Reference?

It's not just pictures and music that they're storing in salesforce, it's sales records. So yes they will change every time a salesperson changes something thanks to meeting a customer, sending them a quote, or any of a bunch of activities which occurs all the time in a normal sales operation. And changes can be erroneous so having full versioning is a very good idea.

And sorry but invoking clusters as any sort of solution to data protection just placed you firmly in the "don't know what they're talking about" camp.

Now do it again every time there is any update to your data. Let me know when you hit $3,000. With the numbers you are quoting you'll be looking at somewhere significantly less than a second.

You know, a lot of these setups might be making 30, 40 or even 50 points of margin but the whole "I could do it for cheaper" when you're talking tiny amounts of data and no real understanding of most of the use cases is just very very wrong.

Yep worked with a lot of monospaced fonts and Consolas is about as good as I've found. Of course, if anyone out there knows of a better font I'm always interested in hearing about it...

Yeah I get what happened, but then that's an internal issue for Dropbox. Putting it up as part of their explanation for what happened just seems like a diversionary tactic (everyone thinks "ooh I use the same password in different places, maybe it's partly my fault" as opposed to "Dropbox have some really bad security policies in place, I wonder how much more of my information is sitting in Dropbox employees' personal stashes?")

Okay so yes it's a good idea to have different passwords for each website, but given that the emails were obtained from a file held in a Dropbox employee's account I'm not sure why they are talking about it in the context of this break-in.

And yes, two-factor authentication would be very nice. Please do it using an already-existing system like YubiKey rather than make your own.

A lot of the anger here is because the patents that Apple are using are garbage technically speaking but because they have been granted Apple is using them to stifle competition.

Let's see: slide to unlock. I have a 'phone with a touchscreen and some physical buttons. I can interact with the 'phone by:
    - pressing the buttons, one or more at a time, in a given sequence
    - touching the screen in one or more places
    - moving my finger(s) around the screen

The above list is *it* in terms of the user communicating with the 'phone (I'm ignoring the gyroscope and GPS for the moment). *All* types of communication are going to be some combination of these. The fact is that Apple patented one of these (already known and frankly blatantly obvious) methods of interaction in a specific situation (taking the 'phone from a locked to an unlocked state) and call it "innovative" and are using it to block the sales of competing products.

Guarding your technical innovations: fine. Reducing competition through enforcing bogus claims backed by a broken legal system: not fine.

Apple didn't sign up to a deal when they first started selling the iPhone. Now that they have sold so many of them any 'fair and reasonable' per-unit cost turns out to be a massive sum in aggregate and Apple is choking on it. Wouldn't have been a problem if they'd done what they should have in the first place.

Nope, although in general there is a lot less speaking going on as you don't need the lengthy exposition to understand what's going on. You *see* what's happening, and so it all flows a lot more naturally than the "Here's my problem: go solve it for me by picking up 10 items/killing 10 creatures" that most MMORPGs provide.

Oh, and if you managed to reach end-game in SWTOR then GW2 will be a revelation. Big world Vs. world battles with 100+ players on-screen and no noticeable lag during the last beta event. If PvP is your thing, especially large-scale PvP, then GW2 is definitely worth a look.

Play is in a bit of a transition, however. The 'new' play is Play 2, and it's still missing a lot of functionality when you start to dip under the hood and try to build out a real application (as I did over the last week or so). A number of basic features around DB integration, user management and other 'core' features aren't where they were in Play v1.

I ended up going with Python and flask for the early stages of my app, and figure that I can worry about moving back to Play 2 as/when it's ready and needed. As long as the backend database and model is the same it shouldn't be that painful a transition and prototyping with Python is *quick*.

Note that the above comments apply to the Java side of things, it's different if you're working with Scala as it uses different underlying technologies.

I suspect that Microsoft doesn't care much about linux one way or the other; if users want to tweak a BIOS option and run linux it won't bother them.

However, I wonder if Microsoft is looking at the far more lucrative fact that those with Windows 7 and Vista licenses will be forced to buy a new Windows 8 license or else run an "insecure" setup. It gets rid of a problem that they've had for years where users upgrade their hardware and keep their old OS around.

Seems like a massive money spinner in the medium term for them.

Yep that'll be Cherenkov radiation.

And some people have this funny belief that true freedom applies to everybody. If I write code under a free license then everyone should be free to do with it as they will, no restrictions. Otherwise it isn't free: in "protection from" Vs. "freedom to" the freer one is the one with the word "free" in it. Doesn't seem so hard to understand to me.

In-memory data storage is fine as long as it isn't primary data storage. Yes it's faster but there are a lot of downsides as well. The most important is that it isn't easy to share between servers (a close second is that it's hard to replicate to a remote site for disaster recovery purposes) so each server needs to have its own copy of the data and there needs to be some way of keeping all that data in sync.

The alternative is to have good old "traditional" storage sitting where it always sits and when the servers boot up or start their processing they load in the appropriate data set from the storage in to memory. This gives you all of the benefits of the fast in-memory processing without worrying about all of the downsides you create by using it as primary storage. So the memory isn't storage, it's cache.

So the real battle that will take place is not between hard disks and memory, it will be between RAM and SSDs.

No, the basic rules are:
      - Don't post sensitive user data on public sites

The rest is damage limitation.