I feel like I'm responding to a troll here, but I think you haven't used Swing in a while. The latest releases in 1.4 are significantly better looking and faster. They also make better use of the underlying graphics hardware in Java 2D. I've written apps in Swing that have been very responsive; you just have to take the time to learn the framework.
I will grant you that Swing can get complex and it can take serious effort to eliminate bottlenecks. It's intended to be a general framework for MVC based applications, so it has to cover a lot of cases that may not be applicable for all applications. You sometimes have to subclass and override default painting behavior to tailor it to your usage. But at least you have the ability to do that if you wish.
It also has a tendency to be lower-level then some other approaches. I've seen people throw together VB apps with a lot of functionality pretty quickly. It can take longer to get there in Swing, but the results generally are more maintainable and scalable.
There are efforts in the works to generate standard higher-level constructs, such as database-backed tables with sorting, that other GUI frameworks provide. Check out JDesktop Network Components to see what's in the works. There are also efforts underway to allow Swing apps to fit more neatly into the native shell (such as tray icons).
Swing was pretty deadly in the past, but it has improved significantly recently. Ironically, I'm seeing a lot more MacOS X apps written in Java or Java apps developed on MacOS since Apple has put a lot of effort into their Swing look and feel for Aqua. If you are looking to Apple for direction, I think that is a significant data point.
True, you wouldn't be able to see exactly what they were looking at, but you could at least get an approximation.
I did read the article, but I didn't clearly recall the comment on the curvature. On review, I see what you are referring to.. it works to an extreme angle.
Actually, sunglasses may make the job easier. Depending on the color of the lenses, reflections might show up better. There is also the fact that sunglasses lenses have a much larger surface area then the eye, making it more likely that an image could be captured from an image taken at a farther distance. The original technique, remember, is adapted from the use of lenses and mirrors in traditional camera systems; it just needs an adequate reflective surface.
Other posters have commented that if you have a high-resolution camera at an event, it is more likely and useful to have a photo of the actual event, not a reflection of it. This ignores, however, events that are unexpected. News photographers, for instance, might be shooting closeups of spectators at an airshow, for instance, at the very moment that a plane stalls out and crashes. There may not be time to turn around with the camera, but chances are that the spectator would be facing in the right general direction to capture the event. There is also a possibility that details can be captured that help explain why the plane crashed to begin with.
I don't think we have to worry about this being used in security cameras for a long time; one weakness of this seems to be that it is very sensitive to the angle that it records the subject's image from. In a large crowd of moving people that are constantly changing the location of their eyes with respect to the camera, I doubt you can get a reliable image with any certainty. Even you have an HDTV resolution camera there would probably still be motion blur to deal with.
The bigger worry would be that security personnel, politicians, and judges BELIEVE it is more reliable than it is. No Florida manual recounts, anyone?
Still, I agree with the parent and others who note that this could be very useful from an HCI standpoint. Perfect scenario really... the subject is close to the camera and not moving a whole lot. Be interesting to see what Sony could do with an Eye Toy using this algorithm... auto-aiming in an FPS?
I agree with some other posters here that the BileBlog posts on Maven don't really offer clear reasons why Maven is bad. If you read enough of his posts on Maven you can pull out some of his general issues:
The auto-generated website has a lot of pointless information that most people don't care about.
The language it's implemented in is crap.
The project favors features over stability.
Maven highly constrains project layouts
New releases break stuff that worked in old releases
For the record, I don't think the idea of Maven is bad. The sexiest feature in my mind is declaring library dependencies by name and version number and having Maven pull down the required library from a central repository. No more cryptically named jars checked into version control. Upgrading the library is as simple as changing the version number. Inter-project dependencies are simplified since Maven publishes build artifacts to the repository for you. Other projects can just treat your project like another library dependency. Think of it like APT for Java builds.
I find myself writing the same constructs over and over in Ant. There really aren't that many ways of build a J2EE application. Maven takes care of a lot of the tedious details by letting you specify at a high-level what you want to build; it takes care of building classpaths and assembling pieces into an EAR file. You can just get on with the code.
I also don't have a significant problem with some of the constraints Maven puts on projects. It's a pain when you have something specific in mind or are trying to retrofit a project, but it is kinda nice to be able to look at any Java project and instantly grasp where to find things. Enforcing a directory layout may constrain the developer but increases transparency. The GNU projects generally follow a standard project layout with Autoconf support. I personally would not want to give up./configure;make;make install. Standardizing project layouts helps make ease of use like that possible. Whether Maven picked a good standard or not is another matter.
Where I agree with Hani's blog is:
The implementation language sucks. Using XML as the syntax of a scripting language has to be the worst idea ever. I had to go in and tweak a few Maven plugins when it was in beta and I still have nightmares.
Compatibility was broken between releases. I know that for a while Maven was in beta, but the beta cycles were so long that people assumed it was 'good enough', like JDOM. At a few points, I thought the project was dead. So it was majorly irritating when simple things broke when upgrading releases. The BileBlogger rightfully points out that betas should be about stabilizing releases, not doing a lot of feature fiddling
I've been thinking about bringing it in for an effort I am currently working on. A lot of its features would match my needs. The issues that Hani identified however, especially the implementation language, are holding me back.
There is also the fact that Ant is very well known. Many people are capable of fixing issues with Ant scripts. Extending Ant for custom tasks is also fairly trivial. I wouldn't really want to write a Maven plugin. And debugging the damn thing is tough since most of the logic is hidden.
I feel like I'm feeding a troll here, but you should probably dig into the history of the WWW a little bit. For instance: the history of the internet which states that
[Tim Berners-Lee] works from several criteria: the system must be flexible and designed with minimal constraint so that it is compatible with numerous languages and operating systems; the system must be capable of recording random links between objects; and the system must be constructed so that entering and correcting information is easily performed.
(Emphasis mine).
Or if you don't find that convincing, there is the original proposal for the World Wide Web. About half way down, look for a mention of the Enquire system, which includes a screen mockup with a prominent "Add" option. As a side note, some of the mentions of keywords and nodes foreshadows the RDF and Semantic Web efforts.
The Amaya editor/browser mentions on its front page that one of its goals is to realize the idea of the Web as a true read/write collaboration medium.
If you look at the RFC for the HTTP protocol, you will probably note the PUT method and the POST method which could be used for uploading new hypertext content.
Alan Kay is reminding us that the vision for some of the pioneering works in computing still has not been fully realized. Perhaps if Mosaic or Netscape made more of an effort to support editing we would be in a very different place now. The proliferation of wiki software is starting to bring the web back toward collaboration and its original mandate.
