What an efficient robot. It is amazing how our entire lives are about being most "productive". Do we do anything just for the for the fun of doing it, in an unstructured unplanned way?
Using UUID(or anything other than sequentially increasing numbers) for primary keys is a good idea because when you have high number of concurrent inserts happening, if you have a sequentially increasing primary key(implemented via a b-tree index), the inserts into index will result in hotspot(as all the inserts will be at the end, in the same place). Whereas if it is random number (like UUID), the entry into indexes will happen at different places thus avoiding hot spots.
Public memory is short(how many remember the Top Gear review of model S now?). In few months people will forget about this episode. This may have negative short term impact(or may be not) on sales of Tesla cars/shareprice. But from Tesla's point of view, they got the following:
1) another test case, which they may not have accounted for, and they will use this to make future improvements
2) wide publicity, which may seem negative at this point, but lot more folks know now that it is possible to think of driving in electric cars outiside your city limits (it may not seem to have works as planned in this case), but nevertheless it is a possibility. CNN did another test ride, which again is more publicity.
Overall I see this as a net plus for Tesla in the long term.
Game consoles are irrelevant from point of view of gaining/retaining big chunk of consumer market. There is a reason why Apple avoided this market (instead of focussing on music, then phone and of course tablet), while Microsoft was busy competing with Sonys and Ninentendos in early formative years of Xbox. In less than five years, this whole game console thing will be a feature in TV/tablet etc.
Rather than self-driving cars, I see hype-loop kind of system being more effective overall(reliable, cheaper). Obviously a lot more work has been done(Google) on self-driving cars but I would secretly hope/wish that Elon really gets cracking on this thing(especially since he has to regular suffer one of the worst commutes in the world - 405 freeway in LA - especially that particular section).
In the long run what is going to hurt SQL server is the fact that it is on Windows only. And if you look at the technology trends for databases - big/midsize IT shops are gravitating towards integrated solutions(Exadata e.g) where Microsoft still relies on third party for hardware. Small shops/startups are gravitating towards commodity hardware(primarily linux based), where trend is more towards MySQL/Postgre/NoSQL, where Microsoft is lacking. And then the cloud (where Microsoft does have an early presence, but then Amazon has been there long before and Oracle is there in too)....In that context this In-Memory database technology tussle is playing out, which was clearly ignited by SAPs Hana (even though oracle had times-ten long before SAP came out with Hana). So looking at future market direction, things are not looking very good for SQL server, even though it is probably one of the best products to come out of Microsoft and currently is doing great.
On the contrary, I suggest 20s is the best time to explore who you actually are - so called "hippy" stuff. As later on it just becomes that much more difficult. Whether you end up building a great company or end up doing a regular job in your later years, it will not mean much if you did not find out who you actually are, what is your purpose in life (all those silly questions we all pondered sometimes but never actually pursued). Once explored thoroughly, and if the conclusion was that your purpose in life was to do a start-p(or startups) and establish a successful company, then it will be worth it. Otherwise, neither your startup will be successful, or if successful, your life will still be miserable. Better to figure all this out in 20s, instead of focusing primarily on your career.
I would attribute this to the following:
1. As a society, and culturally India historically has not given sufficient importance to physical fitness. So while historically there was great importance given to spiritual and philosophical pursuits(they had universities setup more then thousand years back dedicated to philosophy - Nalanda), the physical/bodily aspect was not only overlooked but considered almost an overhead/obstacle to ultimate goal in life. Even Yoga's birth(in India) was related more to spiritual pursuit. Not surprising to see origins of Chess in India(even though Chess is a sport, but it is mental). And India does reasonably good in Chess even now.
2. Even the food habits, historically, in India are geared more towards supporting this bent towards mental/spiritual aspects than physical. Hence prevalence of vegetrianism. Now vegetarianism can be one of the healthiest lifestyle(there has been known triathletes who are pure vegetarians)...but that requires a well balanced diet - which is not the case for majority in India(for most in India, vegetarian diet has lot of grease and less nutrition).
3. There is a reason why Cricket is the most popular sport in
India - it does not require great physical fitness yet you can play it for hours. And cricket does grab a lion share of sporting opportunities in India (and most lucrative).
3. Prevalent thinking still is that sports is waste of time, and you are better of spending that time on studies...hence you will see abundance of Indian American spelling bee champs even here in US, yet you will not see many in athletics
4. Combine that with lack of creativity and focus from Government in India in identifying(and persisting) with a sport which can fetch medals (like Turkey etc)
Look at from all those IT mangers/decision makers point of view at big corporations. And there is lot of Java there in those corporations. They previously may not have known that Oracle is linked with Java(in a big way). Now they know.
I think most of the folks overlook one key point - which is the fact that this was free publicity for Oracle. Some would say in a bad way, but that is if you think purely from ability to use/improve open source software(which I agree). However I also feel Oracle was in this not just from that angle but also to show to the world that they are the owners of Java(sort of). When they bought Sun, in essence they did become owners of Java (in a way). But this case has probably done more to broadcast this message that than they could have done using ads. Most of the folks know Oracle as the database company - this case helped broadcast Java linkage of Oracle. As they say, sometimes bad publicity is better than no publicity(you reach audience which you would never reach or need to spend lot of money to get similar results).
