That's odd, my experience with loading large JPEG's was exactly the opposite. Other browsers (Opera, Konqueror, older versions of Netscape) would "bawk" at large JPEG's loaded from the local filesystem.
In contrast, both IE and Mozilla loaded these images without a hitch.
I have experienced the keyboard focus problem once, but that could have purely been a fluke. No issues with links working / not working, that went away with the early versions of Mozilla.
SACD is not just "higher quality", it's a new way of thinking about how we encode/decode digital music. Samples happen 1 bit at a time, but they are made much more frequently to achieve near-analog accuracy. DSD (SACD) is to CD like FM is to AM, although the sonic characteristics aren't nearly as pronounced, there is a real difference. Try listening to a cymbol on SACD, it's a new experience -- you will actually hear the decay of the instrument.
Taking a CD-quality PCM rip and up-sampling to a higher-quality format won't introduce the bits that have already been lost. I think the hybrid CD/SACD solution is the best compromise for audiophiles and casual listenered alike.
Apple might not have designed this specific CD drive, but they decided it made sense to prevent the user from ejecting a disc while it might still be in use.
This has been no end of trouble. There are Knowledge Base tips, FAQ's, and extensive Usenet support articles on the proper process of manually ejecting a CD from your Macintosh drive. Apple likes to coddle the user too much. My Centris 650 wouldn't even boot from a CDROM without an elaborate key sequence. As far as I'm concerned, Apple should mount an eject button on the CDROM drawer so the drive can be easily opened in the unlikely event the software eject is not working.
The hardware eject can be disabled by the software when the disc is in use. If the user reboots, the software is no longer controlling it and you can get the friggin' disc out of the drive.
Also don't forget that eBay is primarily an NT4 shop. With W2K long-gone and.NET upon us, they are probably also considering how they might be able to maintain their NT4 investment.
Ultimately, eBay may be factoring in TCO. Reports are showing Linux obviously has a substantially lower TCO, so by migrating to a Java engine the eBay NOC is giving itself a chance to roll some Linux servers into their NT server farm.
FWIW, there have been more than just 2 outages with eBay and at least a few of them have been related to their Oracle backend.
Websphere certainly isn't going to fix that, but it might help improve maintainability of what has traditionally been ISAPI code. There is also the stability quandry of a DLL that is sharing space with your IIS process, any fault here could cause the web server to die.
While WebSphere is a more professional looking system from an admin perspective, my experience has shown WebLogic to be the superior performer.
Don't forget the MS Scbool Agreement provides a license to run Microsoft software like MS Office on the Mac.
As usual, the Reg totally blew this out of proportion. There is Microsoft software for Mac and Intel, and as this poster aptly pointed out you will need a CAL if you plan to access the NT print queue from a UNIX workstation or even copy a file to a Windows computer.
Even more significantly, this agreement takes into consideration how teachers really use the software. The license includes permission to install the applications at home, so Visual Studio can be used to build lesson-plan examples at home and then be brought into the classroom.
If MS could extend this to provide similiar agreements for students to install software at home for schoolwork (as if that's not already happening) then real academic work with Windows can finally begin to happen legally.
As far as I'm concerned -- this is definitely the big news. OS X is Apple's new de-facto standard, so the end of OS9 isn't a huge surprise.
What will be interesting is to see what kind of software Apple will push with its new server family. I'm just guessing, but I think you can expect to see Oracle pushing for these boxes, and at least some Java support from Sun.
Just as a random FYI; I use to do this when browsing but have since switched to "Tabbed" browsing (you'll need Opera or Mozilla). It saves a lot of space on my desktop & makes it easier to find what I'm looking for.
What is the definition of a "page"? Is a page a URL? What if a "page" loads images and content from another page, do you pay for that as additional "page"-views?
What if I click on a "page" and bang the "Stop" button right away. I haven't actually viewed the "page", although I did request the link the content was not viewed or for that matter perhaps not even retrieved.
Even worse, what if my connection temporarily times-out and only part of a "page" is downloaded. When I'm forced to reload the page, then I'm paying again for something that I didn't get the first time.
I understand the concessions you're making, but I seriously think you should reconsider something more along the lines of a magazine subscription that provides carte blanc access to all Slashdot content.
DIVX (not DivX...) was slightly different; per another posting the danger of the DIVX format was the massive database that Digital Video eXpress could use to track your viewing habits.