I shouldn't rise to your bait, but I think the original article is really written for people who honestly hold the position you are advocating. The fact that you seem so unwilling to acknowledge what browsers were supposed to be indicates to me that Mr. Kay is right to be making noise about this. Commercial interests want to make the Internet like modern television. Its original inventors wanted to make it a tool to share knowledge. I know which side I'm rooting for.
I haven't gotten a feel for how good the performance truly is on the Opteron/Gentoo front since I'm mostly learning how to administrate Gentoo properly (had to re-install after I let etc-update clobber one to many conf files:-/).
Initial impressions are that it is pretty quick. I had a weird problem where using a USB mouse seemed to slow the system to a crawl, but I switched to using a PS/2 adapter and the problem went away. After that pretty sweet.... I did an emerge world that built X and KDE among other things and it was pretty much done overnight.
My big disappointment right now is that I can't use the win32codecs package. The NVidia drivers now support 32-bit alongside 64-bit OpenGL drivers, so I may actually have a chance of trying the Transgaming Wine impl... Really, games and May a learning edition are the only reason I keep Win 2000 around.
I actually thought the mainstream media account was pretty well-balanced. I've used multiple distributions, including Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, and most recently, Gentoo.
Many of the experiences I've had match what the author experienced. I have yet to have a distribution where everything worked 100% out of the box. I've run into numerous occasions where I've had to play musical chairs with RPMs to get things to install.
I generally have had pretty good luck sorting out these problems out since I'm a pretty advanced computer user, but I have also had problems that were very perplexing. I could see how the experience for a user who does not have the experience or the inclination to spend hours configuring their computer would still find the experience daunting.
While the author brings up all of these issues, he also notes that some of these problems are due to poor manufacturer support. He also expresses faith that the user interface problems with yum will quickly be solved. The fact that a mainstream news outlet would note Linux's strong security record and mention it as a strong possibility for replacing Windows is encouraging since it will raise the visibility of Linux for the mainstream.
I've seen great improvements since starting to use Linux. I enjoy the fact that my scanner now will only work on Linux, while the drivers for Windows 2000 are fairly worthless. Gentoo has been pretty satisfactory on my 64-bit Opteron, while Microsoft is still not shipping 64-bit Windows XP.
Let's acknowledge that works needs to be done and keep improving. I'm looking forward to trying new versions and seeing this platform mature.
A group at MIT is using RDF for an integrated data management system. It's sorta like Outlook (or Kontact, if you prefer;-) on steroids. It's called Haystack.
I have to say, their ideas are intriguing, but after using it... I think the big shortcoming is that it's tough to come up with a generalized user interface for manipulating any data thrown at it. Haystack tries at this, and I think, fails at providing any kind of cues or context that tells you what your are dealing with. In Haystack, every task and piece of information you deal with looks very much like every other piece of data, because, as a design choice, Haystack every piece of data has the same rank as every other piece of data.
Having different applications for different types of data usually make sense, if only to limit the amount of options presented to the user so they can make an intelligent decision about what action they want to perform. See this article on Slashdot about how users need limited since it makes decision-making too difficult psychologically.
Inevitably, discussions around RDF and metadata always devolve into hand-wavy discussions on how the computer will be able to "magically" do smart things based on the metadata. But it really isn't magic and it isn't automatic at all. Equivalencies and mappings have to be created by humans along with the rules about what to do.
RDF uses many concepts from AI research. Anybody who has read about this branch of computer science knows that the discipline has pretty much given up on creating AI in the 'sci-fi' sense as an impractical dream. That's what makes the Loebner prize so controversial. I don't expect that computers will be intelligent enough able to relieve users of too much of the burden in assigning metadata.
RDF is a promising approach, but if you read the article, it makes a lot of assumptions about what needs to happen to make the benefits real. Among them are establishing standards for what metadata fields apply to different types of objects: photos, people, music, etc. That kind of standardization won't happen overnight, if at all.
The computer also needs to know what to do when it encounters that kind of data. The article mentions MIME and browsers and, in effect, says the browser can make a rational decision even if it hasn't seen a particular MIME type before. That isn't really true.. you have to install a plugin that tells the browser what to do, or have a registry that someone has put together where the browser can install the right plugin at the right time.
That said, KDE's unification of contact information and passwords does show some of the promise of metadata efforts. And Apple's Spotlight looks like a good solution as far as it goes. I guess I'm just trying to make the point that the magic of metadata needs to be taken with a fairly large hunk of salt.
Why the database should have fewer connections
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On PHP and Scaling
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· Score: 1
Why would you limit your database to serving fewer connections than you have limited your web server to?
I always wondered about that in application design. Just recently I talked with a former software architect from IBM and he gave me an answer that may make some sense. It still feels a little counter-intuitive to me, so any corrections would be welcome.
The answer is basically a resource management issue if I remember correctly. You want to manage the load on your database servers so it stays relatively even, that is, avoiding peaks and troughs. You also want to keep requests waiting at the edges of your network, add the web server level.
Imagine for a second a scenario where the database accepted an unlimited amount of connections. Eventually the database server would become swamped as more and more resources were consumed (database connections may not be quite as expensive as people think, but they still aren't free). At times you will have the servers running at 100% capacity and at other times at very low capacity.
From a business perspective, you want to use the cheapest machines that are capable of meeting the performance goals. You could keep adding database servers until you meet the load, but this may not always be cost efficient. In addition, you then occur more overhead for keeping the database servers in sync with each other. So you can't just allow unlimited connections.
Now consider the case I think you are stating. Let W web connections = D database connections. IIRCC one problem with this is that not all web requests require a call to the database, so essentially, you will probably have database connections going to waste. You are also wasting database server capacity and resources when you have a low traffic scenario since not all of the possible database connections are used.
Think about it like getting assignments at work. Would you rather get a steady stream of assignments that you can finish in a reasonable amount of time? Or get dumped on with a million things to do at once, and then have long periods of inactivity. I know the clock on the wall seems to move faster to me when I have a steady amount of work to do and I have less stress when expectations are reasonable. Also, from my boss' perspective, when I have nothing to do, he is essentially paying me for doing nothing, and he doesn't want that.
Another analogy might be the caching scenario. Caching is helpful because you can put data you are most likely to need in a location that is faster to search and quicker to access. But if your cache is the same size as your backend store (like memory matched to the size of your hard disk) you loose the advantage of fast searches since you have the same space to search. If your cache is too small you lose the access speed advantage since you have to go back to the underlying, and slower, store more often. So usually, you set the cache to be some fraction of the underlying store to maximize the search/access ratio.
Database connections may not be dog slow, but they have more to do than a web server connection, which may have more to do than an edge-side static content cache. So you want to tune your application to find the optimal usage of each of your resources.
