Comment Re:America is already screwed up (Score 1) 375
So the defense against his straw man is to prop up your straw man so that he is bigger? You are basically arguing that your straw man can beat up his straw man.
Comment Re:Uh, no (Score 1) 503
But to neglect the Soviet involvement in the War as much as some have in this thread borders on criminal. It's a widely held opinion in UK history (and I'm sure other European countries) that the decision to take the war to 2 fronts is the most critical mistake Hitler made.
I completely agree with your post, except for that section I quoted above. Sure I was not on Stalin's staff, but historical documents have shown that Stalin was already planning on moving west once Germany had stalled in its attack. The German army had no choice but to attack before Stalin could get his war machine up and running.
Hitler and his generals made plenty of mistakes during the attack (changing objectives being one of the most terrible), but the decision to attack was not really a choice.
Comment Re:Hey, we could use that in the U.S. too (Score 1) 274
Actually schools represent our biggest customer base; although our B2B is the highest traffic on a daily basis. Most schools use it to announce all manner of things that are coming up (including several emergency lock downs). However, it is weather closings that really stress the system. Several geographically centered locations all hammering their full list at the same time. All of these calls will terminate into the same exchanges.
It is strange to see the system spike, investigate it and find that a nearby school has just be locked down because of a gunman on campus grounds. The supers can sound surprisingly calm when informing the parents not to be alarmed that someone with a gun is on campus and they have everything under control.
I understand the hatred towards robo-calling, but there are many legitimate uses as well. At the end of the day I do not feel sleazy about my code, or my company, because our system is emergency and B2B based. We do not do UCEs.
NVIDIA Enters the Mobile CPU Market 97
Vigile writes "NVIDIA just announced the new Tegra line, a complete system architecture on one chip. Built around a licensed x86 ARM 11 CPU, this tiny chip (smaller than a US dime) includes a processor, memory controller, southbridge, and 3D and video processors. The SoC design is meant to give iPhone-type devices a more impressive visual experiences while maintaining idle power consumption under 100 mW. While not a direct competitor to Intel's Atom or VIA's Nano processors, the NVIDIA Tegra will no doubt push the envelope in handhelds and cement NVIDIA's place in the world of computing going forward."
Bill Gates's Last Speech 389
Ian Lamont writes "Bill Gates, in an address to the TechEd Developers conference, talked about Microsoft's plans for hosted services, and revealed that the company is planning data centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before' that will apparently enable the company to offer all of its server-based products over the Internet. The talk did not include details in terms of capacity or scale. This was Gates's final publicly scheduled speech as a full-time Microsoft employee, and he acknowledged that Microsoft's success is 'due to our relationship with developers.' On July 1, he will start spending most of his time at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation." After that date he will be devoting his "20% time" to Microsoft.
Codemasters Receives Exclusive Formula One Rights 48
bigmouth_strikes writes "A few weeks ago it was announced that British game developers Codemasters have received the exclusive right to develop and publish video games using the "Formula One" brand name. This was after Sony and Formula One Management didn't renew their contract that have made the Playstation platform the only choice for gamers wanting "official" games since 2003. The earlier Sony exclusive right and decision to only release for the Playstation platform has led to active fan-created content for various racing simulation engines, such as rFactor for the PC. The official Formula One website has a brief interview/promo piece with Codemasters CEO Rod Cousens about their hopes and intentions for the game and platforms — which will include Xbox 360 and Wii. The company is targeting an initial release in 2009."
Brian Aker On the Future of Databases 175
blackbearnh recommends
an interview with MySQL Director of Technology Brian Aker that O'Reilly Media is running. Aker talks about the merger of MySQL with Sun, the challenges of designing databases for a SOA world, and what the next decade will bring as far as changes to traditional database architecture. Audio is also available. From the interview: "I think there's two things right now that are pushing the changes... The first thing that's going to push the basic old OLCP transactional database world, which... really hasn't [changed] in some time now — is really a change in the number of cores and the move to solid state disks because a lot of the... concept around database is the idea that you don't have access to enough memory. Your disk is slow, can't do random reads very well, and you maybe have one, maybe eight processors but... you look at some of the upper-end hardware and the mini-core stuff,... and you're almost looking at kind of an array of processing that you're doing; you've got access to so many processors. And well the whole story of trying to optimize... around the problem of random I/O being expensive, well that's not that big of a deal when you actually have solid state disks. So that's one whole area I think that will... cause a rethinking in... the standard Jim Gray relational database design."
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