Comment Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon (Score 4, Informative) 76
They spoke at re:Invent and mentioned that Amazon.com has been hosted on EC2 for a number of years: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f45Uo5rw6YY
Comment Re:You can get my data out of my cold, dead... (Score 1) 396
EC2 is PCI level-I compliant. See: http://aws.amazon.com/security/pci-dss-level-1-compliance-faqs/
California's Santa Clara County Bans Happy Meal Toys 756
WrongSizeGlass writes "The L.A. Times is reporting that Santa Clara County officials have voted to ban toys and other promotions that restaurants offer with high-calorie children's meals. 'This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children's love of toys' to sell high-calorie, unhealthful food, said Supervisor Ken Yeager, who sponsored the measure. 'This ordinance breaks the link between unhealthy food and prizes.' Supervisor Donald Gage, who voted against the measure, said, 'If you can't control a 3-year-old child for a toy, God save you when they get to be teenagers.' The vote was 3 - 2 in favor of the ban."
Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582
An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"
Comment Re:NSFW!!!!!!! (Score 1) 677
no they're not
Comment Re:High performance in scripting languages? (Score 1) 295
Sites like Amazon have already run into this and have moved away from scripting languages and back to system languages
You know Amazon's running on Perl Mason, right? http://www.masonhq.com/?AmazonDotCom
Comment Re:New York (Score 1) 920
If you're in Gainesville and love good pizza, you _must_ go to Satchel's Pizza... holy jebus, it's amazing.
Comment This doesn't surprise me at all... (Score 5, Interesting) 362
I went to a presentation a few years ago by a pair of eBay's senior engineers where they were discussing their architecture and technology. They explained their Java-on-Windows two-tier architecture (web front-ends which are handling all of the business logic, database backends, little-to-no caching, etc). They explained how they have pools of servers for handling different page types (i.e. search vs. gateway vs. help, etc) and how they sometimes have brownouts in some pools because they mis-predicted the number of servers they needed in that pool.
During the Q&A, somebody asked them, "what's the biggest challenge that you guys face?"; the response was "fitting enough information in the browser's cookie... 4k really isn't enough information for us". A follow-up question was asked about why they didn't just use a session-id key and store as much data as they want in a database or cache, etc. They basically admitted that they didn't have the technical strength to build something like that at their scale.
I asked them why they allow users to post JavaScript in their posts as it basically turns all of eBay into a cross-site scripting bug. I know for a fact that sellers have been able to include JS in their posts which can record the max-bid of the buyer. Sure, it's against the TOS, but only if they catch it. Their response was that it's what their customers (read sellers) want.
The point I'm getting to is that eBay, despite having one of the most popular websites in the world employs some bass-ackward technical solutions and business policies. What's reported in this doesn't surprise me at all.
Comment Seems reasonable (Score 4, Insightful) 594
If it's only vehicle location track, how is this different than having the police tail the vehicle or follow it via helicopter, etc. This seems like a lower-cost mechanism for doing the same thing. Is there more to it than that?
Comment Re:lego in the plural (Score 1) 210
It's due to trademark laws... the IP lawyers where I work remind us that trademarked brand terms should be used as adjectives and not nouns (despite the fact that they're generally referred to as nouns amongst "lay people"). For instance, Apple refers to the iPod(R) as the "iPod(R) mobile digital device" if you dig deeply into their docs.
It's the same thing for Lego... they're Lego(R) bricks, despite the common vernacular of Legos.
Comment Re:Sad to see it come to this (Score 1) 165
SGI played a part in that movie; namely the "famous" 3D file-system scene provided by the 'fsn' (file system navigator) demo app. Also featured were an array of Macintosh Quadra 700's and a group of Thinking Machine's Super Computer (which I'd bet is the only actual sale TM had, but that's my guess).
Thinking Machine Supercomputer
SGI was responsible for all/most of the CGI graphics.
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