International links are a bottleneck everywhere, which is why people have devised clever ways around them. Seriously popular content is cached by transparent proxies or Content Delivery Networks such as Akamai which reside inside your high-speed network. Also, having a national high-speed network in a country with plenty of space will be very attractive to tech investors to actually move their data to Australia, bringing the data to you instead of having to pull it in from abroad.
Do not underestimate the capacity of DWDM backbones. Also, realize that this gigabit speed is peak capacity, users will scarcely use this capacity for extended periods of time. I also expect that subscriptions will be differentiated with the 1G subscription being more expensive than less demanding plans. 100Mbps will be plenty for most users, but it would be great if customers with higher demands willing to pay the price could get a higher speed.
Tony Abbott apparently doesn't understand a thing about modern networking. Today's optic fibers can support frightening data rates, the limiting factor currenly is what the hardware on both sides is capable of. With the speeds of the high end of the market recently increasing to 40G and 100G (from 1G and 10G) per channel I would not be surprised if that jump suddenly made 1G FTTH possible. Investing in copper technology now is outrageous and a waste of money. Utilizing it for the last mile while you're not done rolling out fiber to each premise is acceptable at best. Wireless broadband might be acceptable for remote locations but even those base stations need a good fiber connection for their uplink.
All these years after the Tenenbaum-Torvalds debate Linus admitted his prof was right? You'd think that would have been in the news somewhere.
Tanenbaum is not, was not and never will be Torvalds' "prof". Torvalds never studied at the Vrije Universiteit and the two only met on comp.os.minix after Linus released his first kernel.
There are so many reasons not to start with PHP, that I'm not even going to start listing them here.
I think you should, because this is a horrible way to make your case. Although it's true that PHP allows you to make hugely incomprehensible programs, that's no reason to write it off completely. C and C++ allow for even far more rancid hacks, and the only thing I've heard people say about those languages is that it's hard because of the compilation step...
PHP has come a long way since PHP3. Although the typing system is still pretty weak, PHP5 has a nice OO model and Exception handling interface. What makes it great as a first language is that you have very easy access to a visual interface system (html) and that it has a huge library that help you along on the more complicated stuff, with proper documentation. Oh, and it's definitely worse to teach BASIC as a first language than PHP. Let's talk evaluation strategies...
As most people said: it entirely depends on your application, but Minix (www.minix3.org) boots darn fast. It has some serious downsides (such as limited software availability and lack of drivers), but if you get it to work it works like a charm. Also, the microkernel design is clearly superior to the monolithic kernel design many operating systems use these days:P
The final boss is hard, but that's OK. The problem is, you NEED a whole bunch of homing missiles to finish him off. The problem is, I didn't give Juno the homing missile upgrades, so he just has 10, which is not enough to kill the boss. Trying to hit that #@&^%^&^&* small spot on his ass with something other than a homing missile is just not doable. I nevertheless apent three days trying to do it and than I never pleyed the game again. A pity, because the game rocked altogether.
You are seriously confusing "language" with "library". One main problem with JavaScript as a programming environment is indeed that library support for it differs hugely among environments, with good examples indeed being the XMLHTTPRequest object, implemented with roughly the same interface by two completely different browsers, but accesible in different ways (because of the difference in library). What Sun does with Java is delivering the JRE (Java Runtime Environment), of which in important part is of course the JVM, which translates bytecode instructions into operating system and platform specific instructions. However, another very important aspect of the JRE is the Java API, which is also (almost) universally consistent amongst the different JRE's. That is what makes Java "compile once, run anywhere". Also, this is not entirely true. Many cell phones and other mobile devices nowadays are equipped with a JVM, but not with a full J2SE API. Therefore, a lot of those "compile once, run anywhere" Java programs will do nothing but generate errors on such a device.
I am one of those people that cursed JavaScript (after being enthusiastic about it when I was 14). I am just now beginning to turn around and think "well, it IS pretty nice". One of the things that has changed is that it does not "[mutate] faster than a fruit fly in an X-ray machine" (bonus points if you know who wrote this) anymore, with support becoming more standard over different interpreters, and incompatibilities becoming better documented and workaround libraries that unify the differences all over the place. Debuggers also become more widely available, helping the people when they exclaim "WHY the HECK doesn't it work this time!". It's still easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it, but hey, the same goes for C. At least it generally does not blow your leg up like C++. This behaviour is caused by the extreme felxibility of the language, which also allows for interesting constructions, as long as you're careful as a programmer. In other words: you have to know what you're doing to keep the code organized and understanable, something that is lacking with most starting web developers. Still, the availability and functionalty of JavaScript allows rich, interactive web applications to be developed, which is a good thing if you ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
Those data rates are more frightening for RIAA and its friends than for little kids...
