I don't think kiwimate was saying that Wikipedia is an open source project, just that Wikipedia is a great example of an open data project run like an open source project.
Well, my experience from using Symbian smartphones is that it doesn't work great with other phones. My problems included constant memory leaks (both from 3rd party apps and apps that came with the phones), CPU hogging while running in the background, apps never shutting down (even when told to) and instead just living on as 5% CPU and RAM-stealing zombies, most of the time on my last Nokia phone I would get about 60-80 hours before it would lock up so badly due to low memory that it wouldn't even allow me to answer incoming calls(!) and I'd be forced to "reboot" it by removing the battery. If this was the only Symbian phone I'd owned I would've been inclined to assume it was a problem with that specific phone, but I've had these problems on two Symbian phones of my own and I've also seen this happen on phones belonging to friends of mine.
Well, these days the only FPS I play regularly is Urban Terror but through the years I've played various incarnations of Quake, Q3A, HL, UT and others.
Except you can count on at least two or three fairly major distros refusing to use OpenAL, after heated flamewars their documentation will have a lengthy "how to replace the buggy version of ALSA with distro-specific patches with something that works with Steam games" article, their mailing lists and forums will be swamped by users complaining about the lack of OpenAL support and the maintainers will tell the users that they're idiots for not understanding how technically superior ALSA is/how using OpenAL is anti-free software/whatever.
Let's see here.. My first FPS was Wolfenstein 3D, I've never owned a computer with a one button mouse and I'm a mac user since 2006, does this mean I've never played a "real" FPS and that I don't have more than one mouse button?
Also, what about all the old-school geeks who have switched to macs after the death of every other available UNIX workstation manufacturer (or the discontinuation of their workstations)?
The sad part is that it's likely quite a few of these actually have engineering degrees and real problem-solving skills but learned within a few weeks of starting their jobs that thinking for yourself and trying to find solutions that would not only temporarily fix a single customer's problem but also avoid having the problem happen to anyone else is not only not encouraged but downright discouraged, because thinking about things like that is what management is supposed to do.
This is at least how my experience with working tech support was, a bunch of guys, ~50% of which were engineers or computer scientists, sitting in a room applying the same stupid workarounds all day every day and complaining amongst each other about how they weren't being put to good use.
Europe's GDP per capita is only about 70% of the US. Its citizens, on average have a significantly poorer standard of living.
Which european country are you talking about? Because there are some fairly large differences between different countries (and no, a european country isn't really the same as a US state no matter how much some people would like it to be that way).
And of course with socialism the money that you make is spent according to how the government decides, not how you decide.
The government is supposed to be an agent of the people (although for some reason right-wing governments seem more occupied with trying to sell off anything and everything the government owns for ideological reasons, at least here in Sweden where they know that they rarely get to spend more than four years in power before being voted out for another 8-12 years again after screwing everything up...
Also, sometimes the government is the right actor to make investments, particularly long-term och large-scale investments since governments are more likely to be around to pay their bills ten, twenty or thirty years from now.
Well, if you're getting 12 Mbps downstream then they're most definitely capping the upload because the most common ADSL versions in use are g.dmt/G.992.1 (8/0.8 capacity) and ADSL2+/G.992.5 (24/1 capacity). It could however be that your outbound transfers are using TCP and with Ethernet over ATM you end up with a total overhead somewhere around 15% which means the upstream speed you'd end up seeing would be somewhere around 640 kbps. Also, ISPs generally use base 10 for the prefixes (1 kB = 1000 B) so if your software uses base 2 it'll be off by a little there as well.
Yeah, where I live (Östersund, northern part of Sweden, population ~40k) the choices are FTTH through the citynet which has five different ISPs offering everything from 1/1 Mbps to 100/100 Mbps with the most expensive 100/100 service costing SEK 459 ($65) per month, ADSL through a multitude of ISPs offering their services through DSLAMs and networks owned by TDC, Telia or Telenor and finally cable (DOCSIS) through ComHem who offer speeds from 5 Mbps to 25 Mbps (although Comhem are being booted out by the landlord since the citynet is a much better solution and not tied to any one ISP like Comhem's network).
