I dont think the media "gets it wrong", although they do endemically, I think that media is reflective of ourselves.
If we dont see a threat, we dont react. If we dont see a threat the media wont react to it either.
This can operate in reverse, if we see a threat but the govt tells us its not a threat, the media will try to soothe our anxiety.
Maybe what the media fears is being drowned out by the mill of a thousand voices, none of which have any credibility, and so they follow the "dont throw pearls to swine" rule of not getting in the way and wasting their breath.
In the world of Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Jesse Ventura, Rand Paul, who wants to hear facts?
The "media" as we call it, is adjusting to the ability of our collective digestive tract to consume what they have to say.
And their adjustment is to say screw it. Its just (expletive ommitted)
I wont discredit your experience, however, I have been a consultant in several 64 bit shops, linux and solaris who had 64GB servers who could not scale above 8GB due to OOMs.
Also remember that if you are on linux doing that 28 GB heap you are living in the world of memory over-commit, which means if you actually tried to use that memory, you will probably segfault.
Again if you have done it great, no shop I have worked in, has been able to do it with app servers and keep their servers up reliably. Its a constant source of pain and I think JVM GC is not sufficient to scale at the level of current hardware.
I look at this a little differently, Im not going to opine on the character of the CEO or his employees.
Besides raw economic factors and the trend-happy game industry, I think its worth it to ask:
What on earth are we building? And why are we building it?
Its OK to build games we all need entertainment. Nothing wrong with that. But Zynga games were obsessive click factories which were as far as anyone can tell designed to be addictive.
As an engineer, I have worked at places that had so called "projects" designed to "get more clicks".
That may include a lot of web shops. Usually for ad revenue. But if you think about that from an engineering perspective, what a woeful, sad day it is to have your boss come to you with that mission.
Its the day you realize that what you built has no real value to the user, and is a self serving mechanism to get meaningless clicks out of your robot users.
In the old days we made software that people wanted to use and we didnt care how many times they clicked on a cow.
It seems the implication of the article is to say that we have potentially drawn the wrong conclusion on "which straw" broke the camels back.
And that if we drew the wrong conclusion that somehow this might impact or could have impacted the rationale for developing nuclear arsenals.
It's also popular in the US war college that officers attend, the statement that "Wars cannot be won by air power alone".
But beyond these details, whether the history is exactly right on what caused the Japanese to surrender, there is no doubt that the conclusion of WWII precipitated an arms race and a space race as Nazi scientists and technology were divided among the superpowers.
Nothing would have stopped the advancement of war making technology, no convenient conclusions about the strategic causes or effects.
Technology will advance whether we want it to or not. And whether or not its in out best interests as we perceive them in our posited "future".
There are many use cases for which EC2 is exactly perfect and not overpriced.
As a consultant recently I was tasked to build a service which (rather not say), I had good data on requests per day, total data storage, factored in ELB, etc.
The cost was less than 2K a year. Now consider that the company refused to buy hardware or pay anyone to support it because they had a full staff of sysops maintaining their (rather not say) at great cost in their own data center.
2K is absolutely nothing to a company. Most of us are not Netflix or Dropbox. Don't pretend you have those kinds of problems if you don't. It could have cost 3x that per year and they still wouldn't have noticed it.
AWS for manageable workloads is dirt cheap at scale. I think you'd have to be nuts not to use it.
While the JVM has an excellent garbage collector (maybe the best on the planet), it's performance is linearly degraded by the amount of memory a process is using.
If you go into any Java shop (which is where I live) and try to run a highly available system with more than 8GB of RAM in a server instance, you will be lucky to do that.
Servers on the cheap exist with 256GB of RAM, if you can't get to 12GB without OOMs, and GC pauses of 30 seconds, you will never get to a process that scales to this hardware.
Your GC pause on a 100GB system would be over a minute complete stop the world probably more.
And that's a shame, because the only antidote, is to over-distribute, and over cluster, and not only slow everything down by 1000X compared to a single server, but the engineering and operational costs to distribute everything into tiny 4GB buckets are also unacceptable.
I think the industry should rethink GC, if it can get past this boundary. 4GB walls and 8GB walls compared to the current availability of hardware is embarrassing.
I would rather not build a server that can't use all the memory I want it to without falling over.
My minimum required RAM metric is 256GB for a process. That could even be a fairly small (code wise) system that just needs a lot of RAM in which case manual memory management is a piece of cake.
The headline is a little misleading. What SFLC is saying is that patent licensing agreements are orthogonal to enumerated license terms of the GPL.
The construction of a patent claim has little to do with the license terms of the source.
Since no Android device makers will bother to challenge MS in court, we'll never really know what cards if any MS is holding. Must be nice to make millions of dollars for making a phone call.
Hm. Am I reading into this or is this article suggesting that we "help" the Iranian people avoid their governments censorship by setting up encryption and Tor nodes?
Are we to believe that folks in Iran trying to avoid the govt dont have these tools already?
And if they dont, do you want to be the person that shows someone how to setup encrypted communications over Iran's "Internet" and potentially put that persons life in danger?