However, one must wonder why not just use TCP, which is guaranteed to be reliable. IMHO, What you'd end up with using UDP is a LOT of "did you get it? yes/no"-type network traffic between peers
The problem is P2P and firewalls. The typical home firewall is also a NAT device. If you are behind a NAT device and I am behind a NAT device, to set up a TCP connection, one of us has to configure his firewall to specifically forward a particular port to a particular box on the LAN, and the other of us can then connect (assuming the external IP address is known, which is a separate problem).
With UDP, we can work around that "configure his firewall" part. Say we want to communicate between MyIP:MyPort and YourIP:YourPort. I send a UDP packet to YourIP:YourPort from MyPort. My firewall NATs it. Your firewall drops it. However, the NAT software in my firewall won't know yours dropped it, and will open up MyIP:MyPort automatically. You do the same thing on your end, sending a sacrificial packet to be eaten by my firewall. After we've each sent our sacrificial packets, we can now exchange UDP packets.
As far as reliability goes, TCP is implemented over IP, which is no more reliable than UDP. The reason TCP is reliable is that it implements acknoledgments and flow control on top of the unreliable IP layer. There is no reason something like TCP could not be built on top of UDP instead of directly on top of IP.
If a particular pair of clients would end up exchanging a lot of "did you get it? yes/no" traffic, that would still be no more traffic than they'd get with TCP. You just don't see that traffic at the application level with TCP because it is handled by the TCP software. It's still there on the wire, though.
The game is intended as an "interactive reconstruction." The idea is to see how plausible the findings of the Warren Commission are. There's even a contest with a $100,000 prize if you can pull off the shots that Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have taken
Except it's already been done. It was covered on either the History Channel or the Discovery Channel a while ago. They made models out of ballistics gel with pig bones inside, and had a shooter on a crane to get the same angle and distance Oswald had, using the same model gun from the same year, firing the same model bullets. He made the shot, the "wounds" on the ballistics gel model matched the wounds on Kennedy and Connely, and the damage on the bullet was almost identical to that of the so-called "magic bullet".
I've never seen one (apart from ipod) that needed proprietary software... but then I'd never get an ipod anyway
The Creative players require proprietary software. You can only drag/drop from Explorer because their proprietary software installs the appropriate Windows shell extensions and whatnots to make that work.
Well, they "require" it in the sense that iPods require proprietary software. For both, the formats on the device and the interfaces have been reverse engineered and open source programs have been written to manage them.
Of the two, however, the Creatives are "more" proprietary, in that this crap is necessary to use them as file storage devices. iPods, on the other hand, work as Firewire/USB drives without any special software on the host. You only need the special software (proprietary or open source) to get the device to play music.
How can we be sure that un-ethical companies will not try to steal code that is covered under the GPL and try to pass it off as their own?
The simplest way is to use a BSD license and not worry about it. There are plenty of ways to make money off of GPL'ed code without violating GPL that if money is your concern, GPL isn't going to stop people anyway, so might as well just let anyone use it for whatever they want and be done with it.
If you are just going to toss something in a drawer or something like that, and not deal with it for 50 years, then indeed printing your photos might be your best bet.
However, if you are willing to take a more active approach to archiving, there are better ways to do it. For example, store photos on CD or DVD. Make sure you have two or three copies, stored in different locations.
Every couple of years, take each copy, read it (verifying with a checksum that it is fine), and burn a new copy (and verify the new copy). At each location, and add the new copy to the same location. (If space is a concern, you only need to keep the last two good copies at each location). If a copy has errors, replace it with a copy made from one of the good ones.
This will catch bit-rot, unless all your copies go bad at the same time.
If CD or DVD (or whatever format you are using) looks like it is getting obsolete, so that new readers and writers are not readily available, you can switch formats.
This procedure will easily keep your digital data safe and readable indefinitely.