Also, as you said, downtime even with DSL is generally quite low (at least if you live in an apartment building, if you live in some shack in the woods and the copper runs as overhead cables then you'll probably have some issues but that's like expecting to be able to drive your new Ferrari at 200 km/h on a dirt road that hasn't been maintained since the 1920s...). Total downtime due to DSL outages for me has definitely been less than two or three hours in the last year.
As for caps, they seem very common in the US and I don't know of a single ISP where I live that has any caps except for when it comes to 3/3.5/4G connections.
You mentioned clicks, as did the post you replied to.
Also, what if I create a browser plugin that pre-renders the prefetched data so that any possible "next page" from the page I'm viewing right now is already pre-rendered and just has to be shown? AFAIK that's still not fraud since the intent wasn't to commit fraud and the user would not be limited by any contract between the site owner and the ad publishing company.
If the user automates the "click" to make certain that his/her browsing experience isn't impaired due to not clicking ad links then that isn't fraud, by the same reasoning browser plugins that "preload" all linked content would be illegal.
What? Are you saying embedded.NET applications stored as Base64-encoded strings in XML aren't in the SVG standard? (Yeah, I made that up but I develop.NET apps eight hours per day and sometimes I can't tell if the larger Java frameworks or C#.NET is worst when it comes to that kind of "enterprise ready" behaviour)
Yeah, there's still some file somewhere (can't remember if it's in a kext or whatever) that has their "please don't copy this" text. What's interesting is that Apple makes a buttload of money, by the game industry's logic they should've been bankrupt ages ago since they don't really have any copy protection for their OS (unless you call using EFI instead of BIOS copy protection but that's like saying that distributing your game on DVD is copy protection because everyone else uses CDs).
Notice the word in bold? There are plenty of studios that handle video that aren't large, and when you're a small company it can be hard to justify the cost of an expensive SAN, having a server that everyone uploads stuff to regularly while working locally becomes a lot more cost-effective when you're that size, but no one wants to edit the files on the server directly at that point, not even with gig-E. since it feels sluggish and slow compared to working locally (and a lot of "artsy" types who do CGI are very picky about stuff like that so just telling them to accept the slowdown because the middle managers at your last job had no problem waiting another second or so for their spreadsheets to open isn't exactly a solution either).
Well, when it comes to people working with graphics they often use local storage as their primary "work storage" because it's faster (and when you're working with lots of large files this becomes critical if you want to retain your sanity) and then they just use the server for saving backups at the end of the day and for final production work. So a lot of times the actual work copy is always stored on the local workstation, this is especially true when dealing with video/animation as you can easily end up with insane amounts of data, if you're working on uncompressed 1080p video rendered as independent targa images (so you can easily re-render specific short runs of frames, very common when working with software like Maya and 3dsmax) you may be looking at roughly 7 GiB of data for 30 seconds of video (8 bit color with alpha and 30 fps), not the kind of thing you want to be pushing back and forth across the network all the time (even if you're just copying the data that's changed it ends up being pretty heavy).
tl;dr: People who work with CGI have datasets and a workflow that don't work well with using servers for data storage other than as an easy way to backup data.
First off, wow that is one seriously broken site, or maybe my adblocker recognizes their domain as an advertising domain and blocks a lot of stuff...
Second, while that table shows IE6 at roughly 19% you have to consider other data sources, preferably ones that aren't a web marketing company.
Third, the company I work for does business almost exclusively in northern europe and from what I and others I know have seen IE6 has nowhere near 20-30% of the browser market, it tends to be somewhere around 5-10% and dropping every month.
Looking at the usage stats for my employer's two largest websites (which are "general use" websites and not in any way targeted at techies) I see IE6 going down from 5.5 - 6% at the start of the year to just under 5% in the last couple of weeks and from what I've heard from others they have similar numbers, at this point IE6 is completely marginalized on the web, the last places you'll find widespread IE6 usage is on certain corporate networks (and even those are slowly migrating away from it) and with those home users who never upgrade (anyone who's worked tech support has probably encountered this rare breed, the guy who's somehow managed to shoehorn Windows ME onto a 66MHz Pentium with 24 MiB of RAM and who absolutely refuses to admit that both his hardware and software are horribly outdated despite having to reinstall the network stack every other day after winme decides to munch on the files when crashing).