So the IBM guy's answer was, you want to try and use a machine to around 80% capacity, so if the sh** really hits the fan you don't necessarily die, but you aren't maxed out either. By having the web server queue up requests to go to the database, you allow for a steady stream of traffic to the database, even at times when load is off-peak. This also means that it is easier to judge the affect of adding more hardware to the system, since you know how many pages you can serve at 80% capacity, so you know 1) when to add more servers (if the machines are constantly maxed) and 2) how many machines you have to add to keep the same quality of service.
I think the point is the same as the performance vs. scalability discussions in the articl
I think the EPA on it is 35/41 with my standard transmission. Depending on the time of year, I get between 37 (winter) to (an all-time high) 42 (summer). This is in the Northeast, where traffic is pretty dense. I would say my driving is about 60-65% highway and I usually have to get gas every week and a half, depending on how much driving I do on a weekend.
So, I'd have to say the EPA numbers are pretty close to what I'm actually getting. Took awhile to figure out the best way to drive it to get those numbers. All and all, I'm pretty happy with it.
Some of the features in Looking Glass seem kinda pointless, like that 3d cd jukebox idea. The organization of windows by tilting them out of the way looks like a good way to waste screen space.
Metisse seems to take a slightly different approach. The features outlined in the screenshots actually look like they make an effort to help users manage windows. I do agree somewhat with Steve Jobs' position that users shouldn't have to be janitors; a system that makes some useful decisions for the user seems worthwhile.
It looks like Metisee preserves window locations when using the 'shaped' screen and scales contents down, allowing users to utilize spatial relationships and visual cues to find data.
I also like the idea of folding over window corners to see the lower windows. Seems more useful then Alt-Tabbing. This feature is implemented from a research paper. I've seen several posts here that lament open source's propensity to copy rather than innovate. Here is a concrete counter-example of an open source project trying something new and leveraging academic research. Even if the project is a complete failure, it should be applauded for taking a risk and implementing something different.
As an aside, I remember some comments on the original Looking Glass article that critized flipping widgets over to change settings and view properties. The new Tiger Dashboard in Mac OS X is now doing the same thing. The reviews seem positive on that score. I can't really decide what I make of that. Property sheets sometimes obscure their apps, so I guess flipping is a wash, but I think I would prefer to see the application and its properties.
Anybody have any experience using the VIA EPIA boards for DVD and video playback? I'm specifically interested in the MII 12000 for creating a MythTV box. I was also thinking MicroATX, but Pentium 4's and Athlon XPs run hotter and draw more power than the C3. I'd like to keep the power supply and CPU Fan and as quiet as possible.
Extreme Tech was decidedly underwhelmed by the M10000 while mini-itx.com seems to think is fine. The mini-itx review seemed a little hand-wavy though.
There is a film movement that is defined by a very simple set of rules. Anything that doesn't follow the rules isn't considered a part of that movement. In fact, the number of movies that count are so small, that the films are often identified by number indicating the order they were made. I wish I could remember what the movement was to provide info (and so I could try making one). I do remember that the rules are very simple and easy to do cheaply. The resulting works have been considered to be significant cinema.
A 'professional' looking work of cinema is in many cases very subjective. I've watch a work that was basically a very long slow zoom across a room with a horrible soundtrack. It was professional piece by an experimental filmmaker.
Your point is really about economies of scale and the advance of technology. Back in the day, it would have been fairly difficult to press your own 45 and distribute a professional music recording. Professional-sounding musical instruments were pretty expensive. Now I can burn CD's cheaply and get synthesizers that can sound like a whole orchestra of instruments for less than $100. Some day in the future, it may be very cheap to create believable Jurassic Park monsters and armies of orcs. Massive might be a Mac OS XXVI desktop application. Should we have to wait that long for people to make up more stories with these characters? All creative work is built on familiar themes from the past.
I also respectfully disagree with your view that people don't have different copies of the same movie (read story). How many people bought each edition of Star Wars? How many people have the entire Star Trek collection? The Comte of Monte Cristo has been made into two movies that I'm aware of. There have been many movies telling the stories of Robin Hood, Frankenstein, mummies, zombies, Hamlet, Norman Bates, King Kong, and on and on. Film buffs love to argue over which versions they like the best.
People like hearing the same stories over and over again. That's where archetypes, myths, and folk tales come from. Joseph Campbell has made everyone sick and tired of his theories on the subject.
I agree that passing off Spielberg and Lucas' Raiders as your own (if anybody would actually believe that) is wrong. There is a term for it: plagarism. Doing a cheap version may be on the edge of permissible, but it is clear that the makers had no intention of passing off all the work as their own. They followed the rules taught by every teacher assigning a research paper: list your sources. They followed the rules in identifying where the script came from; they are following the current rules about what they can do with the fruits of their labors.
Creating new adventures featuring Indiana Jones should be allowable after a much shorter period of time then Disney has legislated. The audience for decent films about the character is probably bottomless. People are eagerly anticipating the fourth movie and it is still little more than vaporware. A lot of fun movies could have been made in that time. That doesn't mean I wouldn't want to see Spielberg and Lucas take a crack at it (Episodes 1, 2, and 3 not withstanding).
A while ago, a short film featuring Batman fighting the Joker, Predator, and the Alien went on-line. The conference linked in my first post has more information on it. Many people have said it was the best Batman movie they've seen.
At the end of the day, laws are laws, opinions are opinions. I can only go by what I felt in that screening. I would rather live in a world that can freely pump out films about valley girls fighting to destroy the Death Star and 10 year olds hunting archeologists with bows and arrows than a world where creativity is constrained and bottled up. It felt right, it felt good.
The discourse of the movie studios feels disenfranchising, wrong, and extreme. It feels anti-capitalistic, anti-democractic, and totalitarian. They probably don't mean it that way, and would argue they don't present it that way, but it just doesn't have the same vibe that a few guys in a garage cracking out a film has. Wasn't that the American dream?
Last weekend I went to the Fanzilla Fan Film Convention to see the absolutely brilliant Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. For anyone who doesn't know, this movie was the work of three junior high kids back in the 1980's, that were so moved by seeing the actual film, that they decided to remake it shot-for-shot.
At the screening, they informed us that security guards would be monitoring the audience to make sure none of us were taping the film to distribute it across the net, since it is a reproduction of the original film. As I was watching the grainy film of a 13 year old adventurer mock fighting 13 year olds wearing turbins in the streets of Gulfport, MS, a security guard walked up the aisle scanning with a night vision scope to make sure nobody had any naughty cameras.
The whole situation just seemed so ludicrous. Nobody was going to mistake this film for the actual Raiders. The point of watching this film was not to be entertained by the movie's plot (though it does hold up well in the re-telling), but in seeing how these kids with limited resources managed to pull off outrageous stunts and ingeniuously improvise set pieces to make a film that actually held together.
