Comment "hard disk drive prices are at an all-time low" (Score 5, Insightful) 403
Aren't hard disk prices always at an all time low? Have they ever gone up in price?
Comment Re:How will current apps cope? (Score 1) 125
http://android-target.googlecode.com/ should be the correct one.
Comment How will current apps cope? (Score 3, Insightful) 125
There are ~3500 android apps out there now, virtually every one of them written assuming HTC Dream hardware.
It will be very interesting to see how they all cope when run on emerging hardware with vastly different characteristics and screens to the opening device.
My own Android game is not exempt and will need better adaptability (yeah, hypocrite).
Comment Re:Features I'm Looking For in My Next Phone (Score 2, Informative) 152
- Wifi (Must be able to connect to my home network at home)
- SIP Client (Must be able to connect to my Asterisk server at home)
- Bluetooth tethering for a MacBook Pro (For those rare times when I'm not near a wifi access point.)
Already possible, alas you need an unlocked G1 for the tethering:
- Wifi, already there
- Sip: http://code.google.com/p/sipdroid/
- Bluetooth tether: http://code.google.com/p/android-wifi-tether/
Comment Simple, fingers (Score 1) 480
Brain: Without it, im dead and wont care.
Hearth: Ditto.
Eyes: Can work around blindness ok.
Ears: Ditto.
Genitalia: Easy to be a nerd without.
Fingers: Cant code without fingers..aaaaah!
New Moon Found In Saturn's G-Ring 102
caffiend666 writes "Scientists have announced a new moon has been found hidden in the G Ring of Saturn. The discovery was announced Tuesday in a notice by the International Astronomical Union. This is one of over five dozen moons, and is only a third of a mile wide. No word yet on a name for the new moon; I vote Cowboy Neal."
Comment Re:Beta = Test Environment (Score 1) 109
You can test and test all you want outside of production, and any respectable shop will have every piece of code thoroughly unit tested and will test "significant" changes against simulated (for changes that load can affect) and limited users.
But, for an environment with huge infrastructure, it becomes literally impossible to test every scenario against real user loads with real user patterns ("random" requests is not real).
When your test scripts get timeouts, they gently retry after $TIMEOUT. People arent like that. Never underestimate the power of $BIGNUM users clicking 'reload' every coupla seconds....
Slashdot.org Self-Slashdotted 388
Slashdot.org was unreachable for about 75 minutes this evening. Here is the post-mortem from Sourceforge's chief network engineer Uriah Welcome. "What we had was indeed a DoS, however it was not externally originating. At 8:55 PM EST I received a call saying things were horked, at the same time I had also noticed things were not happy. After fighting with our external management servers to login I finally was able to get in and start looking at traffic. What I saw was a massive amount of traffic going across the core switches; by massive I mean 40 Gbit/sec. After further investigation, I was able to eliminate anything outside our network as the cause, as the incoming ports from Savvis showed very little traffic. So I started poking around on the internal switch ports. While I was doing that I kept having timeouts and problems with the core switches. After looking at the logs on each of the core switches they were complaining about being out of CPU, the error message was actually something to do with multicast. As a precautionary measure I rebooted each core just to make sure it wasn't anything silly. After the cores came back online they instantly went back to 100% fabric CPU usage and started shedding connections again. So slowly I started going through all the switch ports on the cores, trying to isolate where the traffic was originating. The problem was all the cabinet switches were showing 10 Gbit/sec of traffic, making it very hard to isolate. Through the process of elimination I was finally able to isolate the problem down to a pair of switches... After shutting the downlink ports to those switches off, the network recovered and everything came back. I fully believe the switches in that cabinet are still sitting there attempting to send 20Gbit/sec of traffic out trying to do something — I just don't know what yet. Luckily we don't have any machines deployed on [that row in that cabinet] yet so no machines are offline. The network came back up around 10:10 PM EST."
Comment Re:NICE! (Score 3, Informative) 160
I put debian on my Dev G1. Zero problems.
It's safe - all it does is run a chroot environment from your SD card, thus you are unable to break your existing system (/dev hacks aside). No kernel is booted, it lives off the running system kernel.
This means two things:
- Resources are only consumed by actual running debian processes you initiate. No mysterious background daemons. I run a bash shell, and the only extra process on the phone is one bash shell.
- Aside from memory/cpu resources (not really scarce on a 192Mb phone), zero impact on the rest of the phone (I can compile a kernel whilst making a call at the same time).
I can now install and run any debian app. With a $12 4Gb micro-sd, I can install a *lot*. Access either via keyboard or network (ssh).
python and perl on my phone - w00t!
All I'm waiting on now is someone to create python modules to interface with the phone's GUI. And/or an X server.
Comment Re:Yes, very much so. (Score 2, Insightful) 1123
That's almost exactly how. Started at a small but growing local ISP, and worked my way up.
Also, trade conferences (geeky ones, not suity ones) are vital for getting contacts and job leads. Don't forget to attend the dinners.
A degree says you might be able to do a particular job. Experience _proves_ that you can do the job.
Comment Yes, very much so. (Score 4, Interesting) 1123
I never finished my degree, yet I have been able to pursue a computing career without it being a roadblock.
My present role is as an engineer at Google.