Well, I was (as I stated) speculating about future enhancements of medical technology and obviously there are issues that would need to be addressed such as "re-encoding" DNA in case of such a real sex change.
So no, I wasn't talking about current "hack and slash" sex change operations.
I bet you're one of those people who force the rest of us to post extremely long and verbose questions on forums, IRC and mailing lists because you always come up with completely irrelevant answers if you don't get a wall of text explaining in detail why someone is looking for a specific type of solution (and even then you probably try to sneak in your irrelevant suggestions).
An example of what I meant by the above: Let's say you have a motherboard where you need to update the BIOS, the computer has no optical drive, no floppy drive and you have no USB memory sticks available, the machine is using grub2 and you're looking for a way to flash the BIOS anyway to get around some silly bug without having to wait until monday morning so you can buy extra hardware just to flash the BIOS. The correct answer would then be something like "Check out flashrom, you should be able to flash the BIOS directly from Linux without even rebooting then". The answers that are likely to show up on any random *nix forum or IRC channel are:
Get a new motherboard
Get a CD-RW drive
Get a USB memory stick
Get a floppy drive
Edit/boot/grub/menu.lst (no can do since it's grub2) and make a FreeDOS boot floppy (right after you replace your boot manager just so you can do a one off BIOS flashing, yay)
Install Windows
Create a FreeDOS boot floppy (see: No floppy drive)
etc ad nauseum...
In fact, even if you explained all the above chances are some people would still give stupid advice and sometimes it's even beneficial to not explain yourself because you know from experience that 90% of those who read your question don't know enough about the subject matter to understand it and will instead give irrelevant answers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, just like us swedes, man we were sure ravaged in WW2...</sarcasm>
Yeah, I realised that after I posted but feel free to replace every "OpenAL" in my post with any random sound subsystem for Linux that isn't ALSA.
/Mikael
I don't think kiwimate was saying that Wikipedia is an open source project, just that Wikipedia is a great example of an open data project run like an open source project.
/Mikael
...mac user since 2006...
Dear Mr. Troll, please read before you reply.
Well, my experience from using Symbian smartphones is that it doesn't work great with other phones. My problems included constant memory leaks (both from 3rd party apps and apps that came with the phones), CPU hogging while running in the background, apps never shutting down (even when told to) and instead just living on as 5% CPU and RAM-stealing zombies, most of the time on my last Nokia phone I would get about 60-80 hours before it would lock up so badly due to low memory that it wouldn't even allow me to answer incoming calls(!) and I'd be forced to "reboot" it by removing the battery. If this was the only Symbian phone I'd owned I would've been inclined to assume it was a problem with that specific phone, but I've had these problems on two Symbian phones of my own and I've also seen this happen on phones belonging to friends of mine.
/Mikael
Well, these days the only FPS I play regularly is Urban Terror but through the years I've played various incarnations of Quake, Q3A, HL, UT and others.
/Mikael
Except you can count on at least two or three fairly major distros refusing to use OpenAL, after heated flamewars their documentation will have a lengthy "how to replace the buggy version of ALSA with distro-specific patches with something that works with Steam games" article, their mailing lists and forums will be swamped by users complaining about the lack of OpenAL support and the maintainers will tell the users that they're idiots for not understanding how technically superior ALSA is/how using OpenAL is anti-free software/whatever.
Oh how I wish that was 100% joking...
/Mikael
Let's see here.. My first FPS was Wolfenstein 3D, I've never owned a computer with a one button mouse and I'm a mac user since 2006, does this mean I've never played a "real" FPS and that I don't have more than one mouse button?
Also, what about all the old-school geeks who have switched to macs after the death of every other available UNIX workstation manufacturer (or the discontinuation of their workstations)?
/Mikael
Oh, I understood the joke, it just wasn't very funny.
