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This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

And for those who don't know, VNC (the official version) IS available for old version of mac OS (both for 64K and PPC processors). Oh, and it works with Linux and windows too. http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/

I've used VNC a lot of linux, windows and a bit on the mac. It works great and you can't beat the price.

but not go off the deep end of OO like C++ did

C++ is hardly "off the OO deep end". Not in the sense that Smalltalk, or even Java, is. In the words of it's creator:

C++ is a multi-paradigm programming language that supports Object-Oriented and other useful styles of programming. If what you are looking for is something that forces you to do things in exactly one way, C++ isn't it. There is no one right way to write every program - and even if there were there would be no way of forcing programmers to use it.

As a longtime C++ user, I can attest to this fact from personal experience. In fact, there have been times when I've wished C++ was more OO than it is.

I've been using the expression "just google for X" when referring friends to some site about X that I know shows up high on the hit list. It's funny, google is starting to replace DNS for me-- instead of remembering or bookmarking URLs, I just remember the keyword to google for. For example, the URL http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/ is harder to remeber than to just type "vnc" and hit "I'm feeling lucky."

I often wonder how much less productive I would be if google went away tomorrow :) If anyone from google.com is reading this, thank you!

The bells never merged. There was AT&T and that was it.

Check this link

Standard Oil didn't merge with anyone. They bought or crushed all their competitors.

Right. They bought their competitors, or merged with them in the business sense. Check this link

Happy now ?

hmm.. According to AT&T's year 2000 balance sheet, they had cash assets of $126,000,000 lying around at the end of the year, not to mention $3,341,000,000 they paid to stockholders in dividends. Good to see they have their priorities straight....

hmm.. According to AT&T's year 2000 balance sheet, they had cash assets of $126,000,000 lying around at the end of the year, not to mention $3,341,000,000 they paid to stockholders in dividends. Good to see they have their priorities straight....

Interesting. However, many experts do disagree with you, including Bjarne Stroustrup and Marshall Cline.

ATT and NTT DOCOMO announced a strategic partnership way back in November 2000, " to develop the next generation of mobile multimedia services on a global-standard, high-speed wireless network...As part of the agreement, AT&T Wireless will license from NTT DoCoMo itsi-mode technology platform." As well, over the past few weeks regular advertisements have appeared in the NYT and WSJ promoting the IPO that mention a nationwide roll-out of i-mode in the US.

I still don't really see what the big fuss is about these next generation services. The two basic constraints are bandwidth and device. I bet that ATT uses G2.5 technology to bring about this nationwide roll out, G3 is just too cost prohibitive right now. In that case, you will not receive a high-latency network connection with a theortical thouroughput of ~128kbps. If you have ever used DSL, you will not tolerate this for general web surfing. The bigger problem, imho, is that a cell phone makes a lousy interface to use the internet. The screen is, by definition, far too small. There is no easy way of typing in text. I really believe in the Palm.net approach with applets that cache most data on the handheld device conducting database queries to provide location and time-sensative information. Especially with the new i705 keyboard, it is easy to input web addresses. I think in the short and medium terms that people will receive certain high-value services, like email and location/time sensative databases, on a handheld and will either wait for home/office/hotel/school for wired internet use or will use wi-fi to connect at high traffic areas like Starbucks or airports. Just my two cents.

Reports that there is indeed snow in the Arctic, and that the sun still rises in the east were met with shock and disbelief.

"What next? Will huge market monopolies and conglomerates start abusing their strengths and taking advantage of the naivete of the average citizen?" said one surprised onlooker who refused to be identified.

I really can't believe people are surprised by this.. companies have been nailing users with 'hidden costs' and bills for services they never signed up with for years.

But lets face it.. AOL users have never been noted for their abundant intellects and computer-savvy, which is exactly why these are the perfect people to try silly marketing techniques on. How much of this is AOL's fault, and how much of it is the fault of the user himself? These users DO have the option of turning off these ads. And if they can't figure it out for themselves, then you have access to AOL's ever-so-helpful tech support (or the neighborhood computer geek).

As much as I dislike AOL and think this type of marketing scheme is completely ridiculous, the blame needs to be shared equally here. If the user can't be bothered to figure out how to turn off those invasive ads, who's to say they didn't click through a time or two?