They succeeded bigger and better than you would think. But Industrial Light and Magic doesn't have to worry about their jobs. I still bought the Indiana Jones Trilogy DVD set. In fact, I watched the real Raiders that night when I got home because the kids did such a good job that I felt like seeing the original.
That fan film may not be creative in the sense of creating a new work from whole cloth. But it was extremely creative in execution, and inspired a few of the kids involved to become a part of the movie business. Ironically, one of them works for a DVD production house.
I wish more people could see this film; it is truly inspirational. I felt like running out and making my own movie. Why can't it be out there on the 'Net if nobody is going to make money from it? Would it really cut into LucasFilm's profits if someone did make some money on it?
One of the producers of the film introduced it at the festival and said that they occasionally show it for educational purposes. What kind of message does it send to show kids this film, and then tell them that there are these bizarre boundaries on their creativity? Do they send security to those screenings? I've heard a lot of complaints on this site and others that kids don't do these kinds of ambitious projects anymore. Why do you think that is?
One X-factor is JVM warm up. When benchmarking Java you should run the test multiple times in the same VM. This gives you a better real-world feel of what a Java app will do during continuous use, at least from a server perspective.
Desktop app use cases may be different, in which case your test may be valid. Start-up time is definitely a significant part of the user experience. At one point Java 1.5 was supposed to have shared VMs, so that Java can start at system load time. Other VMs would just then be a matter of forking another process off the already running VM, thus increasing startup time. My understanding is this has fallen off the truck for that release, but people are working on it.
I don't have a moment to dig it up right now, but I remember that Slashdot posted awhile ago about a professor that experiments with cyborg technology. One of the ideas he proposes for dealing with video surveillance is to give everyone a camera. Then the balance of power is even: the state can see you and the public can keep an eye on the state.
So I would say, you want an RFID tag on my car? Fine. Then I want to be able to find out where every police and government official's car is and how they are used so that I know my tax dollars are being spent responsibily.
I want to know if the cops are sleeping in a parking lot at 3 am when they should be on patrol (e.g. if the patrol car isn't passing RFID readers on the roadways indicating that they are moving around, then why weren't they?). I want to know if government officials speed and obey the laws in my town. Are they taking their cars out of town for any reason?
I should be able to get a reader and I should be able to request the traffic data. I have no problem with RFID tags being used to monitor traffic data. Real-time data about traffic jams would be very helpful. It would also be nice to have hard data justifying the need to widen roads.
This info won't be abused if the state knows that the microscope is on them just as much as it is on us.
Writing down time of death is premature but...
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Is VOIP Over WLAN DOA?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree with other posters that one conference failure does not a funeral make. Slashdot gets enough traffic without having to sensationalize everything.
However, the current state of WiFi is pretty sorry. Perhaps I am just flustered because of the problems I've had setting up a WiFi network for the first time, but everyone I know who has setup WiFi has had to deal with a whole array of perplexing problems. Without fail, they end up consulting with tech support to get the connection to work. Many router reviews I read on-line detailed mysterious problems and uneven user experiences. On the other hand, connecting Ethernet is practically like plugging power in an outlet nowadays.
I'm not tech-illiterate. I've built every computer I've owned since high school and have run Linux variants on each of them at one point or another. I don't mind some technical complexity, but setup should be easier than it is, and the connection more reliable.
I think someone should write an article about the death of the IT industry as a whole. Computer-based consumer electronics and software have an amazingly poor degree of reliability, and there appears to be little liability on the part of companies and few channels of recourse for consumers. Well, </bitter>. I'm going off to enjoy my newly configured WiFi.
My aunt and uncle have an X-Box and she constantly complains that she can't play any of the games on it. They are too complicated for her to control and require too much time investment to learn and play when all she wants to do is spend an evening having a little fun. So far, the only game on X-Box that she really likes is Grabbed by the Ghoulies. My uncle doesn't play all that much either because of the learning curve. I have to wonder how many people use the X-Box for Halo and watching DVD's and that's it.
The Game Cube is cartoony, and I like it that way. It has pick-up-and-play going for it. The controller has big, friendly, multi-colored buttons. I could picture the PS2 or X-Box controller being used to control an interrogation droid; they look complicated. I'm often asked to bring my GC somewhere to play Mario Kart since it is just a fun social game that isn't all that hard to pick up. It's fun to smash your friend with a huge turtle shell while racing on go-karts.
GC may appear to be more of a kids system, but I think the point is that it is a social system. Creating games that people gather around is Nintendo's market. I hope they keep doing that because no one else seems to be. I still like my Halo, but I'm more often in the mood for some MKDD.
They are apparently trying to produce a modern Rosetta stone of contemporary languages that will be microetched into a disk of nickel. Check out the main page.
I also thought there was another site somewhere about other products that were basically CD's etched in stone, but can't seem to find it now.
If you use DocBook XML, you might not necessarily have to give up much on the layout side either... and there is a pretty fair tool chain for using DocBook documents.
I kinda think the Mono project has the right idea: if someone wants a particular feature, pay for us to develop it. Otherwise, we do the features we want in the order we want.
I think service and support is a viable option though. Even when someone truly puts in effort to make it easy to use, it will be hard for somebody. There will also still be bugs to fix in even the best software. This guy goes into why that is pretty well. Not that I am claiming that Microsoft makes the best software, but they do throw a lot of resources at trying.
Really? At this point, most ISPs stop users from running their own servers (or attempt to anyway)... which means that the only way to host your own content is to put it on a hosting service, and even then that's mostly for web content only. No streaming music from your home LAN to your office PC, etc.
Consider this other article posted today about what the Internet isn't and think about how AOL/Comcast/Cox etc. sell their services. If the value of the internet is the sum of the value of the ends, then the ends are rapidly losing value. All of the content will be come centralized in places like AOL.com, Disney.com, and Cnn.com. Of course, nothing could theoretically stop an ad-hoc, grassroots WiFi network from creating a GhostNet that could be what the Internet started out as: a decentralized, bottom-up, collaboration tool.
The Orb, if I recall right, uses a proprietary radio network to receive information. It seems to me like they would have a broader market and a cheaper device if it could make use of WiFi or Ethernet and just sell access to a Web Service that provides the same info. As it is, I wouldn't buy it since there are limitations on how I can extend it because of their design choices.
My family has had DirectTV for about 7 years, and we've experienced signal fade at least a couple of times a year. We live in the Northeast and if you get a pretty heavy snow or really strong thunderstorm the signal can drop. Heavy rain can also cause loss of a couple of transponders, so some channels will feature random drops of pixels in the channel or the loss of some channels. If the weather in your area is generally pretty mild it's fine; but if you are looking for 99.9% reliable, then digital cable may be the only game in town.