"in the company of; alongside, along side of; close to; near to:"
The sad part is that it's likely quite a few of these actually have engineering degrees and real problem-solving skills but learned within a few weeks of starting their jobs that thinking for yourself and trying to find solutions that would not only temporarily fix a single customer's problem but also avoid having the problem happen to anyone else is not only not encouraged but downright discouraged, because thinking about things like that is what management is supposed to do.
This is at least how my experience with working tech support was, a bunch of guys, ~50% of which were engineers or computer scientists, sitting in a room applying the same stupid workarounds all day every day and complaining amongst each other about how they weren't being put to good use.
/Mikael
Not politically though.
/Mikael
Europe's GDP per capita is only about 70% of the US. Its citizens, on average have a significantly poorer standard of living.
Which european country are you talking about? Because there are some fairly large differences between different countries (and no, a european country isn't really the same as a US state no matter how much some people would like it to be that way).
And of course with socialism the money that you make is spent according to how the government decides, not how you decide.
The government is supposed to be an agent of the people (although for some reason right-wing governments seem more occupied with trying to sell off anything and everything the government owns for ideological reasons, at least here in Sweden where they know that they rarely get to spend more than four years in power before being voted out for another 8-12 years again after screwing everything up...
Also, sometimes the government is the right actor to make investments, particularly long-term och large-scale investments since governments are more likely to be around to pay their bills ten, twenty or thirty years from now.
/Mikael
Well, if you're getting 12 Mbps downstream then they're most definitely capping the upload because the most common ADSL versions in use are g.dmt/G.992.1 (8/0.8 capacity) and ADSL2+/G.992.5 (24/1 capacity). It could however be that your outbound transfers are using TCP and with Ethernet over ATM you end up with a total overhead somewhere around 15% which means the upstream speed you'd end up seeing would be somewhere around 640 kbps. Also, ISPs generally use base 10 for the prefixes (1 kB = 1000 B) so if your software uses base 2 it'll be off by a little there as well.
/Mikael
Yeah, where I live (Östersund, northern part of Sweden, population ~40k) the choices are FTTH through the citynet which has five different ISPs offering everything from 1/1 Mbps to 100/100 Mbps with the most expensive 100/100 service costing SEK 459 ($65) per month, ADSL through a multitude of ISPs offering their services through DSLAMs and networks owned by TDC, Telia or Telenor and finally cable (DOCSIS) through ComHem who offer speeds from 5 Mbps to 25 Mbps (although Comhem are being booted out by the landlord since the citynet is a much better solution and not tied to any one ISP like Comhem's network).
Also, as you said, downtime even with DSL is generally quite low (at least if you live in an apartment building, if you live in some shack in the woods and the copper runs as overhead cables then you'll probably have some issues but that's like expecting to be able to drive your new Ferrari at 200 km/h on a dirt road that hasn't been maintained since the 1920s...). Total downtime due to DSL outages for me has definitely been less than two or three hours in the last year.
As for caps, they seem very common in the US and I don't know of a single ISP where I live that has any caps except for when it comes to 3/3.5/4G connections.
/Mikael
You mentioned clicks, as did the post you replied to.
Also, what if I create a browser plugin that pre-renders the prefetched data so that any possible "next page" from the page I'm viewing right now is already pre-rendered and just has to be shown? AFAIK that's still not fraud since the intent wasn't to commit fraud and the user would not be limited by any contract between the site owner and the ad publishing company.
/Mikael
If the user automates the "click" to make certain that his/her browsing experience isn't impaired due to not clicking ad links then that isn't fraud, by the same reasoning browser plugins that "preload" all linked content would be illegal.
/Mikael
What? Are you saying embedded .NET applications stored as Base64-encoded strings in XML aren't in the SVG standard? (Yeah, I made that up but I develop .NET apps eight hours per day and sometimes I can't tell if the larger Java frameworks or C#.NET is worst when it comes to that kind of "enterprise ready" behaviour)
/Mikael
Yeah, there's still some file somewhere (can't remember if it's in a kext or whatever) that has their "please don't copy this" text. What's interesting is that Apple makes a buttload of money, by the game industry's logic they should've been bankrupt ages ago since they don't really have any copy protection for their OS (unless you call using EFI instead of BIOS copy protection but that's like saying that distributing your game on DVD is copy protection because everyone else uses CDs).
