Speaking as someone who's deployed and manages among the largest Cassandra clusters in production (at least on #cassandra nobody had heard of a cluster larger than 1700 nodes), I feel at least partially qualified to say that anything that does away with GC is already a massive improvement in latency, consistency, and likely (as a result) even throughput.

I've lost count of the number of incident bridges caused by GC shitstorms, and the number of hours lost to GC tuning and other GC related insanity.

Forget userland TCP stacks and other cleverness. Give me Cassandra exactly as it today except without GC and I'll be one happy camper. I would gladly pay the cost of reference counting which at least can be predictably amortized over the application's life cycle. And the programmer burden of manually breaking reference cycles (should they exist at all) isn't much to ask for in exchange for predictable latency.

CHEP pallets...

The Truckie above is right about CHEP pallets. These blue pallets with white lettering are ubiquitous in Australia, and there are a number of yards at which you can pick them up and drop them off.

Because it's a rental thing and pallets aren't free to manufacture, there's a penalty if you don't bring them back. AND -- amazingly -- it is at least sometimes NOT on the people who picked them up, or loaded or unloaded them, but on the person who authorised the job with the contractor, who may not have ever even SEEN the pallets in question.

Why would this happen? Because anyone can rock up to a CHEP yard with a bunch of blue pallets and receive back, in cash, the deposit for said pallets. Going pallet-hunting is apparently not an uncommon activity among Australian tradesman after a big night of drinking when the next payday is still days away. Most of us would have no reason to know this, and presumably the economy somewhat relies on this, but basically an unguarded CHEP pallet is like a $100 note (or whatever the deposit is... as I recall, it isn't a small number) sitting on the ground.

So, a friend of mine, in charge of maintenance for a piece of public infrastructure, one day had some maintenance done. The supplies for this apparently came on CHEP pallets. He knows this not because he'd ever been TOLD about any CHEP pallets by the workers... but because one day CHEP sent him a bill for $4,000. He wrote back, don't know anything about your pallets, never seen 'em, don't have 'em, not paying this invoice. SOMEHOW this degenerated into a personal attack by CHEP on him, calling him at home, nagging him for these pallets he'd had nothing to do with. It went on for months. His management backed him on not paying the invoice, but that didn't help in the context of CHEP taking the dispute personal.

One day he got sick and tired of this, and called up the contractors in the middle of the night. "Round up your mates, and round up a big-ass truck. We're going for a drive." And they drove around all night, picking up any blue pallet that wasn't nailed down. Final count it was something like hundreds of them, if I recall correctly. They dropped them off at CHEP. He used the funds to pay the CHEP invoice and pocketed the rest and told the contractors they better not ever say another word about this.

Apparently in recent years, CHEP has begun to bar code pallets so they can track them, so I have no idea if they're still easy, untraceable currency as they were 5+ years ago.

Hopefully the second option is only available to her if she has a demonstrated allergy or other adverse reaction to the flu shot? Otherwise, the two choices ought to be "get a flu shot" or "find another job" given how well established the risk-benefit is.

My parents gre up in the Great Depression. My mom's family had the only car on the block, and they took in 4-5 boarders at a time to make ends meet.

Now I myself am a boarder. Working overseas at less than half my old income in a coal mining town where housing costs 45% of my weekly paycheck. Mandatory insurance eats up another 10%. Then there's food (meat unlikely, as i cannot cook where I live, so I eat a lot of veggies out of the can, for example), detergent to wash my work clothes since I cannot afford to have them dry cleaned, etc. And that housing is a single non-airconditioned room big enough for a bed, garment rack and refrigerator. And hundreds of cockroaches and lizards no matter how many cans of spray I emtpy onto floors and into corners. In the tropics where 95 degree days are common. Kind of makes it not so bad that some mornings there isn't any hot water, because I need to cool off before going to work in my office geek job.

I was lucky to land this accomodation. Many people have it worse; I've heard my region leads the country in homelessness percentage. I begged my way into couch surfing for months while looking for impossible to find affordale housing that 2000 other people in town are also searching for. I was out on the street for a while, periodically when between accommodations. Lacking a car, I slept rough.

And I didn't have to use the daily newspaper for tp only because I could swipe some from a public restroom when needed. But the rest of it, like going without food for 3 days because I'd used up my stock of canned beans, while waitng for the next payday, is de rigeur.

If someone with a masters degree with 20 years experience working in a professional technical field is part of the working poor as a result of the events of the past 3-4 years, and even needed to leave the country to get a deal that good, the country has a problem.

Science is the empirical study of how things are. Religion is the normative study of how things should be.

Except that religion can't help but make empirical claims that routinely contradict the reality science reveals to us, and quite often in extremely absurd ways. If you want to subtract all the ridiculous claims of religion and jettison the supernatural elements and say instead that religion is "the study of how things should be" then you've just described moral philosophy. I've no problem with moral philosophy as such, but I have not seen anyone actually behave as if that's all they believed religion was.