This is Microsoft's second attempt to crack this market. The first one, Ultimate TV went nowhere. But the reports I've heard from Ultimate TV owners have been pretty positive. So Microsoft isn't exactly going into this from scratch
I've got a DirecTV UTV. When I bought it, the features were slightly behind the Tivo of the day for searching, but it had PIP, which I thought I wanted.
The first software update after I got it made it match Tivo, and the second software update made it better. It is interesting to note that the second update was AFTER they stopped selling these.
It has run quite well. In the nearly three years I've had it, there have been maybe two glitches where I had to reboot.
Ever since I started buying music on iTunes, I have yet to buy an entire album. What does that suggest? There are too many junky tracks on every CD. There is no reason to make consumers pay $12 for CD, when I can download the track I want for $0.99
It could also suggest that you no longer are interested in stuff that you don't like right away.
Looking back at all my CDs, I find that it is very common for my favorite tracks to be ones that I initially did not think much of. They grew on my after many listens, as I came to appreciate things I hadn't noticed on the first listen.
I agree with you. I work part time at Barnes & Nobles for extra cash, and I know what you mean about people abusing the return policy (as if all the fucking dirtbag freeloaders hanging out and treating the store like it was their personal lounge wasn't bad enough)
Uhm...B&N encourages people to hang out and treat the store as a lounge. They seem to think if they can make the stores hang-out places, people will buy more books.
There will always be people who abuse policies. But, if you make it hard to do business with someone, they will stop doing business with you
Some businesses understand this, and try hard to keep customers happy. I recall a newspaper story on Nordstrom's customer service. They accepted a return on a set of snow tires, without a reciept. Pretty nice of them, right?
Well, it is even nicer than you might think: Nordstom's does not sell snow tires. Most businesses would have pointed out that those receiptless tires could not possibly have come from them, and sent the customer on his way.
The thing is, in this case, there was nothing wrong with the merchandise. The shopper just realized that she already had something like it at home. People should be more thoughtful about what they spend their money on. If you buy clothes and frequently return them, it might seem to the store that you are just wearing them and then returning them
The significant thing here is that it sounds like the store's system was poorly done. It sounds like it looked at the number of returns per customer, rather than the percentage. This customer wasn't returning a higher percentage than other customers, but she shopped there frequently. So, she was buying and keeping a lot more items than a "normal" customer, too.
This reminds me of something I've noticed with myself over the last few years, as the internet has become so much more a part of everything. My friends have also noticed this.
I find that as I interact with people from all over the world, on forums, and newsgroups, and in online games (my EQ guild had Canadians, and Australians, and French, and a few others, for example), the notion of countries, like "The United States", just doesn't seem that relevant any more.
I'm starting to feel that basically the world consists of here (basically, where the people I interact with outside the net are) and everywhere else. When I deal with someone who is not here, it doesn't matter to me if they are in Texas or New York or France. That the first two of those are in the same country as I and the third is not seems a silly distinction to make.
You are implying that Linux servers host more domains/computer than Windows or OS X boxes do. Apache is the main web server type for Linux and it also runs on Windows and OS X. Are you saying there a technical reason that Linux hosts a higher ratio, or is it a social reason?
Windows can certainly host a large number of sites on one machine, but if you check hosting companies, you'll find many more happen to use Linux than use Windows or OS X. Any given random non-parked domain seems to be much more likely to be on a Linux box than on a Windows or OS X box.
This study has the same problems as last year's. All it is reporting is the total number of breachers per system.
First problem: what is a breach? If someone takes down a hosting company's Linux server that is hosting 5000 domains, and someone else takes down a Windows box with one domain and an OS X box with one domain, is that counted as 5000 Linux breaches, 1 Windows breach, and 1 OS X breach, or is it 1 breach of each OS?
Second problem: total number of breaches is a pointless number to look at by itself. For example, if you had 100 Windows servers and 1000 Linux servers, and you had 50 of the Windows server breached and 100 of the Linux servers breached, that would be a 50% breach rate for Windows and a 10% breach rate for Linux. But the way Mi2G reports it they would say 33% of the breaches were on Window and 67% on Linux, so Windows is twice as secure.