VNC is your answer. Period (in my opinion) the point being that if it's good enough to run the ATT UK research lab (formally Olivetti Research lab) it's surely good enough for your University. It works both ways. (from or to linux/mac/windows) can be secured over ssh and requires a minimul system on the "recieving" end. ( I've used a 486 as the terminal end quite nicely). You can find out all the info/numbers you will need at www.uk.research.att.com/vnc

Sure you can. Tons of companies do it succesully. Local phone bills, AOL, cable, etc. Certainly there is a tendency for people to see that their costs are affected by usage, and decide that revenues should come in the same way. And that frequently is the easiest thing to do when developing a business model, but it can cause customers undue mental anguish (when they have to constantly monitor their usage), and is frequently much more costly from a billing perspective. Andrew Odlyzko (formerly of ATT) has a fascinating paper on this, which also comments a lot on communications technologies. Long but good.

Consider using VNC. I believe it's free (as in beer). From their website:

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing 'desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures.

You can't make money selling a metered resource at a flat rate.

Er... you mean like AOL's $23.95/month internet service? Or perhaps the newly-unveiled AT&T Unlimited Plan? Or local telephone service in the U.S.?

Yes, it's tough to code in C and still keep things secure, especially for inexperienced programmers. But people developing at the OS level need the speed and performance of C. We can't get that amount of speed with Java, C#, etc. There's always a trade-off.

Interestingly, there's a C dialect called Cyclone by AT&T which tries to give the best of both worlds. It doesn't allow careless code (that becomes buffer overflows, etc.) but it doesn't sacrifice performance either.

Yes and no. The discussion veered to what happens when you become the extended family's resident Tech Support department. This can as easily happen with Windows as with Linux (actually, it is more likely to happen with Windows, since it is more common and it breaks more frequently...)

As for VNC vs. SSH, I did remember one advantage of using VNC (to access a Windows machine, anyway), is that the person at the other end gets to see the cursor moving to the appropriate places (Control panels, etc.) and thus learns a thing or two about their machine (if they're paying any attention, that is). For Linux, though, you need to use a different program, which you can get here. I haven't personally tried it on Linux, but I've been told it works really well.

Windows is complicated for new users...but by they time they are familiar with it, they can migrate to Windows-friedly desktops (such as KDE or a correctly-configured GNOME) very easily. In other words, if Granma did learn how to surf the web with Windows, she can migrate to surfing on Linux in no time - though I suggest tweaking her installation to make the transition as seamless as possible.

A little advice, which is as valid for Windows or Linux: if you end up being the family's "tech support" and you don't live at home...install VNC on their computer. That way you'll be able to administer their system remotely directly from your desktop, instead of by telephone (always a a pain!)...

AT&T labs have produced something they call Sentient Computing, and while technically it may not be sentient, it would probably be kind of creepy. Each person wears a "bat" which lets a central computer monitor their whereabouts, and based on information fed to it by various sensors, can deduce what the person is doing.

This is a neat system; you can point at things with the bat and the computer will respond (like pointing the bat at a poster to choose scanner settings), however, since this computer is tied into the phone system (among other things), this could get kind of scary.

• On the good side: China [...] to keep spreadin' the news that "Information good."

Er, good side: USA. To find DeCSS or similar tools without fear of prosecution, for example, or to keep spreadin' the news that "Censorship bad, even when it's done by a (heh) democratically (heh heh) elected (heh heh heh) administration."

• as a Security Manager in a bank who's sometimes asked to go find out if person XYZ has been accessing nakedhairyeyebrowedcheerleaders.com, I can see how this utility might make it impossible for me to do my job

Depends on what your job is. If your job is to protect the bank from liability, anonymised browsing allows you to state with certainty "Nobody can link us or our employees with porn surfing. Not us, not nobody."

If you've been tasked with catching a known baddie in the act (perhaps at preteenlolitas.com), then you've got keyloggers, machine caches (they don't have admin access, right?) or just drop VNC on their machine and catch them with their pants down, so to speak.

I appreciate your concerns, but really, wouldn't it actually make your job easier if users showed a little courtesy and consideration, and stopped waving their dodgy surfing habits in your face (so to speak)?

How about something like Crowds?

For starters, the technology that Mono is based on is standardised, while java is not. Why boost Suns proprietary language ? You might respond by asking "why boost Microsofts proprietary language", but the fact is that .Net is a proprietary implementation of an open standard, so Mono isn't necessarily boosting Visual Studio .Net any more than g++ is boosting Visual C++

Bullshit. CLR was not developed in the open, and as it evolves if the "spec" deviates from Microsoft's implementation, the "spec" will be wrong. It's that simple. CLR is Microsoft's or it is stagnate. Why? Beacuse they don't have a Stroustrup doing evolution in the public.

