I agree, a very Good Thing in the sense that there will be an Open Source DB will all the stuff a DB should have (transactions, lots of field times, triggers, SPs, online backup, replication, etc.), and it runs exactly the same (as far as I know) across platforms.
I wonder what the numerous companies that currently use embedded Interbase databases will do, though? Will it still be appealing? More appealing (less $), or less appealing (not commercial)?
In spite of a fairly amount of noise to lose the signal in, I find that/. actually has *vastly more* accuracy and completeness than what I see in mainstream news media. When erroneous info occurs on CNN.com (or whatever, not picking on them), it simply contributes to the general ignorance of the public. When a errors appear here, a horde of people jump in.
/. reflects the simple reality that we live in a complex world, and there are always several sides to a story.
Hopefully even if it becomes so cheap to add networking that available models have it, they will also continue to function if they are not plugged in to the network.
The lower channels (at lower frequencies) propogate noticeably better... it's quite hard to make the signal go far enough for a large-market station at UHF frequencies.
On the off chance that "they" decide to switch to DVD-2, I would hope that they would fix some things about DVD at the same time, such as boosting the resolution up to HDTV levels. Today's DVD is nowhere near HDTV resolution.
IIRC, the DVD itself is not recorded with macrovision per se, because the DVD represents the moving in MPEG-2 format, not as an NTSC video signal. The DVD player's decoding circuitry adds the Macrovision modifcations as it generates an NTSC signal.
Interestingly, the Delphi community has produced VASTLY more components, many free or quite inexpensive (with source available) than the much larger groups of people using VB, C++, etc. The only other community with such a large set of components is Perl (CPAN).
Just one category, database access components, sports over 50 entries.
(minor plug warning:) I operate a web site that contains extensive information about database access components:
It's a lot of work to maintain my list of 50 or so products... maintain a global registry of similar detail would be full time work for several people.
But the pace of smaller, faster, cheaper, better has show no sign of slowing. Disk space in $/Gig falls by a factor of 2 approximately every year. DVD-ROM readers will undoubtably go from 4X (or whatever) to 30X+, like CD-ROM did.
Will you arguments still be valid when it is cheap and fast (a few minutes) to copy a DVD on to a (small part of a 200 gig) hard drive?
Same situation here.... SWBell rolled out DSL with great fanfare here (St. Louis, MO), but vast (and highly populated) areas of the city and suburbs are beyond the distance limit.
They also have declined to deploy it in some commercial areas (notably the Westport area, for those of you familiar with St. Louis) that have a high concentration of businesses currently paying for T1 lines.
Of course, the cable companies here either offer nothing at all, or one-way cable modems (which require a dialup connection for the uplink).
I think FastCGI is a Very Good Thing, a thing that gets much too little attention. It's an efficient, generalized, language-neutral, networkable means of doing CGI-type work without forking.
** everytime you called a store to get information, a price quote, directions to their store, etc, they asked you your name, address and phone number?
They already can do this - some phone companies offer an extended "Caller ID" service to businesses which not only shows caller ID (or ANI for 800# calls), but also automatically does a phone directory lookup to show them your name, address, etc.
The Citrix ICA protocol is remarkable... it compresses the screen changes so well that you can run applications very smoothly over a mere 56K line. VNC, while very flexible, is much more bandwidth-intensive, and feels pretty sluggish even over a T1. They say right on their web site that it was designed for high-bandwidth LANs.
(VNC is highly portable and free, though. We have deployed it to every server and workstation to allow remote administration and help desk support.)
>> And 9.9% will be incorrectly flagged as violent.
... these people will then be "treated", and will end up not doing anything violent (which they would not have anyway), resulting in the effort being called a Success.
[sure, you could go out and buy all the movies on vhs that you wanted]
This is emphatically NOT TRUE. You cannot buy the latest, greated moving or other programming on VHS (or DVD, bummer). If you want the content, you have to get it via the means it is provided.
So you watch it on TV (with 100 commercials per hour or whatever), or you pay $7 to see a movie at the theater.
It's all about control of the content.
What if MS Office 2005 comes out as a "hosted" app only? Then if you want to upgrade, you have to go to an ASP.
At least remarq.com can put a bunch of articles together on one page - making it much faster to read through a discussion thread on remarq than on deja.
ASP seems really neat when you first try it. That is stage 1.
In state 2, you realize that ASP is essentially the same kind of tool as
PHP
ePerl
EmbPerl
NeoWebScript (perl or Tcl)
AOLServer's Tcl integration
Netscape's server-side Javascript
And a whole bunch (100s, I think) or tools of the same ilk.
Later, when you have a large web site, you realize (stage 3) that mixing your HTML and scripting all together is really a pretty bad idea, so you start using the above tools in a rather different way than you used to, and eventually start thinking about tools that are intended from the beginning to keep the HTML templating seperate from the programming.
Further, the court that slapped back the CDA (remember that...) stated that the Web deserved the highest level of First Amendent protection, or something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, a very Good Thing in the sense that there will be an Open Source DB will all the stuff a DB should have (transactions, lots of field times, triggers, SPs, online backup, replication, etc.), and it runs exactly the same (as far as I know) across platforms.
I wonder what the numerous companies that currently use embedded Interbase databases will do, though? Will it still be appealing? More appealing (less $), or less appealing (not commercial)?
In spite of a fairly amount of noise to lose the signal in, I find that /. actually has *vastly more* accuracy and completeness than what I see in mainstream news media. When erroneous info occurs on CNN.com (or whatever, not picking on them), it simply contributes to the general ignorance of the public. When a errors appear here, a horde of people jump in.
/. reflects the simple reality that we live in a complex world, and there are always several sides to a story.
DVD (on S-video) is a LOT better than VHS on NTSC.
