It's not just high school programming that's like this (at least where I'm from). This is happening in post-secondary education.

I took Java EE - "Enterprise Edition" quite recently. We learned how to make enterprise grade web applications... Web forms with database back-ends.

Now, I have a decent programming background (C, shell scripts, and php mostly). Lets just say I can't remember the first thing on how to reproduce anything that was taught in that class. It was all copying and pasting code blobs and lots of "s/oldword/newword", even for our midterm and final exams. Unfortunately they try to make those classes as easy as possible for everyone, but nobody truly learns anything. And fucks over the people who actually would like to learn something. The Java 101 class I took before taught me at least 100x more.

For reference, I have to get my diploma in order to continue working with the current employer I'm with. While there are some things I do learn from these classes, the majority of it I already know.

It depends on the card really.

I was "upgraded" to an HP 6000 at work (ugh, don't ask). We had a discrete graphics card in an earlier model, but then due to warranty, were all upgraded to the newer model. We lost the graphics card because supposedly the 6000's onboard graphics had enough power to run Win7.

One 22 inch was hooked through DVI while one was hooked through VGA. The VGA looked like total crap - washed out, blurry, totally noticeable. I promptly grabbed the video card back and dropped it in - problem gone. That was a simple 1GB ATI 5450.

I later tried the 512MB model of the SAME card (different brand). When I hooked it up, I immediately noticed the same quality picture as the onboard graphics through the VGA. Sure, I could have used and HDMI -> DVI adapter for the HDMI port, but didn't have an adapter handy.

How about ripping HDDVD movies for format shifting? .. Yep, the format that discs and players aren't made anymore.

But hey! You can go out and buy the BLU-RAY version.. It's ONLY $20, don't be cheap........

I can't believe Viacom is starving from piracy so much too! Giving their head executive a $50M raise (from $~35M) and all. He must be needing to put food on his table.

The corps aren't worried about the pirates... They're worried about the normal Joe Schmoes who want to take that DVD and put it on their iPhone. Why sell 1 copy when you can force the same person (who doesn't want to break ANY laws) to buy 5 copies?

You don't think Google or Microsoft can make notaries? .. They have bots that scour and cache the internet already. Grabbing the ssl certificate of a site and caching it isn't that much more to deal with. Plus, I have the option of hosting a notary at home if I want.

The idea is to get a proof of concept out there, and a decent implementation of it I might add (I'm running it at work, home, and school). We just need to get the major browser vendors onboard (MS, Google, Apple), and then get it rolling.

The beauty of it is that the current https infrastructure doesn't need to change. If a certificate is signed, and it checks out at both the client and notary level, it's valid. Same goes for self-signed certificates.

According to these guys, there is already a convergence notary fork in the works using Google's help.
http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/6778/how-does-convergence-ca-replacement-prevent-its-notaries-from-being-mitmd-as-w

... And if you lose your domain?

It's quite nice to see more and more things switching to torrents..

There's a DVD that a well respected individual made on the subject of bodybuilding - Over 11 hours of material. I can only imagine how much time he actually spent on it.

It was first only put up on a single website and youtube for download/streaming (he isn't charging anything for it). After finding out about this, I immediately threw it up on piratebay (with his permission) using DHT and an open bittorent tracker. It's a Win Win. Way more reliable to distribute (hash checking), downloads can easily resume, and his site uses boatloads less bandwidth.

There's not really a more efficient/faster way than P2P to deploy material.

Why do they need to virtualize it? Linux has better methods of "virtualizing" with a lot less overhead. OpenVZ and LXC being two.

From the way it sounds, it runs like a desktop hypervisor - so it's a hardware layer virtualization.

OpenVZ and LXC run like Solaris Containers and FreeBSD Jails.. OS level virtualization. They're still isolated, but they share the same kernel, so a second kernel doesn't need to run - saving resources and CPU time.

Why does VMWare need to make it more complicated than it really needs to be?

Isn't that kind of what Skype did with EBay?

Almost forgot..

Here's the info page on OpenSolaris

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+brandz/linux_2_6

You can follow pretty closely - ignoring the guide about creating your own image since you'll be using an openvz image. The rest is relevant. .. Just remember they're removing lx support in the newest versions =(

Also I think the /etc/resolv.conf file doesn't exist after setting up the zone.. So you'll need to create one to do anything practical online.

lx2.6 (Linux kernel 2.6 support) is considered experimental. It runs fine for me and a couple others that I know, but cannot say if it will work for you. There are certain things that WILL NOT work. Your best bet is to just try it.

Mind you these zones I run aren't heavily utilized, but I do know hash checking torrents doesn't give the CPU a break. It's nice seeing each process in a zone show up in my main OpenSolaris "top" process tree.

Check out this forum: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=466361&tstart=0 read "jwhitby3"'s post on using the openvz image.

The posts are from early October, and b131 wasn't even out then. jwhitby3 is reportedly using 2009.06.. So build 111b or so.

First login, you'll need to use zlogin -S to change the root pass. After that, it should run beautifully... Just probably not a good idea to run it in a true production environment.