Now there is an alternative to Objective-C in iOS development(for Rubyists). This is similar to development of Coffescript. There is nothing wrong with Objective-C, it is just that folks who prefer the elegance and beauty of Ruby have an option. I think this will be great combination - beautiful & elegant language for creating apps on a beautiful platform.
Very informative and sense of humor is not only awesome it conveys the point very well. This is one of the most truthful and at the same time hilarious commentary on doing a startup.
These pearls of wisdom are no less than PG's essays. What I find most impressive about his wisdom is that it had withstood the test of time....it's not just about finding the next big idea and executing it when you are 20/30 something and then do what? It goes much more deeper than that. It is about how to maintain genuine interest in programming, over a period, measured in decades(spanning all different type of envmts) and not years/months...To me that is the ultimate measure of success(for a hacker atleast).
What is considered as "good/ethical/moral" is relative...to individuals and time...few hundred years back, to even think that earth goes around sun, was considered not good/unethical/amoral by lot of folks...
Not sure I would agree complete with this assessment. Reason Microsoft was able to get that kind of stronghold was due to applications(Word, Excel - though they copied these - and others vendor apps/drivers written exclusively for windows). It is pretty much the same reason why desktop Linux is not able to make much inroads into the windows desktop OS market(it's the apps). Of course Apple and Google are trying to just bypass this market altogther(handheld, web). But it is the apps those matter and not sure where does VMWare has the apps to lock folks into the VMWare?
I would like to agree with this and hope this is true. As Steve Jobs once said he would much rather be considered as builder rather than trader. And so building part of entrepreneurship is more like an art. As unpredictable and challenging starting up a company is, I would like to think that it is the art aspect of it that makes it somewhat fun as well. As difficult, unpredictable & dangerous doing a startup may be, there must be this fun aspect of it(which is more artistic) that makes it fulfilling. Else it will be just like another exam(to be passed, graded to be acquired).
This is probably the best explanation of the effectiveness of the customary greeting extended even to strangers in US. It may sound mechanical but it does serves an important purpose.
On the contrary I think whenever you get into a situation where there is an overlap in functionality, that means it needs to be further broken down into more smaller independent units. I see tremendous value in adhering to this philosophy, and usefulness of Unix is a testament to it. That does not means there are no shortcoming in the overall Unix approach but as far as this particular philosophy is concerned, I think it is very smart strategy to adhere to. Look at nature, our different body parts are specialized for specific functions(for example eyes, ears etc) and they do those functions remarkably well and when you combine these, we can recognizing the physical world.
This article provides a very good insight into what makes someone a genius (and certainly it is not just the talent). I think perspective/vision is a key thing here, combined with passion and hard work.
Although Sproutcore and Rails seems to be geared towards different domains(and seem complimentary to each other); the comparison was quite useful because of the simple way it was explained.
I liked it. Lot of folks may already know some or most of this. But it is distilled all in once place, and as the post mentions, it will surely help in quickly moving forward with a polished looking app.
What is probably most significant point of this article is that he has enjoyed programming for that long and still enjoys it, and gets to do it. It is refreshing to read that, amongst all the craze for startups, somewhere folks are interested in programming as a hobby, as an art. And not just high school or college but life-long. I certainly think that just like music, art, sports there is an aspect to programming which is as fulfilling as these art form. And more than the end goal, the act itself is also filled with purpose and fun.
Oracle RAC may come closest to addressing most of these issues. Of course it is pricey. However it fulfills pretty much all the constraints mentioned here - application transparency while scaling(sharding does not involve changing the app), horizontal scalability(add nodes as needed), failover for both read & write transactions. It sounds like sale-pitch for RAC but it seems to geared to deal with these kind of scenarios.
Sending clear text passwords in email might itself be in an issue. However, if all he wanted was to regularly send clear text passwords in email to the users, he still could have encrypted the passwords before saving it in the database. And when sending password to user, decrypt it while taking out of db and send it.
I have not used shapoo/soap for my hair and body for more than 10 years now(my skin was not happy with soap). Have not had any issues(and I shower everyday). Also I try to use hot water whenever I can instead of soap. In my case this has more to do with sensibility than for the environment. Also I feel that, not only shampoos & soaps may actually not be good for the body, the real way to have health hair and skin is having proper nutrition and good life-style.
I was wondering how much effort it took them to implement these practices. In a typical Oracle based systems, some of features are invariably used(sequence, triggers) even if you assume that application were already written to not have any stored procedures or PL/SQL (which itself is rare for a system implemented in Oracle). Some of these best practices I would not call them best practices: for example using natural keys for primary keys, not sure if that is a good idea. And setting up kind of replication he is talking about is not easy to setup. One of the reasons he gave for this migration was that they wanted to save their eng resource to focus on product related stuff but this migration itself would have cost them significant resources to done.