The XBox2 using a PPC doesn't make it easier to port those games to Mac. Games for all modern systems, including consoles, are written in C or C++, and use system libraries to access the hardware on the console, so the choice of processor is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to porting. The work of porting is dealing with different graphics, sound, and I/O architectures on the original and target systems.
It is emulation that benefits when the original and target systems have the same processor, because then you don't have to emulate the CPU, and that is by far the slowest part of emulation. So, XBox2 using PPC opens up the possibility of a terrific XBox2 emulator for the Mac.
I wish Creative had known how to do what Apple did. I like Creative MP3 players much more
Creative players don't implement the USB Mass Storage interface, so you can't use them as data drives. Yes, you CAN store data on them, but only by using Creative's proprietary software, or a third party reverse engineered clone of that software.
And you wake up three years later at a thin 100 pounds. Forget Atkins, let's go to Mars!
But what about the return trip? Would this mean the ship would have to have enough food so that on Mars you could bulk back up to 400? If so, that might negate the savings from hibernation!
With all of the new private space industry, NASA has been set free to explore the further reaches of space
What new private space industry? Spaceship One, for example, reached space. That's a long way from being able to do anything useful in space. They were nowhere near orbital velocity, for example. We're still many years, if not decades, away from private industry being able to take over NASA's near-earth space role.
Not exactly, see here for the expression of K (eq. 12)
See eq 15. The one I'm talking about (the limit of Qn^(1/n)) is exactly exp(pi^2/(12ln2)). They call it the Khinchin-Levy constant at Mathworld, but I've seen it called just the Kninchin constant. The one in eq 12 is the limit of the geometric mean of the paritial quotients of the continued fraction.
For almost all real numbers r, let {Pn/Qn} be the sequence of convergents of the continued fraction expansion of r. Then limit as n goes to infinity of Qn^(1/n) exists and is equal to exp(pi^2/(12 ln 2)).
That's my favorite.
I used to even use "exp(pi^2/12ln2)" as my name in Quakeworld.
That will be cheaper than doing each INSERT in its own transaction, but it is still significantly slower than it could be. You should really be using COPY for loading lots of data into PostgreSQL, as it is significantly faster than INSERT
That's interesting. There's a problem, though. Say I've got three big tables, T1, T2, and T3. Each report I have to import leads to one entry in T1, and one or more entries in T2 that have an ID field from T1 as a foreign key, and up to a few thouand T3 entries that have an ID from T2 as a foreign key.
It would appear that COPY would be hard to use, because an entry in T2 can't be made without knowing the ID in T1, and a T3 entry can't be made without knowing the ID from the T2 entry.
So, two ways around that come to mind.
First, in my program that parses reports, make it keep track of the IDs, rather than relying on the database to assign them, at least when doing a bulk import, so I can write out files with those all set. A bit inelegant, since it basically means duplicating some database functionality in the report parser.
Second approach would be to FIRST import all my reports into MySQL, then dump it with mysqldump, write a Perl script to massage that dump into the form COPY wants, and use COPY. There's something perversely amusing about using MySQL to speed up PostgreSQL data importing.
So? There are plenty of things in standard SQL that don't work in PostgreSQL. There are plenty of things in standard SQL that don't work in Oracle.
You made lack of conformance to the SQL standard a line item in the things wrong with MySQL when every other major SQL database suffers from the same problem.
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Strange or Charmed?
The problem is P2P and firewalls. The typical home firewall is also a NAT device. If you are behind a NAT device and I am behind a NAT device, to set up a TCP connection, one of us has to configure his firewall to specifically forward a particular port to a particular box on the LAN, and the other of us can then connect (assuming the external IP address is known, which is a separate problem).