Although this is a slightly better format in this regard, it has the same problems inherent in other read-once media.
For example, self-destructing floppys -- sounds like a good idea? It's been tried, in fact I remember picking up a floppy at my local Heath/Zenith dealer back in the early 80's that could only be read once.
There are plenty of times I rent movies and don't get to watch them in the first viewing. So the media certainly can't self-destruct after first playback. So what is an acceptable time before you lose the rights to watch the rest of your movie?
I don't think I want RIAA determining when I can watch a movie. I'm perfectly happy paying my late fees to have the option to watch a rental when it fits my schedule.
Consumers will be wary of this because they don't recognize that the publisher of the media still owns the movie even after they have it in their home.
Definitely a lot of fun, but not nearly as big as I had hoped it would have been.
CA was as ambivalent as ever, although the CEO gave a neat speech on all the "serious" committments they have made to the Linux platform, the cattle at the CA booth were less than informative.
There were free T-shirts at at least a few other booths, I picked up a nifty T for the Zaurus PDA from Sharp (although the penguin does look a little less cuddly than it should...)
I thought the Intel booth was pretty good, there were a variety of vendors discussing how they are working with Intel and Linux technologies.
IBM was definitely about as exciting as a six-pack of Prozac, but they had the greatest assortment of technologies to offer.
I'm not sure how to read HP. Although it was nice that the keynote suggested HP will vigorously support the Linux platform, there was really not much to offer at the HP booth.
OmniCluster was pretty neat, I could definitely see using one of their PC-boards to multi-process some of my older equipment. Somewhat reminicent of OrangeMicro but with much bigger plans (redundancy, clustering, performance, etc.)
I liked the conversion product offered by LSP, it advertised an ability to take your NT/2000 servers and turn them into Linux boxes (preserving files and users in the process).
Finally, what was Slashdot doing there? If they were really reporting on the show, you'd think there would be stories up here rather than a bunch of links to Wired. For that matter, OSDN didn't have much in the way of reporting either. Kudos to Wired for staying ahead of the curve and providing the only useful reporting of the show.
I think this is key, even though users don't necessarily understand what a port is they can understand the concept of providing a service on their computer that others on the network can use.
I don't know about you, but after I install any UNIX my first stop is 'netstat -a' followed immediately with a review of inetd.
For Windows, a review of Services is always in order (disable remote reg, browser, etc.).Let's *prompt* users to enable/disable services following an install. Never secretly run anything, you can empower the user with sensible defaults but always give them the option to control what they are doing.
Not only is it disappointing that.NET seems to hinge on Passport, but it's even more disappointing the sites that Passport works with.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to signup for this thing, but if I was going to it would only be because my favorite web sites were providing seemless integration with Passport.
Meanwhile, on passport.com the top-tier sites include "Doris the Florist", the rather shady looking "Treasure on the Net" and a full compliment of MSN sites.
Maybe, but let's not forget that convergent technology devices with all of these elements have traditionally flopped.
I think Sony might have made the right choice here. They will leverage the PS2 as the entertainment device and the eVilla as the fun information appliance device.
I can't believe my parents bought one of these inane transparent microwaves. It's getting tough to find anything anymore that's not see-thru, I imagine shoes and hats with the Apple iMac logo are right around the corner.
Anyway, the real reason I posted was because the Sharp link in the original posting brings up a nasty message in Netscape 6:
Attention Netscape 6 Users:
Sharp-USA.com takes advantage of the latest Internet technologies such as I-Frames and Layers. Netscape 6 does not support these advanced technologies as they did in previous releases. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We suggest you contact Netscape Communications to offer your feedback.
Yeesh. "Advanced" technologies? it's a markup language for cryin' out loud!
The thing about Sony is they know how to produce media and devices that demonstrate good visual design. Usually borrowing from golden-mean or divine ratios, every Sony product -- including the Beta cassette tape and the Compact Disc -- demonstrate great visual cues.
So - people will buy this stuff, and eVilla appears to exhibit these properties. Let's also not forget that Sony doesn't usually give up on stuff (in that sense they are very much like IBM). Just look at MiniDisc, BetaMax and Hi8.
As a company, Microsoft has both the dynamics of a marketing machine and a programming thinktank to contend with. It seems that these two camps are forever at odds with each other, and I get the sense that.NET is yet another example of this dichonomy.
