Cogent has a horrible reputation. 90% of the complaints about poor networks on WebHostingTalk.com are about Cogent.

Weeellll...they are a fantastic provider, but what you pay a lot for bandwidth. You get a great VPS, but they're not really designed for this kind of high bandwidth, unless you also need correspondingly high cpu.

Maybe linode coupled with a good CDN.

Attacking the Catholic Church in 2012 over the priest abuse scandal is like attacking Britain over John Major's policies.

The abuse scandal was a pattern of abuse and cover-up that exploded into the media spotlight in the late 80s/early 90s. The Church did wrong, but since then, they've done a lot of right - there's a zero-tolerance policies, lots of priests have been defrocked, billions in settlements have been paid, hundreds were jailed, etc. There will always be sexual abuse in any large organization with access to children - schools, Boy/Girl scouts, the YMCA, the Mendocino Physics Club, Gencon, whatever. So yes, there may be some that goes on today on a small scale...but what has changed is the organizational response. In 1970, a Bishop might have shuffled a pedophile priest to a different parish. Today, there's zero tolerance, formal processes, and a much greater awareness.

So...why attack in 2012? What is the point? If this was 1990, it'd be more understandable.

I think "anonymous" (aka a half-dozen bored kids) is just desperate to remain in the spotlight. The attention-getting is more important than any "cause". In fact, attention-getting is the cause.

Five.

But yahoos on Slashdot who ascribe any criticism of Middle Eastern fascism to some kind of racism...perhaps one.

The DFBSD Goals page is now empty. Hmm.

I seem to recall that at one point the goal was an OS that ran as a single OS image across multiple machines. Memory, processes, storage, etc. was unified into a single OS image. Is that still a DFBSD goal?

So as the OP said, one isn't free and one is.

CERN has a database with trillions of rows in a traditional Oracle RDBMS. I saw a presentation on it at Oracle OpenWorld this year by a guy from CERN..

Yahoo also has trillion-rowed databases, on PostGreSQL.

An excellent example.

I think of the NoSQL world as "get a document/piece of data by an indexed data column". It works very well for that. SQL is better for "correlate and compute summation on these data with these sets of conditions".

There's another piece to the definition. The traditional RDBMS (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL) is designed to give 100% consistent results. All other design goals are sacrificed so that two people asking the DB the same question at the same time will get the same answer, and no one can make a modification and someone else gets an answer that is not 100% up to date. NoSQL trades consistency for flexibility/simpler scalability.

If you post something on a social network at 1:00 and your friend in a different timezone looks at 1:00:10 and doesn't see the update, no big deal. If one person authorizes $500 on your credit card at 1:00 and consumes your limit and someone else tries to authorize $300 at 1:00:10 and it goes through because the DBMS isn't giving consistent answers, that's a problem.

They're just systems with two different design goals. Some DBs will let you restrict this - SQL Server 2008R2 has a "replicate to nodes" setup that tries to stay 100% in sync but doesn't guarantee it. OTOH, something like Oracle RAC is always 100% in sync because there's only one set of datafiles shared by everyone.

I said "simpler scalability" because the idea that SQL-based RDBMS systems can't scale to any length is ridiculous - all credit card processing, bank transactions, airline reservations, Amazon orders, etc. all flow through very traditional RDBMS of one of the flavors I mentioned. However, it's a lot more complicated than scaling NoSQL. Getting that guarantee of consistency is not easy once you outgrow a single server, need 100% (not 99.999%) uptime, etc..

NoSQL is also better for large document storage. Traditional RDBMS has LOBs but they're a later add-on and it somewhat shows. Want to store a few gigabytes of LOBs in your DB? Sure. Want to store terabytes of big LOBs and use your DB as a transactional filesystem? It can be done, but it won't be pretty.

All in all, it depends on what you're trying to do.

I think threadmaster here was talking about using IE as a user, not creating sites/apps. From a user POV, I only care about how a site looks on my computer.

Itanic is not a buggy or bad design. It's just a design without a good market. If you were doing a lot of computation where that last .01% of performance was important and you had the time/budget to write Itanium-specific assembler, you'd love Itanium (64 64-bit registers is nice). It's just solves problems that most people don't have.

To wit, a woman chose not to join a CAL against Honda and took them to small claims court. Instead of $100 and a $1000 credit towards a new Honda, she won $9,867.

I think the OP is pointing out the ritual of class action lawsuits in America. A CAL is filed and won or settled for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Lawyers take 30-50% and the rest is divided over the huge pool in the class, hence often resulting in a few bucks each.

It's a perverted system - as a big company, you are spared having to pay anything of substance to each litigant, yet the overall effect is still big. Lawyers love it because they get rich.

I usually get 2-3 letters or postcards a year informing me that I'm potentially part of a CAL because a had a Mastercard four years ago, or I exchanged foreign currency with company X in 2005, or because I changed flight reservations in 2006, or some other event that I've completely forgotten. Just check boxes A and B and sign on the line, and you get a check for $5-10 in three months, and you can check the status at SomeBigCompanySettlement.com. It's a weird part of modern life.

THAT'S what I was doing wrong. I was doing lather-rinse-repeat, and it was supposed to be rinse-wash-repeat.

Headed back downstairs to the lab...