With UDP, we can work around that "configure his firewall" part. Say we want to communicate between MyIP:MyPort and YourIP:YourPort. I send a UDP packet to YourIP:YourPort from MyPort. My firewall NATs it. Your firewall drops it. However, the NAT software in my firewall won't know yours dropped it, and will open up MyIP:MyPort automatically. You do the same thing on your end, sending a sacrificial packet to be eaten by my firewall. After we've each sent our sacrificial packets, we can now exchange UDP packets.
As far as reliability goes, TCP is implemented over IP, which is no more reliable than UDP. The reason TCP is reliable is that it implements acknoledgments and flow control on top of the unreliable IP layer. There is no reason something like TCP could not be built on top of UDP instead of directly on top of IP.
If a particular pair of clients would end up exchanging a lot of "did you get it? yes/no" traffic, that would still be no more traffic than they'd get with TCP. You just don't see that traffic at the application level with TCP because it is handled by the TCP software. It's still there on the wire, though.
Not always. EQ2 was almost flawless. Same with CoH and DAoC.
Except it's already been done. It was covered on either the History Channel or the Discovery Channel a while ago. They made models out of ballistics gel with pig bones inside, and had a shooter on a crane to get the same angle and distance Oswald had, using the same model gun from the same year, firing the same model bullets. He made the shot, the "wounds" on the ballistics gel model matched the wounds on Kennedy and Connely, and the damage on the bullet was almost identical to that of the so-called "magic bullet".
The Creative players require proprietary software. You can only drag/drop from Explorer because their proprietary software installs the appropriate Windows shell extensions and whatnots to make that work.
Well, they "require" it in the sense that iPods require proprietary software. For both, the formats on the device and the interfaces have been reverse engineered and open source programs have been written to manage them.
Of the two, however, the Creatives are "more" proprietary, in that this crap is necessary to use them as file storage devices. iPods, on the other hand, work as Firewire/USB drives without any special software on the host. You only need the special software (proprietary or open source) to get the device to play music.
The simplest way is to use a BSD license and not worry about it. There are plenty of ways to make money off of GPL'ed code without violating GPL that if money is your concern, GPL isn't going to stop people anyway, so might as well just let anyone use it for whatever they want and be done with it.
However, if you are willing to take a more active approach to archiving, there are better ways to do it. For example, store photos on CD or DVD. Make sure you have two or three copies, stored in different locations.
Every couple of years, take each copy, read it (verifying with a checksum that it is fine), and burn a new copy (and verify the new copy). At each location, and add the new copy to the same location. (If space is a concern, you only need to keep the last two good copies at each location). If a copy has errors, replace it with a copy made from one of the good ones.
This will catch bit-rot, unless all your copies go bad at the same time.
If CD or DVD (or whatever format you are using) looks like it is getting obsolete, so that new readers and writers are not readily available, you can switch formats.
This procedure will easily keep your digital data safe and readable indefinitely.
I've got a DirecTV UTV. When I bought it, the features were slightly behind the Tivo of the day for searching, but it had PIP, which I thought I wanted.
The first software update after I got it made it match Tivo, and the second software update made it better. It is interesting to note that the second update was AFTER they stopped selling these.
It has run quite well. In the nearly three years I've had it, there have been maybe two glitches where I had to reboot.
It could also suggest that you no longer are interested in stuff that you don't like right away. Looking back at all my CDs, I find that it is very common for my favorite tracks to be ones that I initially did not think much of. They grew on my after many listens, as I came to appreciate things I hadn't noticed on the first listen.
Uhm...B&N encourages people to hang out and treat the store as a lounge. They seem to think if they can make the stores hang-out places, people will buy more books.
Some businesses understand this, and try hard to keep customers happy. I recall a newspaper story on Nordstrom's customer service. They accepted a return on a set of snow tires, without a reciept. Pretty nice of them, right?
Well, it is even nicer than you might think: Nordstom's does not sell snow tires. Most businesses would have pointed out that those receiptless tires could not possibly have come from them, and sent the customer on his way.