I imagine it went a little bit like this. Somebody in marketing or sales said that they need another piece of new technology that they can sell. Somebody in development presented a bunch of different projects they were working on, and the marketeers said let's brand these things as part of a vision statement and we'll call it.NET.
Technology thought that was a good idea because all the.com URI's are taken.
At any rate, I think the truth here is that no one really knows exactly what.NET is. MS seems to be hedging it's bets that it could be used to help deploy to various network enabled devices (computer, cellphone, PDA, etc.) yet it is equally probable that.NET would emerge as a development tool or even a services-oriented industry.
The point is, it's nebulous enough that it can do many things. Remember, this is a vision statement and not an MRD for a next-generation software application.
Obviously, this is just a patent-pending so eBay can't claim to own this yet. Unfortunately it does mean that many smaller companies might avoid using this "technology" (and I use that in the loosest sense of the word...) on their websites.
At any rate, the bigger problem here is the rash of companies applying for patent protection on software.
Software should be protected by copywrite only. Let's imagine I invent a new method for ray tracing images at x4 the speed of current implementations. The code itself is copywrited so no one can reproduce it for profit -- they will have to re-engineer my algorithm somehow.
That's it -- a real piece of code and as a programmer I am protected.
It's very difficult to patent something that anyone can plainly see. Imagine if AT&T focused all of its energies on patenting the telephone keypad interface and ignored switching protocols. Every phone today would have different keypad layouts, it would make it virtually impossible to operate a telephone. It's like trying to patent the spy-novel genra of literature, anyone can write a spy-novel and it could have happened at any time -- so who's to say you're the first one?
By trying to patent web interfaces like this, eBay is misleading investors and users. It's a sham, and even worse the US Patent Office has to waste time reviewing this claim.
The.NET strategy is really designed to get your Internet servers talking a language (XML) that any kind of device (cell phone, PDA, web browser, etc.) can translate into a readable document given the proper template.
What's disappointing is the amount of marketing bunk going on at http://microsoft.net. Suddenly every product is about.NET, it's analogous to a release of a suite a daemons sendmail.NET, httpd.NET, mysql.NET, quotd.NET, etc.
So if you're wondering about how Corel Linux might get tied to.NET, imagine XML parsers everywhere and a wholesale rename of every major system daemon.
It's starting to feel more like CDO, RDO, ADO all over again. This is the first step to a slightly different vision of the Internet, don't be surprised if the name changes and even some of the core XML strategies get revised.
Slashdot Mirror
That's odd, my experience with loading large JPEG's was exactly the opposite. Other browsers (Opera, Konqueror, older versions of Netscape) would "bawk" at large JPEG's loaded from the local filesystem.
In contrast, both IE and Mozilla loaded these images without a hitch.
I have experienced the keyboard focus problem once, but that could have purely been a fluke. No issues with links working / not working, that went away with the early versions of Mozilla.
Yup. That's how DSD works. Millions of samples per second.
SACD is not just "higher quality", it's a new way of thinking about how we encode/decode digital music. Samples happen 1 bit at a time, but they are made much more frequently to achieve near-analog accuracy. DSD (SACD) is to CD like FM is to AM, although the sonic characteristics aren't nearly as pronounced, there is a real difference. Try listening to a cymbol on SACD, it's a new experience -- you will actually hear the decay of the instrument.
Taking a CD-quality PCM rip and up-sampling to a higher-quality format won't introduce the bits that have already been lost. I think the hybrid CD/SACD solution is the best compromise for audiophiles and casual listenered alike.
Apple might not have designed this specific CD drive, but they decided it made sense to prevent the user from ejecting a disc while it might still be in use.
This has been no end of trouble. There are Knowledge Base tips, FAQ's, and extensive Usenet support articles on the proper process of manually ejecting a CD from your Macintosh drive. Apple likes to coddle the user too much. My Centris 650 wouldn't even boot from a CDROM without an elaborate key sequence. As far as I'm concerned, Apple should mount an eject button on the CDROM drawer so the drive can be easily opened in the unlikely event the software eject is not working.
The hardware eject can be disabled by the software when the disc is in use. If the user reboots, the software is no longer controlling it and you can get the friggin' disc out of the drive.
Just went through it with Mozilla RC2... looks like I'm moving to North Carolina!
Also don't forget that eBay is primarily an NT4 shop. With W2K long-gone and .NET upon us, they are probably also considering how they might be able to maintain their NT4 investment.