/Mikael
Hmm. Having worked in several large vfx studios,
Notice the word in bold? There are plenty of studios that handle video that aren't large, and when you're a small company it can be hard to justify the cost of an expensive SAN, having a server that everyone uploads stuff to regularly while working locally becomes a lot more cost-effective when you're that size, but no one wants to edit the files on the server directly at that point, not even with gig-E. since it feels sluggish and slow compared to working locally (and a lot of "artsy" types who do CGI are very picky about stuff like that so just telling them to accept the slowdown because the middle managers at your last job had no problem waiting another second or so for their spreadsheets to open isn't exactly a solution either).
/Mikael
Well, when it comes to people working with graphics they often use local storage as their primary "work storage" because it's faster (and when you're working with lots of large files this becomes critical if you want to retain your sanity) and then they just use the server for saving backups at the end of the day and for final production work. So a lot of times the actual work copy is always stored on the local workstation, this is especially true when dealing with video/animation as you can easily end up with insane amounts of data, if you're working on uncompressed 1080p video rendered as independent targa images (so you can easily re-render specific short runs of frames, very common when working with software like Maya and 3dsmax) you may be looking at roughly 7 GiB of data for 30 seconds of video (8 bit color with alpha and 30 fps), not the kind of thing you want to be pushing back and forth across the network all the time (even if you're just copying the data that's changed it ends up being pretty heavy).
tl;dr: People who work with CGI have datasets and a workflow that don't work well with using servers for data storage other than as an easy way to backup data.
/Mikael
First off, wow that is one seriously broken site, or maybe my adblocker recognizes their domain as an advertising domain and blocks a lot of stuff...
Second, while that table shows IE6 at roughly 19% you have to consider other data sources, preferably ones that aren't a web marketing company.
Third, the company I work for does business almost exclusively in northern europe and from what I and others I know have seen IE6 has nowhere near 20-30% of the browser market, it tends to be somewhere around 5-10% and dropping every month.
/Mikael
Looking at the usage stats for my employer's two largest websites (which are "general use" websites and not in any way targeted at techies) I see IE6 going down from 5.5 - 6% at the start of the year to just under 5% in the last couple of weeks and from what I've heard from others they have similar numbers, at this point IE6 is completely marginalized on the web, the last places you'll find widespread IE6 usage is on certain corporate networks (and even those are slowly migrating away from it) and with those home users who never upgrade (anyone who's worked tech support has probably encountered this rare breed, the guy who's somehow managed to shoehorn Windows ME onto a 66MHz Pentium with 24 MiB of RAM and who absolutely refuses to admit that both his hardware and software are horribly outdated despite having to reinstall the network stack every other day after winme decides to munch on the files when crashing).
/Mikael
Well, I was (as I stated) speculating about future enhancements of medical technology and obviously there are issues that would need to be addressed such as "re-encoding" DNA in case of such a real sex change.
So no, I wasn't talking about current "hack and slash" sex change operations.
/Mikael
I bet you're one of those people who force the rest of us to post extremely long and verbose questions on forums, IRC and mailing lists because you always come up with completely irrelevant answers if you don't get a wall of text explaining in detail why someone is looking for a specific type of solution (and even then you probably try to sneak in your irrelevant suggestions).
An example of what I meant by the above: Let's say you have a motherboard where you need to update the BIOS, the computer has no optical drive, no floppy drive and you have no USB memory sticks available, the machine is using grub2 and you're looking for a way to flash the BIOS anyway to get around some silly bug without having to wait until monday morning so you can buy extra hardware just to flash the BIOS. The correct answer would then be something like "Check out flashrom, you should be able to flash the BIOS directly from Linux without even rebooting then". The answers that are likely to show up on any random *nix forum or IRC channel are:
In fact, even if you explained all the above chances are some people would still give stupid advice and sometimes it's even beneficial to not explain yourself because you know from experience that 90% of those who read your question don't know enough about the subject matter to understand it and will instead give irrelevant answers.
/Mikael