From the DirectTiVO perspective; never tried that, but I think I would prefer to get a seperate TiVO box. Then modding is an option if you want more capacity and if anything happens to the satellite box or the TiVO, the broken component can be repaired or replaced without completely losing the ability to watch programs (assuming you have a big TiVO backlog of shows). I also don't mind trading some space for the ability to upgrade components seperately as needed.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel like I'm responding to a troll here, but I think you haven't used Swing in a while. The latest releases in 1.4 are significantly better looking and faster. They also make better use of the underlying graphics hardware in Java 2D. I've written apps in Swing that have been very responsive; you just have to take the time to learn the framework.
I will grant you that Swing can get complex and it can take serious effort to eliminate bottlenecks. It's intended to be a general framework for MVC based applications, so it has to cover a lot of cases that may not be applicable for all applications. You sometimes have to subclass and override default painting behavior to tailor it to your usage. But at least you have the ability to do that if you wish.
It also has a tendency to be lower-level then some other approaches. I've seen people throw together VB apps with a lot of functionality pretty quickly. It can take longer to get there in Swing, but the results generally are more maintainable and scalable.
There are efforts in the works to generate standard higher-level constructs, such as database-backed tables with sorting, that other GUI frameworks provide. Check out JDesktop Network Components to see what's in the works. There are also efforts underway to allow Swing apps to fit more neatly into the native shell (such as tray icons).
Swing was pretty deadly in the past, but it has improved significantly recently. Ironically, I'm seeing a lot more MacOS X apps written in Java or Java apps developed on MacOS since Apple has put a lot of effort into their Swing look and feel for Aqua. If you are looking to Apple for direction, I think that is a significant data point.
True, you wouldn't be able to see exactly what they were looking at, but you could at least get an approximation.
I did read the article, but I didn't clearly recall the comment on the curvature. On review, I see what you are referring to.. it works to an extreme angle.
Actually, sunglasses may make the job easier. Depending on the color of the lenses, reflections might show up better. There is also the fact that sunglasses lenses have a much larger surface area then the eye, making it more likely that an image could be captured from an image taken at a farther distance. The original technique, remember, is adapted from the use of lenses and mirrors in traditional camera systems; it just needs an adequate reflective surface.
Other posters have commented that if you have a high-resolution camera at an event, it is more likely and useful to have a photo of the actual event, not a reflection of it. This ignores, however, events that are unexpected. News photographers, for instance, might be shooting closeups of spectators at an airshow, for instance, at the very moment that a plane stalls out and crashes. There may not be time to turn around with the camera, but chances are that the spectator would be facing in the right general direction to capture the event. There is also a possibility that details can be captured that help explain why the plane crashed to begin with.
I don't think we have to worry about this being used in security cameras for a long time; one weakness of this seems to be that it is very sensitive to the angle that it records the subject's image from. In a large crowd of moving people that are constantly changing the location of their eyes with respect to the camera, I doubt you can get a reliable image with any certainty. Even you have an HDTV resolution camera there would probably still be motion blur to deal with.
The bigger worry would be that security personnel, politicians, and judges BELIEVE it is more reliable than it is. No Florida manual recounts, anyone?
Still, I agree with the parent and others who note that this could be very useful from an HCI standpoint. Perfect scenario really... the subject is close to the camera and not moving a whole lot. Be interesting to see what Sony could do with an Eye Toy using this algorithm... auto-aiming in an FPS?
For the record, I don't think the idea of Maven is bad. The sexiest feature in my mind is declaring library dependencies by name and version number and having Maven pull down the required library from a central repository. No more cryptically named jars checked into version control. Upgrading the library is as simple as changing the version number. Inter-project dependencies are simplified since Maven publishes build artifacts to the repository for you. Other projects can just treat your project like another library dependency. Think of it like APT for Java builds.
I find myself writing the same constructs over and over in Ant. There really aren't that many ways of build a J2EE application. Maven takes care of a lot of the tedious details by letting you specify at a high-level what you want to build; it takes care of building classpaths and assembling pieces into an EAR file. You can just get on with the code.
I also don't have a significant problem with some of the constraints Maven puts on projects. It's a pain when you have something specific in mind or are trying to retrofit a project, but it is kinda nice to be able to look at any Java project and instantly grasp where to find things. Enforcing a directory layout may constrain the developer but increases transparency. The GNU projects generally follow a standard project layout with Autoconf support. I personally would not want to give up
Where I agree with Hani's blog is:
I've been thinking about bringing it in for an effort I am currently working on. A lot of its features would match my needs. The issues that Hani identified however, especially the implementation language, are holding me back.
There is also the fact that Ant is very well known. Many people are capable of fixing issues with Ant scripts. Extending Ant for custom tasks is also fairly trivial. I wouldn't really want to write a Maven plugin. And debugging the damn thing is tough since most of the logic is hidden.
(Emphasis mine).
Or if you don't find that convincing, there is the original proposal for the World Wide Web. About half way down, look for a mention of the Enquire system, which includes a screen mockup with a prominent "Add" option. As a side note, some of the mentions of keywords and nodes foreshadows the RDF and Semantic Web efforts.
The Amaya editor/browser mentions on its front page that one of its goals is to realize the idea of the Web as a true read/write collaboration medium.
If you look at the RFC for the HTTP protocol, you will probably note the PUT method and the POST method which could be used for uploading new hypertext content.
Alan Kay is reminding us that the vision for some of the pioneering works in computing still has not been fully realized. Perhaps if Mosaic or Netscape made more of an effort to support editing we would be in a very different place now. The proliferation of wiki software is starting to bring the web back toward collaboration and its original mandate.
I shouldn't rise to your bait, but I think the original article is really written for people who honestly hold the position you are advocating.
The fact that you seem so unwilling to acknowledge what browsers were supposed to be indicates to me that Mr. Kay is right to be making noise about this. Commercial interests want to make the Internet like modern television. Its original inventors wanted to make it a tool to share knowledge. I know which side I'm rooting for.
I haven't gotten a feel for how good the performance truly is on the Opteron/Gentoo front since I'm mostly learning how to administrate Gentoo properly (had to re-install after I let etc-update clobber one to many conf files :-/).
Initial impressions are that it is pretty quick. I had a weird problem where using a USB mouse seemed to slow the system to a crawl, but I switched to using a PS/2 adapter and the problem went away. After that pretty sweet.... I did an emerge world that built X and KDE among other things and it was pretty much done overnight.