Ultimately, eBay may be factoring in TCO. Reports are showing Linux obviously has a substantially lower TCO, so by migrating to a Java engine the eBay NOC is giving itself a chance to roll some Linux servers into their NT server farm.
FWIW, there have been more than just 2 outages with eBay and at least a few of them have been related to their Oracle backend.
Websphere certainly isn't going to fix that, but it might help improve maintainability of what has traditionally been ISAPI code. There is also the stability quandry of a DLL that is sharing space with your IIS process, any fault here could cause the web server to die.
While WebSphere is a more professional looking system from an admin perspective, my experience has shown WebLogic to be the superior performer.
Don't forget the MS Scbool Agreement provides a license to run Microsoft software like MS Office on the Mac.
As usual, the Reg totally blew this out of proportion. There is Microsoft software for Mac and Intel, and as this poster aptly pointed out you will need a CAL if you plan to access the NT print queue from a UNIX workstation or even copy a file to a Windows computer.
Even more significantly, this agreement takes into consideration how teachers really use the software. The license includes permission to install the applications at home, so Visual Studio can be used to build lesson-plan examples at home and then be brought into the classroom.
If MS could extend this to provide similiar agreements for students to install software at home for schoolwork (as if that's not already happening) then real academic work with Windows can finally begin to happen legally.
As far as I'm concerned -- this is definitely the big news. OS X is Apple's new de-facto standard, so the end of OS9 isn't a huge surprise.
What will be interesting is to see what kind of software Apple will push with its new server family. I'm just guessing, but I think you can expect to see Oracle pushing for these boxes, and at least some Java support from Sun.
Isn't Apple Records out of business anyway?
Just as a random FYI; I use to do this when browsing but have since switched to "Tabbed" browsing (you'll need Opera or Mozilla). It saves a lot of space on my desktop & makes it easier to find what I'm looking for.
You know, after all these years my bookmark still has me going to http://slashdot.org.
.com.
This is so inappropriate now, I think I need to start going maybe to http://slashdot.com or perhaps slashdot.biz?
btw, fix your lame redirect on slashdot.com; you are *NOT* an organization any longer -- you are a commercial entity hence the
What is the definition of a "page"? Is a page a URL? What if a "page" loads images and content from another page, do you pay for that as additional "page"-views?
What if I click on a "page" and bang the "Stop" button right away. I haven't actually viewed the "page", although I did request the link the content was not viewed or for that matter perhaps not even retrieved.
Even worse, what if my connection temporarily times-out and only part of a "page" is downloaded. When I'm forced to reload the page, then I'm paying again for something that I didn't get the first time.
I understand the concessions you're making, but I seriously think you should reconsider something more along the lines of a magazine subscription that provides carte blanc access to all Slashdot content.
DIVX (not DivX...) was slightly different; per another posting the danger of the DIVX format was the massive database that Digital Video eXpress could use to track your viewing habits.
Although this is a slightly better format in this regard, it has the same problems inherent in other read-once media.
For example, self-destructing floppys -- sounds like a good idea? It's been tried, in fact I remember picking up a floppy at my local Heath/Zenith dealer back in the early 80's that could only be read once.
There are plenty of times I rent movies and don't get to watch them in the first viewing. So the media certainly can't self-destruct after first playback. So what is an acceptable time before you lose the rights to watch the rest of your movie?
I don't think I want RIAA determining when I can watch a movie. I'm perfectly happy paying my late fees to have the option to watch a rental when it fits my schedule.
Consumers will be wary of this because they don't recognize that the publisher of the media still owns the movie even after they have it in their home.
Definitely a lot of fun, but not nearly as big as I had hoped it would have been.
CA was as ambivalent as ever, although the CEO gave a neat speech on all the "serious" committments they have made to the Linux platform, the cattle at the CA booth were less than informative.
There were free T-shirts at at least a few other booths, I picked up a nifty T for the Zaurus PDA from Sharp (although the penguin does look a little less cuddly than it should...)
I thought the Intel booth was pretty good, there were a variety of vendors discussing how they are working with Intel and Linux technologies.
IBM was definitely about as exciting as a six-pack of Prozac, but they had the greatest assortment of technologies to offer.
I'm not sure how to read HP. Although it was nice that the keynote suggested HP will vigorously support the Linux platform, there was really not much to offer at the HP booth.
