ponnap

It seems to work for me.

  CL-USER> (defvar *arch-enemy* nil)
           (defun pudding-eater (person)
             (cond  ((eq person 'henry)(setf *arch-enemy* 'stupid-lisp-alien)'(curse you lisp alien - you ate my pudding))
           	    ((eq person 'johnny)(setf *arch-enemy* 'useless-old-johnny)'(i hope you choked on my pudding johnny)) 
          	    (t'(why you ate my pudding stranger?)))) 

  PUDDING-EATER
  CL-USER> *arch-enemy* 
  NIL 
  CL-USER> (pudding-eater 'johnny) 
  (I HOPE YOU CHOKED ON MY PUDDING JOHNNY) 
  CL-USER> *arch-enemy* 
  USELESS-OLD-JOHNNY 
  CL-USER>

Misleading title. Does not contain any 'story'.

"Most existing database clustering solutions rely on a shared disk storage to maintain their cluster state, as can be seen in the diagram below."

In the case of RAC, although state is written to a file called 'voting disk', the actual state of the cluster is communicated through a high speed inter connect which is redundant. Only if the network connection(s) are down, state is exchanged through the 'voting disk'.

Actually most production databases tend not to use ASM's High or Normal redundancy because the software level redundancy provided by ASM tends to perform very badly when compared to a storage controller driven RAID. External redundancy is usually chosen. ASM is primarily used to easily manage the disk groups when the volumes in the disk group tend to run out of space.

There are lot of use cases wherein 'dedup' helps, and it could be done in a number of ways. For eg: Lets say there is a huge email attachment and it needs to be sent to everybody in the company. Instead of saving a copy of the attachment in everybody's account, only one copy could be saved and others could point to this. Mail systems probably already do this. However, if this support natively existed in the file system layer, application developers could take advantage of this feature instead of rolling out their own 'dedup' applications.

"While not intended for occupants to remain inside during a hurricane, the structure is designed to minimize catastrophic damage and preserve the homeowner’s investment, Mayne says.

In case of a flood, the base of the house acts as a raft, allowing the home to rise on guide posts up to 12 feet as water levels rise. In the Lower 9th Ward, which saw some of the worst flooding in the city during Katrina, floodwater reached as high as 12 feet."

Looks like this helps 'preserve' your house in the event of flooding.

Mailinator.com already does something similar. It creates a random email ID on the fly and lets one use it too - to verify email IDs.

I am not sure why your cell phone bill has not changed much over the past few years. However, a quick Google search returned these results, and this information seems to be at least two years old:

http://in.rediff.com/money/2007/jan/10mobile.htm http://money.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?sid=10&cid=13...

"Bharti Airtel is investing $2 billion in 2006-07 to ensure the 'death of distance', which, hopefully, will further bring down call charges by 15-20 per cent. Moreover, with sharing of infrastructure among operators and the reduced burden of revenue sharing for universal access service licence (UASL), basic and cellular mobile service providers will lower operating costs and the benefits may again be passed on to the consumer.

Bottomline: If you pay Re 1 a minute for a local call today, you may have to pay 80 paise for the same tomorrow. Talk is cheap, tech is chief."

Thats a 20% reduction in margin.

Most of the revenue generated by cell phone service providers through their walled gardens seems to be from voice and not data. It would be interesting to see how long these service providers would continue to be profitable given their decreasing margins. Usage of the so called smart phones that help provide value added data services is not to be found in large numbers. Also, access to data is pretty expensive (when compared to the quality of service offered in the US). There have been instances of a few startups that have worked around this problem of expensive data services.

For example, there is this startup that strips and forwards email from lets say gmail, yahoo etc to an email associated with the cell phone number as an SMS for a very low price. SMS seems to be a very viable and inexpensive solution to target a large user base.

May be it exists in their coding guidelines? Although tablename.tablename_columnname sounds repetitive and verbose, it might in some cases be of help when one deals with too many tables and too many keys with the same name across tables.

How about taking the approach of Steve Blanks 'Customer development' about which, there was a thread a few days ago to figure out where one stands?

You could have all the money in the world and still make a product that nobody wants. Looks like a guaranteed path to failure.

"This is academic gobbledy gook.I felt like I was hearing a bad tech sales pitch flipping through this with all of its markitecture diagrams."

Is there a reason why you thought so? Are you aware of a better way of doing this, according to you? We'd like to hear.

True, and this is probably the reason for media obsession with celebrity related talk.

From the link above, it appears that they came up with an integration product that pretty much talks to all other systems at the customer site. Given this, I would speculate that the product probably does not deal with data that probably automates/affects/interferes with a patients diagnosis/procedure atleast as of now.

We've had them in my previous company. How different are they from the regular whiteboards?

They probably look a lot cleaner than the white ones after years of usage. If the ink in the marker dries out, it is harder to read than it is to, from a whiteboard. Can't think of others for now.

Given that the question reads "how to learn computer programming in 8 months?", I'd say there is no definite carved out approach to get there. Individual mileage might vary. However, as most other people have already suggested, "quickly building something" (preferably something that you care about) and trying to improve upon it will make you a decent programmer. In the process of trying to improve upon it, you would have hopefully figured out what is wrong with the existing program, quickly learn from it and come up with a better evolved program/product.

This is a well known thing and pretty much everybody on HN is probably aware of this.