It's all well and good to quote-mine the bible and say everything else is just details, except when the overwhelming majority of your fellow believers use those details to justify very damaging and immoral behaviour. And if the foundation of your morality is divine authority and the immoral prescription is in your holy text (and the new testament is hardly the moral exemplar), you have very little cause to argue with them.

... many have gone to their deaths defending their religious faith. There is something there that is dismissed much too casually.

I agree there is something interesting and important and relevant to human psychology, that many people will defend to the death some proposition they believe on insufficient evidence. But their willingness to die says nothing about the truth of those propositions, because people die for contradictory religions, and other absurd ideas. If you're compelled to believe in the Christian religion because people have shed their own blood or given their lives for religious beliefs, then why hasn't 9/11 made you a Muslim?

But to accept some Science on nothing more than faith in the Scientifc Method is, in the end, faith by any other name.

I've noticed that theists play this little trick, but it's equivocating on the word "faith" to ludicrous degrees. You might want to wave the semantic wand and call my tentative assent to various scientific theories "faith," but this is disingenuous, and I assure you that it bears no resemblance whatever to any sort of faith in a deity.

My acceptance of the results of science will change on a dime if evidence comes in to the contrary, and the degree of that acceptance scales in proportion to the evidence. Can you say the same about belief in God?

What I don't understand is why researchers waste all that time with properly controlled and blinded vaccine trials when we have your wonderful personal anecdotes, which obviously supersede the mountains of objective data that clearly establishes the value-risk proposition of vaccines. I also really appreciated your poisoning the well of Bill Gates, as if it invalidates his position on vaccines.

So here's to you, Mr. Youtube-quality-slashdot-commenter.

Ayers Rock (it's a big rock in outback Oz) paper scissors.

Gecko frightens non-Aussie-native human. Human's out, hiding away from gecko-attracting lights and insects (that would be, ohhhh, somewhere in Antarctica?)

Gecko eats spider. Spider's out, much in the sense that the innocuous paper covers rock.

Gecko v shark. Hardly a decent entree, where's the rest of the plate?

Shark v croc. How big a croc did you say it was? Less than 2.5m? Shark. One of those medieval guys? Croc.

I've brought my own laptop to a startup that employed me on a W-2 basis. The idea being, it's already set up with all of my dev and productivity tools, and I'm comfortable with its performance, so why spend $$ on giving someone a duplicate of what they already have (that I'm not using during business hours otherwise), if they're still willing to sign the agreement saying they give all rights to what they do for you in the workplace to the employer? (Note: it's crucial in these situations to make sure that you keep rights to your OWN stuff developed on the same hardware for non-work purposes.)

Another time, years ago, I was stuck with a 486sx PC. I had a Sun Sparcstation at home. I brought in the Sparcstation and was much, much, much more productive for two weeks, until the beancounters spied it and asked WTF? I copped to it being my personal machine, whereupon they directed me to take it home at the end of the day because it ran afoul of their insurance requirements that all in-house equipment be owned by the company. It was only months later that I realized they leased a crapload of machines from GE Leasing, and that I could have suggested, "Why don't you lease it from me for $1/month?", as a way around that if the problem REALLY was the insurance issue they described.

Still another time, I worked for a large tech company. Whilst they were a bit skittish about people's personal laptops being connected to the domain, as long as you went through the setup process to put all of their security software on your machine (and were willing to accept someone else's closed-source security software whose full functionality you could not predict), they tended to tolerate it. Eventually, they got more generous in handing out laptops.

At the same company, they have a policy of allowing personal phones to connect to the Exchange server for email and calendaring purposes. Not everyone gets a company cell phone, but since it's a company full of geeks, most employees have one of their own. Being able to catch up on your email in the morning whilst on the bus to work, and being reminded while you're out at lunch that a super-important meeting is beginning in 15 minutes and you better get yourself back to the office, are valuable things that contribute to productivity. Sure, the company may lose a bit in security by "opening up" their email server to personal devices, but multiple large and small companies I know have concluded that the tradeoff is worth it. Funny thing was, they didn't like iphone, and I THINK they might even have had an official policy against allowing iphones on their network, but since at least 20% of the technical staff at the company (a couple years ago) seemed to use iphones, I'm not sure it was enforced.

At my present employer, only high level managers and up have access to smartphone based email. Some other employees have company phones, but they're not net-access-capable. However, many employees seem to have Apple, HTC, Sony, etc. devices with smartphone functionality -- and many of them could benefit from being able to send "oops, I'll be a bit late, stuck in traffic" to the office, or check their email while out in the field, etc. So I'm currently playing change agent and talking up the benefits of allowing them access to company email from those devices.