Simple. Windows comes with a huge default set things you're allowed to link against. Somewhere, it says: "you can link against all this stuff for no royalty". If I go out and buy a copy of Windows and write a Windows apps, then I dynamically link against all libraries in Windows. I sell my app. Done.

Imagine if a Windows developer had to review every single DLL inside of c:\windows\system to check for licenses. It takes time. Some licenses are written such that only a lawyer can figure out what they mean. "Oh, yes, Mr. Lawyer, please read these 423 licenses and tell me which one I can use. What, that will only cost $35,000 for your time? Nevermind!"

If I got out and buy a copy of Foo linux, it has 500,000 libraries on it, each with a different license. Each time I link in a different one I have stop and read to see if I'm allowed to do so.

Now here's the kicker: to get anything non-trivial done in Linux, you need to link against the libraries. But you can't link in a GPL library unless you plan to give away your software.

So, if you want to sell something, you have to roll your own. THAT is what's slowing down progress on Linux.

I think it is 100% retarded to write a low-level library and release it under the GPL instead of the LGPL. (And yes, I write both free and propietary software. I have no paranoid delusions about one destroying the other.)

All I need is a motivation.

Just like when I understood the idea of inheritance and the real OO code reuse, together with the idea of moving data to the foreground and that with a good data you need simple algorithms -- that day I understood, that I have to learn Smalltalk, Objective C, C++ and OO Perl.

Today I need to know why I need to learn how to think with the functional paradigm. It's a serious problem, which stops many people before they learn functional languages.

Many years ago I was writing C programs to process text, and I could do everything that way, I just didn't realize, that there were better ways to do the same. That was before I knew Regular Expressions, egrep, sed or Perl. Now I write Perl one-liners for tasks, which used to take me days of writing C code, but I didn't know that before, because "If the only tool you have in the toolbox is a hammer - every problem looks like a nail."

So now I ask for a reason to learn the functional way of thinking. I need to know it before I actually learn them, just to have a strong imperative. Learning the new way of thinking is a long and hard process, I just want to know what waits for me at the end.

I hope someone who know that reason, will tell me and those who also need it, why it's worth the efford. Thanks in advance.

-- Your Anonymous Coward who wants to learn new ways of thinking...

This could be very useful in a large networked environment, for monitoring system status on your servers remotely. It wouldn't even require modification of the system, if your server has "statu page" accessible by web browser. Alternatively, you could use VNC and get the added benefit of not only monitoring your server remotely, but being able to perform system maintenance remotely.

I suppose the VNC scenario would depend on a couple of things:

1. Input problems. Can that stylus/on-screen keyboard be used quickly enough once you get used to them? Having to carry around a USB keyboard all the time would put a serious dent in its usefulness for remote administration.
2. Using the VNC server's built-in web server, which has permission to serve up one single page containing a Java applet that hooks into VNC to allow web-based control, might be a problem. Looks like the review had a hard time getting Java to work properly in Mozilla.
3. Using VNC like this might open up some security concerns, particularly if you're a large company. Under ordinary circumstances, you can tunnel VNC through SSH to increase its security, but I don't think that would work in this case without modifying the aquapad in such a way that Mozilla could understand SSH. Still, if you have the know-how that can be done -- ain't open-source great?

If you're a bit more daring, I bet you could modify this in such a way as to make it a nice, portable media outlet. It's got an MP3 player already. It'd take some doing, but you could make it capable of streaming movies over the network also. 802.11b's 11-megabit pipe is fine for DivX-encoded movies. (Note: the thing's OS is flash-based. If you try making modifications and screw it up . . . it wasn't my idea! Unless you are a Linux Guru, capable of causing device drivers to rewrite themselves by sheer force of will, it's probably best to leave well enough alone.)

One hopes that future versions might include 1) a hard drive, for example an IBM microdrive, which would make fiddling with the OS's guts a lot simpler and safer. Note that the article says the Windows CE version already uses a microdrive -- so maybe you could get a windows version, wipe it, and install Linux? 2) USB 2.0 instead of 1.1. 3) *Integrated* 802.11b, so you could use that PCMCIA slot for something else.

Finally -- that green-haired chick that serves as Midori's emblem is cool. I wonder what she's looking at. Perhaps she is looking down at Tux, and wondering how it is that she came to be co-starring with a penguin.