My big disappointment right now is that I can't use the win32codecs package. The NVidia drivers now support 32-bit alongside 64-bit OpenGL drivers, so I may actually have a chance of trying the Transgaming Wine impl... Really, games and May a learning edition are the only reason I keep Win 2000 around.
I actually thought the mainstream media account was pretty well-balanced. I've used multiple distributions, including Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, and most recently, Gentoo.
Many of the experiences I've had match what the author experienced. I have yet to have a distribution where everything worked 100% out of the box. I've run into numerous occasions where I've had to play musical chairs with RPMs to get things to install.
I generally have had pretty good luck sorting out these problems out since I'm a pretty advanced computer user, but I have also had problems that were very perplexing. I could see how the experience for a user who does not have the experience or the inclination to spend hours configuring their computer would still find the experience daunting.
While the author brings up all of these issues, he also notes that some of these problems are due to poor manufacturer support. He also expresses faith that the user interface problems with yum will quickly be solved. The fact that a mainstream news outlet would note Linux's strong security record and mention it as a strong possibility for replacing Windows is encouraging since it will raise the visibility of Linux for the mainstream.
I've seen great improvements since starting to use Linux. I enjoy the fact that my scanner now will only work on Linux, while the drivers for Windows 2000 are fairly worthless. Gentoo has been pretty satisfactory on my 64-bit Opteron, while Microsoft is still not shipping 64-bit Windows XP.
Let's acknowledge that works needs to be done and keep improving. I'm looking forward to trying new versions and seeing this platform mature.
A group at MIT is using RDF for an integrated data management system. It's sorta like Outlook (or Kontact, if you prefer ;-) on steroids. It's called Haystack.
I have to say, their ideas are intriguing, but after using it... I think the big shortcoming is that it's tough to come up with a generalized user interface for manipulating any data thrown at it. Haystack tries at this, and I think, fails at providing any kind of cues or context that tells you what your are dealing with. In Haystack, every task and piece of information you deal with looks very much like every other piece of data, because, as a design choice, Haystack every piece of data has the same rank as every other piece of data.
Having different applications for different types of data usually make sense, if only to limit the amount of options presented to the user so they can make an intelligent decision about what action they want to perform. See this article on Slashdot about how users need limited since it makes decision-making too difficult psychologically.
Inevitably, discussions around RDF and metadata always devolve into hand-wavy discussions on how the computer will be able to "magically" do smart things based on the metadata. But it really isn't magic and it isn't automatic at all. Equivalencies and mappings have to be created by humans along with the rules about what to do.
RDF uses many concepts from AI research. Anybody who has read about this branch of computer science knows that the discipline has pretty much given up on creating AI in the 'sci-fi' sense as an impractical dream. That's what makes the Loebner prize so controversial. I don't expect that computers will be intelligent enough able to relieve users of too much of the burden in assigning metadata.
RDF is a promising approach, but if you read the article, it makes a lot of assumptions about what needs to happen to make the benefits real. Among them are establishing standards for what metadata fields apply to different types of objects: photos, people, music, etc. That kind of standardization won't happen overnight, if at all.
The computer also needs to know what to do when it encounters that kind of data. The article mentions MIME and browsers and, in effect, says the browser can make a rational decision even if it hasn't seen a particular MIME type before. That isn't really true.. you have to install a plugin that tells the browser what to do, or have a registry that someone has put together where the browser can install the right plugin at the right time.
That said, KDE's unification of contact information and passwords does show some of the promise of metadata efforts. And Apple's Spotlight looks like a good solution as far as it goes. I guess I'm just trying to make the point that the magic of metadata needs to be taken with a fairly large hunk of salt.
Why would you limit your database to serving fewer connections than you have limited your web server to?
I always wondered about that in application design. Just recently I talked with a former software architect from IBM and he gave me an answer that may make some sense. It still feels a little counter-intuitive to me, so any corrections would be welcome.
The answer is basically a resource management issue if I remember correctly. You want to manage the load on your database servers so it stays relatively even, that is, avoiding peaks and troughs. You also want to keep requests waiting at the edges of your network, add the web server level.
Imagine for a second a scenario where the database accepted an unlimited amount of connections. Eventually the database server would become swamped as more and more resources were consumed (database connections may not be quite as expensive as people think, but they still aren't free). At times you will have the servers running at 100% capacity and at other times at very low capacity.
From a business perspective, you want to use the cheapest machines that are capable of meeting the performance goals. You could keep adding database servers until you meet the load, but this may not always be cost efficient. In addition, you then occur more overhead for keeping the database servers in sync with each other. So you can't just allow unlimited connections.
Now consider the case I think you are stating. Let W web connections = D database connections. IIRCC one problem with this is that not all web requests require a call to the database, so essentially, you will probably have database connections going to waste. You are also wasting database server capacity and resources when you have a low traffic scenario since not all of the possible database connections are used.
Think about it like getting assignments at work. Would you rather get a steady stream of assignments that you can finish in a reasonable amount of time? Or get dumped on with a million things to do at once, and then have long periods of inactivity. I know the clock on the wall seems to move faster to me when I have a steady amount of work to do and I have less stress when expectations are reasonable. Also, from my boss' perspective, when I have nothing to do, he is essentially paying me for doing nothing, and he doesn't want that.
Another analogy might be the caching scenario. Caching is helpful because you can put data you are most likely to need in a location that is faster to search and quicker to access. But if your cache is the same size as your backend store (like memory matched to the size of your hard disk) you loose the advantage of fast searches since you have the same space to search. If your cache is too small you lose the access speed advantage since you have to go back to the underlying, and slower, store more often. So usually, you set the cache to be some fraction of the underlying store to maximize the search/access ratio.
Database connections may not be dog slow, but they have more to do than a web server connection, which may have more to do than an edge-side static content cache. So you want to tune your application to find the optimal usage of each of your resources.
So the IBM guy's answer was, you want to try and use a machine to around 80% capacity, so if the sh** really hits the fan you don't necessarily die, but you aren't maxed out either. By having the web server queue up requests to go to the database, you allow for a steady stream of traffic to the database, even at times when load is off-peak. This also means that it is easier to judge the affect of adding more hardware to the system, since you know how many pages you can serve at 80% capacity, so you know 1) when to add more servers (if the machines are constantly maxed) and 2) how many machines you have to add to keep the same quality of service.
I think the point is the same as the performance vs. scalability discussions in the articl
I think the EPA on it is 35/41 with my standard transmission. Depending on the time of year, I get between 37 (winter) to (an all-time high) 42 (summer). This is in the Northeast, where traffic is pretty dense. I would say my driving is about 60-65% highway and I usually have to get gas every week and a half, depending on how much driving I do on a weekend.