OmniCluster was pretty neat, I could definitely see using one of their PC-boards to multi-process some of my older equipment. Somewhat reminicent of OrangeMicro but with much bigger plans (redundancy, clustering, performance, etc.)
I liked the conversion product offered by LSP, it advertised an ability to take your NT/2000 servers and turn them into Linux boxes (preserving files and users in the process).
Finally, what was Slashdot doing there? If they were really reporting on the show, you'd think there would be stories up here rather than a bunch of links to Wired. For that matter, OSDN didn't have much in the way of reporting either. Kudos to Wired for staying ahead of the curve and providing the only useful reporting of the show.
try changing your wallpaper -- at least that's broken on my XP install. Worked the first time, but since rebooting it has never worked again....
I think this is key, even though users don't necessarily understand what a port is they can understand the concept of providing a service on their computer that others on the network can use.
I don't know about you, but after I install any UNIX my first stop is 'netstat -a' followed immediately with a review of inetd.
For Windows, a review of Services is always in order (disable remote reg, browser, etc.).Let's *prompt* users to enable/disable services following an install. Never secretly run anything, you can empower the user with sensible defaults but always give them the option to control what they are doing.
Not only is it disappointing that .NET seems to hinge on Passport, but it's even more disappointing the sites that Passport works with.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to signup for this thing, but if I was going to it would only be because my favorite web sites were providing seemless integration with Passport.
Meanwhile, on passport.com the top-tier sites include "Doris the Florist", the rather shady looking "Treasure on the Net" and a full compliment of MSN sites.
Eric W. Sarjeant
ericsarjeant[@]mediaone.net
I think Sony might have made the right choice here. They will leverage the PS2 as the entertainment device and the eVilla as the fun information appliance device.
Eric W. Sarjeant
ericsarjeant[@]mediaone.net
Anyway, the real reason I posted was because the Sharp link in the original posting brings up a nasty message in Netscape 6:
Attention Netscape 6 Users:
Sharp-USA.com takes advantage of the latest Internet technologies such as I-Frames and Layers. Netscape 6 does not support these advanced technologies as they did in previous releases. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We suggest you contact Netscape Communications to offer your feedback.
Yeesh. "Advanced" technologies? it's a markup language for cryin' out loud!
Eric W. Sarjeant
ericsarjeant[@]mediaone.net
So - people will buy this stuff, and eVilla appears to exhibit these properties. Let's also not forget that Sony doesn't usually give up on stuff (in that sense they are very much like IBM). Just look at MiniDisc, BetaMax and Hi8.
Eric W. Sarjeant
ericsarjeant[@]mediaone.net
Eric W. Sarjeant
ericsarjeant[@]mediaone.net
At any rate, the bigger problem here is the rash of companies applying for patent protection on software.
Software should be protected by copywrite only. Let's imagine I invent a new method for ray tracing images at x4 the speed of current implementations. The code itself is copywrited so no one can reproduce it for profit -- they will have to re-engineer my algorithm somehow.
That's it -- a real piece of code and as a programmer I am protected.
It's very difficult to patent something that anyone can plainly see. Imagine if AT&T focused all of its energies on patenting the telephone keypad interface and ignored switching protocols. Every phone today would have different keypad layouts, it would make it virtually impossible to operate a telephone. It's like trying to patent the spy-novel genra of literature, anyone can write a spy-novel and it could have happened at any time -- so who's to say you're the first one?
By trying to patent web interfaces like this, eBay is misleading investors and users. It's a sham, and even worse the US Patent Office has to waste time reviewing this claim.
Eric W. Sarjeant
ericsarjeant[@]mediaone.net
The .NET strategy is really designed to get your Internet servers talking a language (XML) that any kind of device (cell phone, PDA, web browser, etc.) can translate into a readable document given the proper template.
What's disappointing is the amount of marketing bunk going on at http://microsoft.net. Suddenly every product is about .NET, it's analogous to a release of a suite a daemons sendmail.NET, httpd.NET, mysql.NET, quotd.NET, etc.
So if you're wondering about how Corel Linux might get tied to .NET, imagine XML parsers everywhere and a wholesale rename of every major system daemon.
It's starting to feel more like CDO, RDO, ADO all over again. This is the first step to a slightly different vision of the Internet, don't be surprised if the name changes and even some of the core XML strategies get revised.
Eric W. Sarjeant
ericsarjeant[@]mediaone.net