GCC can already do that, or at least it does an reasonably OK job. It's really more a question of having a good STL implemenation, IMHO. Here are a couple of links (shamelessly ripped from the compilers part of Bjarne Stroustrup's C++ FAQ):

C++ conformance roundup and boost.org's compiler status page.

VNC ! It's free, cross platform (linux, windows, ...) and you can download it here .

VNC ! It's free, cross platform (linux, windows, ...) and you can download it here .

I find that Java simply outshines C++ because it doesn't leave me dealing with low level stuff, like pointers.

Then perhaps you should learn how to use C++.

Not to flame you -- I'm usually the first person to use the right-tools-right-job argument -- but one of the best books to teach C++ doesn't even mention pointers or builtin arrays until chapter 10. They teach C++, not C features that happen to show up in C++.

After having used C++ quite heavily for a decade, even I found parts of this book refreshing. I highly recommend it, both to beginning programmers, and crusty veterans like us.

They also spec'd the motherboard as an "A7B266-D". I'm guessing this is the A7M266-D, as there is no A7B266-D (no one else is even considering manufacturing an SMP Athlon chipset besides the forthcoming Micron Scimitar)

It seems to me like this is a rather poorly thought out spec. Why are they using 4 FastTrak100 TX2s when they could use 2 FastTrak100 TX4s? Which of course brings up another point, why are they even using FastTraks? Under Linux the FastTrak driver is quite immature, and last time I used it only worked with 2.2 kernels, which hinders tbe ability to use filesystems like XFS. Also, the FastTrak cards are essentially software RAID as they offload the work of calculating the stripe locations onto the host CPU. There's no point in using md to combine multiple FastTrak arrays.

Many people were mentioning the 3Ware Escalade. It is a relatively good card, but for a home storage array Linux md + XFS might be a better choice. (Also note that the advantages of 64-bit PCI couldn't be had with the A7M266-D as it doesn't include any 64-bit PCI slots. Perhaps the Tyan Tiger would be a better choice for a 3Ware solution) My recommendation would be 3 Promise Ultra133 TX2 controllers. The read and write performance on an Escalade 7410/7810 is appaling. With the embedded processor on the 7450/7850 (R5Fusion Technology, as 3Ware calls it) the performance exceeds that of software RAID, but at the much more expensive price, of course. I think the goal here is bulk storage and not performance, and the ATA133 controllers are by far the cheapest solution.

For more information on IDE RAID under Linux, check out this site It's information is a bit dated at this point, but I used it for my home storage server and haven't regretted it. With 5 7200RPM drives on Promise Ultra100 controllers and Linux md RAID-5 w\ XFS, my bonnie++ scores are 90/30MBs for sequential read and write, respectively. I couldn't be happier. This site also has benchmarks showing the superior performance of software RAID over a hardware solution with a 3Ware card.

And there were a few other things people seemed confused about. No one in their right mind would put more than one drive per channel for the purposes of a performance RAID. That's just foolish. As for the limitation of being unable to access both the primary and secondary IDE channels simultaneously, this limitation was removed years ago with the introduction of EIDE.

In as far as everything else goes, I'm a SCSI bigot. I have SCSI drives in my workstations and I couldn't be happier. However, IDE RAID is a very economical solution for a home user, often with performance on par with that of more expensive SCSI RAID solutions.

To conclude, this article seems very poorly researched and documented. Had they actually attempted to build this beast and failed, perhaps I would've been more amused. However, as stands it's an overpriced specification which uses incompatible parts, and little research has been done on the optimum parts for the configuration.

A little dated but still contains usefull insight.
Linux IDE-RAID Notes

A number of years ago I spent a long time researching KVMs and came to the conclusion that they're really not that much of a solution in reducing clutter.

I went with another solution VNC it reduced cables etc and allowed me to locate all my hardware except one PC in a machine room.

I had ten windoze PCs, a few Linux boxes, A Sparc Solaris and an Apple Imac all accessable from my Linux desktop.

Of ourse as a software solution the remote machine has to be running but you can login, logout reboot etc

I can't believe you guys modded a troll up to 3...

I guess this sucks?

Or This?

This?

This?

These?

This stuff?

IDE is here to stay in the high end market, and it's going to kick SCSI's ass. Why pay 3X more per drive for the same HDA with a different interface board?

This is from the server in the first link above. Note that most of the write bottleneck is caused not by the drives but by the hardware RAID5 controller.

Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
bedford 1G 24436 11 22834 13 83890 43 361.2 2

...go to AT&T's help page about what's going on with the mediaone domain. If that doesn't work as a direct link, there's a link to that page from the main help page. I would look to those pages for updates if you haven't gotten the official email yet (has anyone?).

...go to AT&T's help page about what's going on with the mediaone domain. If that doesn't work as a direct link, there's a link to that page from the main help page. I would look to those pages for updates if you haven't gotten the official email yet (has anyone?).

I've been frustrated with AT&T Broadband ever since I signed up. They block port 80 (which wasn't spelled out in my user agreement, although the 'no servers' rule was), they use your MAC address to limit your access to a single computer, they don't offer static IPs at all.

(Obviously, most of these things are easy to get around. They're just annoying. When I signed up, AT&T was the only broadband service available to me, since you asked. :)

What's interesting to me is that no where on AT&T Broadband's site do they mention that they also provide consumer DSL service, hidden in their business site. I actually stumbled across this during another unrelated search.

I just found it interesting that AT&T isn't promoting this at all. Apparently they want consumers only on cable modems. Any thoughts as to why, especially when they've been having so many problems with their cable network?

XMill by AT&T is free (not quite GPL, but the source is there too), and it takes advantage of the redundancy in XML data so that it's super efficient. Here are some comparisons to plain old gzip compression (it blows it away). It'd be horrible on random data, but it squishes XML like you wouldn't believe.

XMill by AT&T is free (not quite GPL, but the source is there too), and it takes advantage of the redundancy in XML data so that it's super efficient. Here are some comparisons to plain old gzip compression (it blows it away). It'd be horrible on random data, but it squishes XML like you wouldn't believe.

AT&T's Globeview 2000 (an ATM phone switch I think, telecoms is not my speciality) uses Harlequin's (presumably now xanalys) Real Time Lisp (a variant on their ordinary Lisp). It certainly garbage collects in real time meaning their is an upper bound on the length of a pause due to GC and a guarantee of maximum CPU overhead due to GC.

Those resources might be valuable, but so is the ability to add a new voicemail service to your phone switch without dropping existing calls (which rebooting the switch would do).

Here's a press release with some marketing details

I can't wait until I can't watch all that crap

I'm not sure my life would end should I not be able to see AOLTW content.

It might actually enable people to turn producer than consumer and then they might remember that creativity is more fun than being a passive observer.

Actually, I think it's happening already. The real internet apps are email, chatrooms & weblogs, places where people contribute.

The advertising crowd have had a rude awakening to the fact that Content is not King

but don't take my word for it

html
pdf

One of the biggest advantages of COM over CORBA is a *big* speed difference when running in-proc, while maintaining the same speed as CORBA as out-proccess & out-machine.

2F> You can do OO design with any language you like
MJ> Um, okay...
MJ>If this were true, then why did we _need_ all these other languages? Caprice?

Mostly because of cleaner syntax.

You do have a point -- sometimes the language(s) make it impossible to express a given paradigm (i.e. Generic Programming in C)

Methinks you haven't read Bjarne Stroustrups (dated but interesting) paper called What is Object-Orientated Programming

YES, you *can* do OOP in C. What do you think 'cfront' did back when C++ was still in development, and there was no native compilers?! It translated C++ code into C. Sure it was ugly** C code, but it was C code doing the same job as "native" C++.

(** ugly is not a redundant adjective describing C :) I've seen some beautifull C code)

A native C++ compiler provides
a) cleaner syntax
b) better type safety

Now templates are a whole different ball of wax. C has no paradigm for expressing generic programming. And this is the *real* reason C++ is so popular -- Multiparadigm support: Procedural, OO, and Generic. C++ is VERY powerfull once you start combining OO and Generic Programming. See Moden C++ Design - Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied by Andrei Alexandrescu

> Many languages reason for being is that that their inherent features make design cleaner.

You are correct -- the underlying language that the app is implemented in will constrain the design, but a good language will let you pick the "best" design for you app.

Cheers

First of all, for those individuals who refer to C++ as an OO language, please stop. You're wrong. C++ can be used for an OO project, but it is a multi-paradigm language. At least that's what Bjarne Stroustrup calls it. But what does he know about C++?

Second, use of C++'s STL does not equate to OO programming. It is an example of generic programming. Here's a hint: the STL has very little inheritance except for iterators and iostreams -- most evaluation is handled at compile-time. And even iterators and iostreams are just as much generic as OO.

Finally, please dispel the rumor that C is automatically faster than C++ because of C++'s excessive overhead. Need proof? Please read this article about treating C++ as its own language and not a variation of C. Yes, it's a PDF. Get over it.