So, I'd have to say the EPA numbers are pretty close to what I'm actually getting. Took awhile to figure out the best way to drive it to get those numbers. All and all, I'm pretty happy with it.
Some of the features in Looking Glass seem kinda pointless, like that 3d cd jukebox idea. The organization of windows by tilting them out of the way looks like a good way to waste screen space.
Metisse seems to take a slightly different approach. The features outlined in the screenshots actually look like they make an effort to help users manage windows. I do agree somewhat with Steve Jobs' position that users shouldn't have to be janitors; a system that makes some useful decisions for the user seems worthwhile.
It looks like Metisee preserves window locations when using the 'shaped' screen and scales contents down, allowing users to utilize spatial relationships and visual cues to find data.
I also like the idea of folding over window corners to see the lower windows. Seems more useful then Alt-Tabbing. This feature is implemented from a research paper. I've seen several posts here that lament open source's propensity to copy rather than innovate. Here is a concrete counter-example of an open source project trying something new and leveraging academic research. Even if the project is a complete failure, it should be applauded for taking a risk and implementing something different.
As an aside, I remember some comments on the original Looking Glass article that critized flipping widgets over to change settings and view properties. The new Tiger Dashboard in Mac OS X is now doing the same thing. The reviews seem positive on that score. I can't really decide what I make of that. Property sheets sometimes obscure their apps, so I guess flipping is a wash, but I think I would prefer to see the application and its properties.
Anybody have any experience using the VIA EPIA boards for DVD and video playback? I'm specifically interested in the MII 12000 for creating a MythTV box. I was also thinking MicroATX, but Pentium 4's and Athlon XPs run hotter and draw more power than the C3. I'd like to keep the power supply and CPU Fan and as quiet as possible.
Extreme Tech was decidedly underwhelmed by the M10000 while mini-itx.com seems to think is fine. The mini-itx review seemed a little hand-wavy though.
There is a film movement that is defined by a very simple set of rules. Anything that doesn't follow the rules isn't considered a part of that movement. In fact, the number of movies that count are so small, that the films are often identified by number indicating the order they were made. I wish I could remember what the movement was to provide info (and so I could try making one). I do remember that the rules are very simple and easy to do cheaply. The resulting works have been considered to be significant cinema.
A 'professional' looking work of cinema is in many cases very subjective. I've watch a work that was basically a very long slow zoom across a room with a horrible soundtrack. It was professional piece by an experimental filmmaker.
Your point is really about economies of scale and the advance of technology. Back in the day, it would have been fairly difficult to press your own 45 and distribute a professional music recording. Professional-sounding musical instruments were pretty expensive. Now I can burn CD's cheaply and get synthesizers that can sound like a whole orchestra of instruments for less than $100. Some day in the future, it may be very cheap to create believable Jurassic Park monsters and armies of orcs. Massive might be a Mac OS XXVI desktop application. Should we have to wait that long for people to make up more stories with these characters? All creative work is built on familiar themes from the past.
I also respectfully disagree with your view that people don't have different copies of the same movie (read story). How many people bought each edition of Star Wars? How many people have the entire Star Trek collection? The Comte of Monte Cristo has been made into two movies that I'm aware of. There have been many movies telling the stories of Robin Hood, Frankenstein, mummies, zombies, Hamlet, Norman Bates, King Kong, and on and on. Film buffs love to argue over which versions they like the best.
People like hearing the same stories over and over again. That's where archetypes, myths, and folk tales come from. Joseph Campbell has made everyone sick and tired of his theories on the subject.
I agree that passing off Spielberg and Lucas' Raiders as your own (if anybody would actually believe that) is wrong. There is a term for it: plagarism. Doing a cheap version may be on the edge of permissible, but it is clear that the makers had no intention of passing off all the work as their own. They followed the rules taught by every teacher assigning a research paper: list your sources. They followed the rules in identifying where the script came from; they are following the current rules about what they can do with the fruits of their labors.
Creating new adventures featuring Indiana Jones should be allowable after a much shorter period of time then Disney has legislated. The audience for decent films about the character is probably bottomless. People are eagerly anticipating the fourth movie and it is still little more than vaporware. A lot of fun movies could have been made in that time. That doesn't mean I wouldn't want to see Spielberg and Lucas take a crack at it (Episodes 1, 2, and 3 not withstanding).
A while ago, a short film featuring Batman fighting the Joker, Predator, and the Alien went on-line. The conference linked in my first post has more information on it. Many people have said it was the best Batman movie they've seen.
At the end of the day, laws are laws, opinions are opinions. I can only go by what I felt in that screening. I would rather live in a world that can freely pump out films about valley girls fighting to destroy the Death Star and 10 year olds hunting archeologists with bows and arrows than a world where creativity is constrained and bottled up. It felt right, it felt good.
The discourse of the movie studios feels disenfranchising, wrong, and extreme. It feels anti-capitalistic, anti-democractic, and totalitarian. They probably don't mean it that way, and would argue they don't present it that way, but it just doesn't have the same vibe that a few guys in a garage cracking out a film has. Wasn't that the American dream?
Last weekend I went to the Fanzilla Fan Film Convention to see the absolutely brilliant Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. For anyone who doesn't know, this movie was the work of three junior high kids back in the 1980's, that were so moved by seeing the actual film, that they decided to remake it shot-for-shot.
At the screening, they informed us that security guards would be monitoring the audience to make sure none of us were taping the film to distribute it across the net, since it is a reproduction of the original film. As I was watching the grainy film of a 13 year old adventurer mock fighting 13 year olds wearing turbins in the streets of Gulfport, MS, a security guard walked up the aisle scanning with a night vision scope to make sure nobody had any naughty cameras.
The whole situation just seemed so ludicrous. Nobody was going to mistake this film for the actual Raiders. The point of watching this film was not to be entertained by the movie's plot (though it does hold up well in the re-telling), but in seeing how these kids with limited resources managed to pull off outrageous stunts and ingeniuously improvise set pieces to make a film that actually held together.
They succeeded bigger and better than you would think. But Industrial Light and Magic doesn't have to worry about their jobs. I still bought the Indiana Jones Trilogy DVD set. In fact, I watched the real Raiders that night when I got home because the kids did such a good job that I felt like seeing the original.
That fan film may not be creative in the sense of creating a new work from whole cloth. But it was extremely creative in execution, and inspired a few of the kids involved to become a part of the movie business. Ironically, one of them works for a DVD production house.
I wish more people could see this film; it is truly inspirational. I felt like running out and making my own movie. Why can't it be out there on the 'Net if nobody is going to make money from it? Would it really cut into LucasFilm's profits if someone did make some money on it?