That was my first thought. Gee, someone's rediscovered digital/analog conversion... funny how in this industry things that were ubiquitous 20 years ago sometimes pop up as the next new groundbreaking thins 20 years later. (Accessing centralized systems from relatively dumb/low-powered clients, I'm thinking of you, too! ;-)

You will always find a few crackpots or frauds like Wakefield who happen to have PhD or MD beside their names who will say absurd things and maintain positions not borne out by the evidence. The Discovery Institute has managed to put together an impressive list of ostensibly well-educated people (even biologists) who deny evolution. This does not mean this even remotely represents any scientific consensus. Project Steve is NCSE's satirical response to DI's lame list, a counter list of scientists who endorse evolution all named Steve (or some close variant).

The people who "knew" about a vaccine/autism link were similarly way out on the fringe. The literature you speak of is sparse, with low quality studies and/or tiny sample sizes, and the scientific consensus is overwhelmingly against any such causal connection, and has been for a long time now. Initial reaction to preliminary studies like Wakefield's is always met with skepticism, and then it trends toward a position as the data comes in -- in this case, the position that there is no link whatsoever.

You're right, I do also see a lot of similarities here with climate change.

Or put simply, who decides that a chicken has more of a right to live than a carrot? It's all empty-headed bullshit.

I've never been able to relate to the hostility shown by both sides of this issue. To me, it does seem to be a difficult, nuanced moral question. I especially don't understand the naturalistic argument, because in my view this isn't an "is" but an "ought" matter. I think a sensible starting line is whether or not the living thing you're eating has a nervous system, which quite clearly puts carrots and chickens in different camps.

I'm fairly undecided on this issue, but I can't help but shake the nagging feeling that I have some cognitive dissonance to work through. If you accept evolution (and I assume everyone here does) and you start with the premise that killing humans for food is morally wrong, then you're forced to evaluate the same question throughout the evolutionary tree (or bush, at is were). For those people that accept the premise and are settled on your side of the issue, presumably they have decided that the life of a chicken, or a pig, or a cow, or whatever has sufficiently low value to trade for convenience, nutrition, quality of life, health, etc. And these things will vary by person, admittedly -- in my case I suspect my eating meat is primarily a matter of convenience and quality of life. I doubt I need them to be healthy. But nor do I feel like I'm in a position to criticize those who are decided, except to discourage language like "wankoff jerkfest" used against those who hold differing opinions.

I'm reminded of Christopher Hitchens' position on abortion. He recognizes that it's a complex problem of spectrum. There can be no obvious line drawn through foetal development where you can say it's unambiguously morally ok to abort, so he's simply opposed to abortion at any stage for that reason (setting aside the mitigating factors like health risks, whether incest or rape was involved, etc.). To me, the moral question of meat-eating is similar non-obvious spectrum.

I think the ad also required Javascript to even be visible. At least, I use NoScript and didn't even know about the fundraiser until a friend mentioned it, and I never saw it until I enabled Javascript on Wikipedia. Might not be a large number of people, but you'd figure those who browse with NoScript (or with JS otherwise disabled) are the type who would be inclined to donate (likely technically savvy, probably gainfully employed, find Wikipedia useful, etc.).

http://www.foxtel.com.au/xbox/default.htm

$20 for the basic package (which is quite basic), and $15 each for additional sets of channels like sport, movies, Showtime, and "entertainment" (random channels that didn't get into the basic package ;-).

This is not perfect. For example, Fox Sports will black out AFL and NRL games that they would normally show on cable, because they don't have Internet broadcast rights for those games. But it seems to be a fair start at giving people tired of paying hundreds of dollars for hundreds of channels, when they may only watch 7 or 8 channels that just happen to be spread across a few different packages, an alternative to cable TV. Completely unbundled pricing -- subscribe on a channel by channel basis -- would be ideal, and this isn't there yet, but maybe it'll help push things in that direction.

I'd invite more scientific investigation of the field.

There's been quite a lot already. There is no science behind the core tenants of chiropractic, nor is there any verifiable evidence to support their more wacky claims. The practices of chiropractors that actually work are already done by physical therapists and related specialists.

Reminds me of Tim Minchin's Storm when he says: You know what they call "alternative medicine" that's been proven to work? Medicine.

So I suppose if you're educated and experienced enough to find a chiropractor who is only going to practice a sensible therapeutic intervention on you, then you might get some reasonable medical care. But then you still have to wonder why they aren't already a DPT.

Why is it that people jump on chiropractors all the time but not on psychologists?

Well, I agree that there's probably a lot of crap in practicing psychology, and there's also a lot of argument and controversy. But generally psychology practices trend along with the evidence. Cognitive therapy does actually have some evidence to show efficacy in certain circumstances, for example.