Think the article is FUD? Prove it! Take the examples from the article and tune them better than he did. Compile them with trusty ol' gcc and g++ on your box. Measure the results. After you do so, can show that C is faster, does not contain any potential buffer-overflow bugs, handles error conditions, and wasn't at least five times more code to do it, then reply back with your results. I have a feeling I won't be getting any replies from people who actually try it.

That said, use whatever language you like best. Studies have shown that people will always perform better in languages they know intimately well than languages in which they have a general familiarity.

But if you want to use OO and C++, check out this numeric library

Have a nice day

VNC works pretty well. It's free and it runs pretty well. I'm not sure how secure it is but im sure it can't be to much worse than IIS.

I would go so far as to say that the explosion of distributed networks is a backlash against the slow stratification of the Internet into commercial, government, and educational....and NOTHING ELSE.

Look what happens to P2P networks if they step on any non-corporate toes. The Bad Guys go after them, and shut 'em down.

I think commercialism is great as long as there's a lot of it. Once you get a small group of high-powered, expensive contenders, it limits the power of supply and demand. Capitalism works best when there's lots of competition.

Don't forget, though, that most nerds, myself included, don't care about capitalism and economics. The main problem with the scenario of the Internet being controlled by a few companies is that do-it-yourselfers cannot readily rig up something that feeds into the Internet without a lot of money, or without being rigorously controlled by vast, completely soulless entities. :)

I am not brilliant enough at Linux to help you, but it seems that AT&T have done something on their network that causes non standard Windows default MTU, MSS, RWIN and TTL settings to be severely dimished in service. I had tweaked mine for @Home speed, but since moving over to AT&T Broadband, I saw a progression to worse and worse service. Once I switched it back to its defaults, I started getting high speed access again.

The Windows settings I currently have are:

• MTU is 1500
• MSS is set to 0
• RWIN is set to 0
• TTL is set to 0

I tried setting it back after reading something on AT&T's site.

I have been with AT&T Broadband/@Home for about 3 years in Chicago area. The service transistion wa painless for me. I had to enable DHCP, since they won't give out static IP's anymore. That was a bit annoying, but after a reboot, it seems ok.

A lot of my IP tweaks I had done in my Windows 2000 box caused my service to slow down under AT&T Boadband though, and it wasn't until I set everything back to Windows defaults that I got decent download speed. It was a bit freaky.

I have had some problems with my NAT server, WinRoute Pro. It seems that HTTP requests are getting dropped on the machines not directly connected to the cable modem, so I have had to send everything through a proxy server and the cable modem box. I don't know if it is me, my network cards, cabling or a change in service, but it didn't happen all of a sudden, it is really wierd and seemed to get worse as time progressed. It doesn't effect other TCP traffic (like IRC), but it does seem to effect any HTTP traffic. Really strange.

The news of unhappy customers on the AT&T broadband network has nothing to do with the AT&T IPServices network (Its really down to how much capacity AT&T broadband have had AT&T IPservices provition them, which knowing AT&T they will have likely only purchased enough capacity to generate a profit not nessesarly enough to satisfy the demands placed upon it by the customers). Like I said AT&T broadband do use AT&T provisioned network services but then again so did @home and so do many many other companies (e.g. exodus also chap11).

Now you can read about the AT&T backbone here or see a map of the network here.

The news of unhappy customers on the AT&T broadband network has nothing to do with the AT&T IPServices network (Its really down to how much capacity AT&T broadband have had AT&T IPservices provition them, which knowing AT&T they will have likely only purchased enough capacity to generate a profit not nessesarly enough to satisfy the demands placed upon it by the customers). Like I said AT&T broadband do use AT&T provisioned network services but then again so did @home and so do many many other companies (e.g. exodus also chap11).

Now you can read about the AT&T backbone here or see a map of the network here.

According to this article, AT&T's broadband internet network is experiencing some problems (nationwide it sounds like) and "some customers are experiencing lengthy hold times" (explains the 30 minute hold).

To quote the article, "The company will automatically issue credits to any customers who experience an interruption of service. Credits will be issued at the rate of two days free service for every day of interruption. In cases where the temporary outage is a bit longer, customers will receive free dial-up service from AT&T Broadband until they are restored to a high-speed network. These customers will automatically receive the free dial-up service from AT&T Broadband."

Read it on their FAQ:

Why is AT&T Broadband Filtering HTTP Port 80?