The significant thing here is that it sounds like the store's system was poorly done. It sounds like it looked at the number of returns per customer, rather than the percentage. This customer wasn't returning a higher percentage than other customers, but she shopped there frequently. So, she was buying and keeping a lot more items than a "normal" customer, too.
I find that as I interact with people from all over the world, on forums, and newsgroups, and in online games (my EQ guild had Canadians, and Australians, and French, and a few others, for example), the notion of countries, like "The United States", just doesn't seem that relevant any more.
I'm starting to feel that basically the world consists of here (basically, where the people I interact with outside the net are) and everywhere else. When I deal with someone who is not here, it doesn't matter to me if they are in Texas or New York or France. That the first two of those are in the same country as I and the third is not seems a silly distinction to make.
Windows can certainly host a large number of sites on one machine, but if you check hosting companies, you'll find many more happen to use Linux than use Windows or OS X. Any given random non-parked domain seems to be much more likely to be on a Linux box than on a Windows or OS X box.
First problem: what is a breach? If someone takes down a hosting company's Linux server that is hosting 5000 domains, and someone else takes down a Windows box with one domain and an OS X box with one domain, is that counted as 5000 Linux breaches, 1 Windows breach, and 1 OS X breach, or is it 1 breach of each OS?
Second problem: total number of breaches is a pointless number to look at by itself. For example, if you had 100 Windows servers and 1000 Linux servers, and you had 50 of the Windows server breached and 100 of the Linux servers breached, that would be a 50% breach rate for Windows and a 10% breach rate for Linux. But the way Mi2G reports it they would say 33% of the breaches were on Window and 67% on Linux, so Windows is twice as secure.
It is emulation that benefits when the original and target systems have the same processor, because then you don't have to emulate the CPU, and that is by far the slowest part of emulation. So, XBox2 using PPC opens up the possibility of a terrific XBox2 emulator for the Mac.
Creative players don't implement the USB Mass Storage interface, so you can't use them as data drives. Yes, you CAN store data on them, but only by using Creative's proprietary software, or a third party reverse engineered clone of that software.
That rules them out for me.
But what about the return trip? Would this mean the ship would have to have enough food so that on Mars you could bulk back up to 400? If so, that might negate the savings from hibernation!
What new private space industry? Spaceship One, for example, reached space. That's a long way from being able to do anything useful in space. They were nowhere near orbital velocity, for example. We're still many years, if not decades, away from private industry being able to take over NASA's near-earth space role.
See eq 15. The one I'm talking about (the limit of Qn^(1/n)) is exactly exp(pi^2/(12ln2)). They call it the Khinchin-Levy constant at Mathworld, but I've seen it called just the Kninchin constant. The one in eq 12 is the limit of the geometric mean of the paritial quotients of the continued fraction.
That's my favorite.
I used to even use "exp(pi^2/12ln2)" as my name in Quakeworld.
Uhm...you are massively confused. The whole point of Fedora Legacy is to provide such updates.
That's interesting. There's a problem, though. Say I've got three big tables, T1, T2, and T3. Each report I have to import leads to one entry in T1, and one or more entries in T2 that have an ID field from T1 as a foreign key, and up to a few thouand T3 entries that have an ID from T2 as a foreign key.
It would appear that COPY would be hard to use, because an entry in T2 can't be made without knowing the ID in T1, and a T3 entry can't be made without knowing the ID from the T2 entry.
So, two ways around that come to mind.
First, in my program that parses reports, make it keep track of the IDs, rather than relying on the database to assign them, at least when doing a bulk import, so I can write out files with those all set. A bit inelegant, since it basically means duplicating some database functionality in the report parser.
Second approach would be to FIRST import all my reports into MySQL, then dump it with mysqldump, write a Perl script to massage that dump into the form COPY wants, and use COPY. There's something perversely amusing about using MySQL to speed up PostgreSQL data importing.
He was a good Superman, but Dean Cain in Lois & Clark was even better.
You made lack of conformance to the SQL standard a line item in the things wrong with MySQL when every other major SQL database suffers from the same problem.