International links are a bottleneck everywhere, which is why people have devised clever ways around them. Seriously popular content is cached by transparent proxies or Content Delivery Networks such as Akamai which reside inside your high-speed network. Also, having a national high-speed network in a country with plenty of space will be very attractive to tech investors to actually move their data to Australia, bringing the data to you instead of having to pull it in from abroad.
Do not underestimate the capacity of DWDM backbones. Also, realize that this gigabit speed is peak capacity, users will scarcely use this capacity for extended periods of time. I also expect that subscriptions will be differentiated with the 1G subscription being more expensive than less demanding plans. 100Mbps will be plenty for most users, but it would be great if customers with higher demands willing to pay the price could get a higher speed.
Tony Abbott apparently doesn't understand a thing about modern networking. Today's optic fibers can support frightening data rates, the limiting factor currenly is what the hardware on both sides is capable of. With the speeds of the high end of the market recently increasing to 40G and 100G (from 1G and 10G) per channel I would not be surprised if that jump suddenly made 1G FTTH possible. Investing in copper technology now is outrageous and a waste of money. Utilizing it for the last mile while you're not done rolling out fiber to each premise is acceptable at best. Wireless broadband might be acceptable for remote locations but even those base stations need a good fiber connection for their uplink.
All these years after the Tenenbaum-Torvalds debate Linus admitted his prof was right? You'd think that would have been in the news somewhere.
Tanenbaum is not, was not and never will be Torvalds' "prof". Torvalds never studied at the Vrije Universiteit and the two only met on comp.os.minix after Linus released his first kernel.
Some newsgroup I regularly read got a lot of spam over the last month or so, but a couple days ago it just stopped. Possibly related...
Probably _the_ way to get him (more) involved in piracy, and (more) frustrated with you...
There are so many reasons not to start with PHP, that I'm not even going to start listing them here.
I think you should, because this is a horrible way to make your case. Although it's true that PHP allows you to make hugely incomprehensible programs, that's no reason to write it off completely. C and C++ allow for even far more rancid hacks, and the only thing I've heard people say about those languages is that it's hard because of the compilation step...
PHP has come a long way since PHP3. Although the typing system is still pretty weak, PHP5 has a nice OO model and Exception handling interface. What makes it great as a first language is that you have very easy access to a visual interface system (html) and that it has a huge library that help you along on the more complicated stuff, with proper documentation. Oh, and it's definitely worse to teach BASIC as a first language than PHP. Let's talk evaluation strategies...
As most people said: it entirely depends on your application, but Minix (www.minix3.org) boots darn fast. It has some serious downsides (such as limited software availability and lack of drivers), but if you get it to work it works like a charm. Also, the microkernel design is clearly superior to the monolithic kernel design many operating systems use these days :P
The final boss is hard, but that's OK. The problem is, you NEED a whole bunch of homing missiles to finish him off. The problem is, I didn't give Juno the homing missile upgrades, so he just has 10, which is not enough to kill the boss. Trying to hit that #@&^%^&^&* small spot on his ass with something other than a homing missile is just not doable. I nevertheless apent three days trying to do it and than I never pleyed the game again. A pity, because the game rocked altogether.
You are seriously confusing "language" with "library". One main problem with JavaScript as a programming environment is indeed that library support for it differs hugely among environments, with good examples indeed being the XMLHTTPRequest object, implemented with roughly the same interface by two completely different browsers, but accesible in different ways (because of the difference in library). What Sun does with Java is delivering the JRE (Java Runtime Environment), of which in important part is of course the JVM, which translates bytecode instructions into operating system and platform specific instructions. However, another very important aspect of the JRE is the Java API, which is also (almost) universally consistent amongst the different JRE's. That is what makes Java "compile once, run anywhere". Also, this is not entirely true. Many cell phones and other mobile devices nowadays are equipped with a JVM, but not with a full J2SE API. Therefore, a lot of those "compile once, run anywhere" Java programs will do nothing but generate errors on such a device.
I am one of those people that cursed JavaScript (after being enthusiastic about it when I was 14). I am just now beginning to turn around and think "well, it IS pretty nice". One of the things that has changed is that it does not "[mutate] faster than a fruit fly in an X-ray machine" (bonus points if you know who wrote this) anymore, with support becoming more standard over different interpreters, and incompatibilities becoming better documented and workaround libraries that unify the differences all over the place. Debuggers also become more widely available, helping the people when they exclaim "WHY the HECK doesn't it work this time!". It's still easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it, but hey, the same goes for C. At least it generally does not blow your leg up like C++. This behaviour is caused by the extreme felxibility of the language, which also allows for interesting constructions, as long as you're careful as a programmer. In other words: you have to know what you're doing to keep the code organized and understanable, something that is lacking with most starting web developers. Still, the availability and functionalty of JavaScript allows rich, interactive web applications to be developed, which is a good thing if you ask me.