fast. So it is written in Objective-C (and Java for Android.)
We are renaming TouchDB to Couchbase Lite (still 100% open source), and have a bunch more tools for it:
We are 100% serious about building the best damn database for mobile. Bonus points that it will seamlessly interact with other projects like PouchDB and friends via the sync protocol originally written as part of Apache CouchDB.
It feels strange to me that so far only one commenter here (ok, he's at the top now) has identified where the main mistake seems to be:
A SYNCHED COPY IS NOT A BACKUP.
This includes:
- git
- svn
- Dropbox
- RAID (of any kind)
If you don't believe this, please reconcile everything you've learned about backups. More specifically, if you treat any VCS or dropbox as your only backup system, STOP RIGHT NOW and at least get something that's intended to be a backup, such as SpiderOak in backup mode.
Yeah, I for one think that Musk was being entirely unreasonable when he got upset with Top Gear (I mean come on, this is a show that gave a good review to a car because they were able to drive it upside-down in a tunnel...).
His issues with the Times seem far more reasonable.
I think they also mentioned when reviewing one of those crazy open-wheelers that it was supposed to be able to drive upside-down simply due to downforce, but I don't think they demo'd that.
F1 teams also commonly claim their cars could drive upsidedown, but the logistics of actually trying that would be absurd. You'd probably need a robotic driver at least...
Which, sadly, brings us back to what they say about why Top Gear US can't be like Top Gear UK. Try that style in the US, and everybody is jumping down your throat.
Honestly, as a European, that sums up pretty much the preconceptions we have about Americans: throat jumpy. If it accurately reflects American culture is another story, but I gotta say American media is not really helping the case - as isn't Mr. Musk here.
That being said, I - and most of my acquaintances - still love American culture - the kind of 'just do it'(TM) attitude, shown as well by Elon here - the stunts he's pulling with three high risk industrial companies at the same time is pretty much unthinkable in 'the old world'. And I'm not sure, but maybe his aggressive stance, the ability to sort of indoctrinate himself with his vision, might actually be needed to push through these grand projects. It's not unlike what we've known from Steve Jobs, really. Most people would agree that he was quite an ass - but by god he was an influential one.
As an American, my perspective is that Americans seem to be more "throat jumpy" when it comes to corporate responses and lawsuits, though Europeans (well, the British) seem to be more throat jumpy with social outrage.
In other words: while getting sued for a bad revue strikes me as distinctly American, I can't picture Clarkson getting flak in America for saying many of the more "offensive" things he seems to get flak for in the UK. I think Americans would be more understanding of the fact that Clarkson's public persona is basically a satire of itself and that comments like "I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families" clearly should not be taken seriously.
Then again Gilbert Gottfried did get fired from his duck commercial gig over some silly joke... Maybe I'm giving Americans too much credit.
If it keeps its promises this will be huge. To be honest it's almost too good to be true (and to have such an open license). Looking forward very much to using this in future projects.
While I share your sentiment I'm honestly kind of impressed that you run 5-6 linux VMs on a Pentium 4/AMD64 generation system. Really? Those things didn't virtualization support on the CPU yet, did they? Also, Ram probably maxes out at around 4GB which is quite low for an updated winXP with so many instances. Does that really run smoothly? I recommend you get an i5, 16GB, 500GB SSD and then come back and tell me the upgrade wasn't worth it ;-).
Always two (2) Linux instances (One CentOS and One Ubuntu), and almost always 4 OpenBSD images (for networking simulations). The VMware instances don't really seem to cause any foreground processing pauses (unlike the Craptastic VMware Workstation on my MacBook Pro + WIndows XP which leaves me in constant jerk-spinning beachball state. Grr...) - Runs super smoothly.
I do all my interactive work on a (Circa 2010) Macbook Air - the Windows XP system is for Visio, Dynamips, Vmware Workstation, PowerPoint, Visio, Microsoft Word, and Outlook+Lookout (I have 10 years of Exchange PST's cached on that box) - I don't think a faster system would give me much more than 10% improvement in performance - because I'm never really CPU bound on that box. And, honestly, I spend maybe an hour a day on it - the other seven I spend on my MacBook Air. I just don't see any justification to upgrade it. It gets the job done, and it's fast enough.
With all that said - the upgrade from my 2010 MacBook Pro to my SSD based 2010 MacBook Air was an awesome performance jump. Totally worth it. CPUs may not make much of a difference but WOW, do SSDs in a MacBook rock your world!
Vmware Workstation was first released in 1999. It never used to require hardware virtualization support until recently.
Also, 4GB is plenty for Windows XP. Perhaps you have not used it for so long now that you've forgotten, but it only ever required 64MB and ran perfectly fine with 128MB-256MB even with high performance apps. All that has happened since is a factor increase in memory requirement for a limited set of applications.
With Linux guest instances, it is easy to cap and keep very low the maximum memory usage. 6x VM with 256MB each is still only 1.5GB.
Without a change in software requirements, I doubt many consumers would feel the need to upgrade anything. CPUs/PCs really have been fast enough for many years now.
Did you also update your XP to the latest service packs and patches? My updated XP in a VM currently runs at 780MB after one morning of very light usage. It has only one application open at 100MB.
Also, yes, virtualization wasn't always needed, but without it anything slightly CPU intensive will be awfully slow. I can see it working for CLI-only linux/bsd systems, but not much else. Do you ever compile something bigger on your guest systems as an example?