(I'm not sure offhand how S-video related to NTSC.)
I can't think of anything nice to say about NTSC.
A DOS attack is an attack on the HMO / Ins. company / whatever company's profit.
I respectfully submit that most corporations would consider an attack on their profitability MUCH more serious than an attack on my privacy!
I came in the other direction:
(6502 ->) Mot 680x0 -> x86
After being used to the elegant orthogontality and linear addressing of the 680x0 world, x86 was quite a jolt!
Hopefully even if it becomes so cheap to add networking that available models have it, they will also continue to function if they are not plugged in to the network.
... which is exactly what I intend to do.
I have no need for a networked toaster, thanks.
The baby bells dwarf the original because the market for telecom services is so vastly larger than it was then.
Ironically, this explosion happened partly due to the breakup.
The lower channels (at lower frequencies) propogate noticeably better... it's quite hard to make the signal go far enough for a large-market station at UHF frequencies.
On the off chance that "they" decide to switch to DVD-2, I would hope that they would fix some things about DVD at the same time, such as boosting the resolution up to HDTV levels. Today's DVD is nowhere near HDTV resolution.
IIRC, the DVD itself is not recorded with macrovision per se, because the DVD represents the moving in MPEG-2 format, not as an NTSC video signal. The DVD player's decoding circuitry adds the Macrovision modifcations as it generates an NTSC signal.
FYI, Matrox also has a four-output card - one graphics card could run four 19" monitors, all this could be yours for a few thousand $.
Interestingly, the Delphi community has produced VASTLY more components, many free or quite inexpensive (with source available) than the much larger groups of people using VB, C++, etc. The only other community with such a large set of components is Perl (CPAN).
Just one category, database access components, sports over 50 entries.
(minor plug warning:) I operate a web site that contains extensive information about database access components:
http://kylecordes.com
It's a lot of work to maintain my list of 50 or so products... maintain a global registry of similar detail would be full time work for several people.
Your argument is valid, today.
But the pace of smaller, faster, cheaper, better has show no sign of slowing. Disk space in $/Gig falls by a factor of 2 approximately every year. DVD-ROM readers will undoubtably go from 4X (or whatever) to 30X+, like CD-ROM did.
Will you arguments still be valid when it is cheap and fast (a few minutes) to copy a DVD on to a (small part of a 200 gig) hard drive?
Same situation here.... SWBell rolled out DSL with great fanfare here (St. Louis, MO), but vast (and highly populated) areas of the city and suburbs are beyond the distance limit.
They also have declined to deploy it in some commercial areas (notably the Westport area, for those of you familiar with St. Louis) that have a high concentration of businesses currently paying for T1 lines.
Of course, the cable companies here either offer nothing at all, or one-way cable modems (which require a dialup connection for the uplink).
I think FastCGI is a Very Good Thing, a thing that gets much too little attention. It's an efficient, generalized, language-neutral, networkable means of doing CGI-type work without forking.
** everytime you called a store to get information, a price quote, directions to their store, etc, they asked you your name, address and phone number?
They already can do this - some phone companies offer an extended "Caller ID" service to businesses which not only shows caller ID (or ANI for 800# calls), but also automatically does a phone directory lookup to show them your name, address, etc.
>> The original series wasn't taped. It was filmed.
Actually, IIRC most current dramatic TV series are shot on 35mm film, then later transferred to video. This is done to get the "film look".
Hopefully someone familiar with the industry can confirm this or tell me I am utterly incorrect.
Faster?
The Citrix ICA protocol is remarkable... it compresses the screen changes so well that you can run applications very smoothly over a mere 56K line. VNC, while very flexible, is much more bandwidth-intensive, and feels pretty sluggish even over a T1. They say right on their web site that it was designed for high-bandwidth LANs.
(VNC is highly portable and free, though. We have deployed it to every server and workstation to allow remote administration and help desk support.)
>> And 9.9% will be incorrectly flagged as violent.
... these people will then be "treated", and will end up not doing anything violent (which they would not have anyway), resulting in the effort being called a Success.
[sure, you could go out and buy all the movies on vhs that you wanted]
This is emphatically NOT TRUE. You cannot buy the latest, greated moving or other programming on VHS (or DVD, bummer). If you want the content, you have to get it via the means it is provided.
So you watch it on TV (with 100 commercials per hour or whatever), or you pay $7 to see a movie at the theater.
It's all about control of the content.
What if MS Office 2005 comes out as a "hosted" app only? Then if you want to upgrade, you have to go to an ASP.
At least remarq.com can put a bunch of articles together on one page - making it much faster to read through a discussion thread on remarq than on deja.
Personally, I am surprised that /. does not have the following:
/. and Andover for not doing these things.
1) "square" banners running down the left edge of the screen. There is wasted white space there.
2) "Interstitials", micro-banners stuck right in the middle of the content.
Now that I mentioned it, kudos to
ASP seems really neat when you first try it. That is stage 1.
In state 2, you realize that ASP is essentially the same kind of tool as
PHP
ePerl
EmbPerl
NeoWebScript (perl or Tcl)
AOLServer's Tcl integration
Netscape's server-side Javascript
And a whole bunch (100s, I think) or tools of the same ilk.
Later, when you have a large web site, you realize (stage 3) that mixing your HTML and scripting all together is really a pretty bad idea, so you start using the above tools in a rather different way than you used to, and eventually start thinking about tools that are intended from the beginning to keep the HTML templating seperate from the programming.
Further, the court that slapped back the CDA (remember that...) stated that the Web deserved the highest level of First Amendent protection, or something like that.
As long as they can keep dropping the voltage level, the heat can be kept under control.
(someone with electronics knowledge can quote the relevant formula)