One of the producers of the film introduced it at the festival and said that they occasionally show it for educational purposes. What kind of message does it send to show kids this film, and then tell them that there are these bizarre boundaries on their creativity? Do they send security to those screenings? I've heard a lot of complaints on this site and others that kids don't do these kinds of ambitious projects anymore. Why do you think that is?
One X-factor is JVM warm up. When benchmarking Java you should run the test multiple times in the same VM. This gives you a better real-world feel of what a Java app will do during continuous use, at least from a server perspective.
Desktop app use cases may be different, in which case your test may be valid. Start-up time is definitely a significant part of the user experience. At one point Java 1.5 was supposed to have shared VMs, so that Java can start at system load time. Other VMs would just then be a matter of forking another process off the already running VM, thus increasing startup time. My understanding is this has fallen off the truck for that release, but people are working on it.
I don't have a moment to dig it up right now, but I remember that Slashdot posted awhile ago about a professor that experiments with cyborg technology. One of the ideas he proposes for dealing with video surveillance is to give everyone a camera. Then the balance of power is even: the state can see you and the public can keep an eye on the state.
So I would say, you want an RFID tag on my car? Fine. Then I want to be able to find out where every police and government official's car is and how they are used so that I know my tax dollars are being spent responsibily.
I want to know if the cops are sleeping in a parking lot at 3 am when they should be on patrol (e.g. if the patrol car isn't passing RFID readers on the roadways indicating that they are moving around, then why weren't they?). I want to know if government officials speed and obey the laws in my town. Are they taking their cars out of town for any reason?
I should be able to get a reader and I should be able to request the traffic data. I have no problem with RFID tags being used to monitor traffic data. Real-time data about traffic jams would be very helpful. It would also be nice to have hard data justifying the need to widen roads.
This info won't be abused if the state knows that the microscope is on them just as much as it is on us.
I agree with other posters that one conference failure does not a funeral make. Slashdot gets enough traffic without having to sensationalize everything.
However, the current state of WiFi is pretty sorry. Perhaps I am just flustered because of the problems I've had setting up a WiFi network for the first time, but everyone I know who has setup WiFi has had to deal with a whole array of perplexing problems. Without fail, they end up consulting with tech support to get the connection to work. Many router reviews I read on-line detailed mysterious problems and uneven user experiences. On the other hand, connecting Ethernet is practically like plugging power in an outlet nowadays.
I'm not tech-illiterate. I've built every computer I've owned since high school and have run Linux variants on each of them at one point or another. I don't mind some technical complexity, but setup should be easier than it is, and the connection more reliable.
At this point, I could launch into a rant about cell phones as well. CNN had an article today about growing customer complaints with cell providers in the US. In related news, java.net's front page is leading with a blog and associated discussion about how the current speed of software development is going to get the industry in serious trouble.
I think someone should write an article about the death of the IT industry as a whole. Computer-based consumer electronics and software have an amazingly poor degree of reliability, and there appears to be little liability on the part of companies and few channels of recourse for consumers. Well, </bitter>. I'm going off to enjoy my newly configured WiFi.
My aunt and uncle have an X-Box and she constantly complains that she can't play any of the games on it. They are too complicated for her to control and require too much time investment to learn and play when all she wants to do is spend an evening having a little fun. So far, the only game on X-Box that she really likes is Grabbed by the Ghoulies. My uncle doesn't play all that much either because of the learning curve. I have to wonder how many people use the X-Box for Halo and watching DVD's and that's it.
The Game Cube is cartoony, and I like it that way. It has pick-up-and-play going for it. The controller has big, friendly, multi-colored buttons. I could picture the PS2 or X-Box controller being used to control an interrogation droid; they look complicated. I'm often asked to bring my GC somewhere to play Mario Kart since it is just a fun social game that isn't all that hard to pick up. It's fun to smash your friend with a huge turtle shell while racing on go-karts.
GC may appear to be more of a kids system, but I think the point is that it is a social system. Creating games that people gather around is Nintendo's market. I hope they keep doing that because no one else seems to be. I still like my Halo, but I'm more often in the mood for some MKDD.
Oddly enough, there is a project doing that.
The Rosetta Project Technology page
They are apparently trying to produce a modern Rosetta stone of contemporary languages that will be microetched into a disk of nickel. Check out the main page.
I also thought there was another site somewhere about other products that were basically CD's etched in stone, but can't seem to find it now.
If you use DocBook XML, you might not necessarily have to give up much on the layout side either... and there is a pretty fair tool chain for using DocBook documents.
Traffic where you live must be wicked if you are at risk of getting hit by a car in your house.
I kinda think the Mono project has the right idea: if someone wants a particular feature, pay for us to develop it. Otherwise, we do the features we want in the order we want.
I think service and support is a viable option though. Even when someone truly puts in effort to make it easy to use, it will be hard for somebody. There will also still be bugs to fix in even the best software.
This guy goes into why that is pretty well. Not that I am claiming that Microsoft makes the best software, but they do throw a lot of resources at trying.
Really? At this point, most ISPs stop users from running their own servers (or attempt to anyway) ... which means that the only way to host your own content is to put it on a hosting service, and even then that's mostly for web content only. No streaming music from your home LAN to your office PC, etc.
Consider this other article posted today about what the Internet isn't and think about how AOL/Comcast/Cox etc. sell their services. If the value of the internet is the sum of the value of the ends, then the ends are rapidly losing value. All of the content will be come centralized in places like AOL.com, Disney.com, and Cnn.com. Of course, nothing could theoretically stop an ad-hoc, grassroots WiFi network from creating a GhostNet that could be what the Internet started out as: a decentralized, bottom-up, collaboration tool.
The Orb, if I recall right, uses a proprietary radio network to receive information. It seems to me like they would have a broader market and a cheaper device if it could make use of WiFi or Ethernet and just sell access to a Web Service that provides the same info. As it is, I wouldn't buy it since there are limitations on how I can extend it because of their design choices.
I do like the concept though.
My family has had DirectTV for about 7 years, and we've experienced signal fade at least a couple of times a year. We live in the Northeast and if you get a pretty heavy snow or really strong thunderstorm the signal can drop. Heavy rain can also cause loss of a couple of transponders, so some channels will feature random drops of pixels in the channel or the loss of some channels. If the weather in your area is generally pretty mild it's fine; but if you are looking for 99.9% reliable, then digital cable may be the only game in town.
From the DirectTiVO perspective; never tried that, but I think I would prefer to get a seperate TiVO box. Then modding is an option if you want more capacity and if anything happens to the satellite box or the TiVO, the broken component can be repaired or replaced without completely losing the ability to watch programs (assuming you have a big TiVO backlog of shows). I also don't mind trading some space for the ability to upgrade components seperately as needed.