Baysian filtering IS word-counting with (not very sophisticated) statistical heuristics applied to the results
This may be the case, but most of the newer filters available now are not really Bayesian filtering by this definition. I use spambayes, and it has some very sophisticated algorithms to determine the statistical probability of the "spamminess" of a ham/spam.
Some of these fancier algorithms were developed by Gary Robinson and are discussed in some detail here. You can see the results of these different classification techniques (gary combining, chi-squared) in some nice graphs here.
On a related note, spambayes is VERY accurate in catching spam for me. Amazingly so in fact. It does a far better job than SpamAssassin or the Bayesian filter in Mail.app in my personal experience.
At my company, "nterprise" means supported software with automatic failover, guaranteed uptime, and linear scalability by adding more servers and CPUs.
That means that session data has to be either shared or stored (which means the application servers have to be clustered), or you have to set the sticky bit on two cross-linked load balancers (which is not an option in many cases since Foundry Server Irons cost $30,000 apiece and you need two so the irons can fail over too).
You can't do that with Perl or PHP as far as I know. Enterprise has nothing to do with size or features, it is all about consistent performance, uptime, and failover.
Show me some objective evidence that Java is superior, not brochure cliches.
There's not going to be objective evidence of a subjective comment. "Superior" is ultimately a matter of opinion. I personally think python is the "superior" language of all those I have tried, but that's my opinion.
What I can say conclusively is that a programmer of equal skill in C++ and Java can write the same program in less lines of Java code. Java does lots of stuff "for free" that gets the job done faster, like memory allocation and garbage collection, and handling pointers transparently. If your goal is a good application written quickly, Java may very well be "superior" for your needs.
Another advantage of Java over other languages (except Perl and Python) is the huge and wonderful library of methods and classes. You can accomplish these goals with C or C++, but generally you have to go out and find the libraries to do what you want, then compile them for your particular platform. Java generally includes them, and for those that are not included, they're distributed pre-compiled for the JVM.
So it's not fair to say Java is "Superior", because that really depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking to build enterprise web applications, Java is likely superior. If you're looking to crunch numbers as fast as possible, you're likely to be happier with C or C++. It depends on the project and the goals.
In what way does encrypting the video prevent you from recording it?
Why can't you simply record the video on your HD-TiVo of the future in encrypted form, then play it back in encrypted form, which the TV can then decrypt?
Most of us are interested in making copies for timeshifting or backup or whatever. If every TV on earth can decrypt the file, just save it encrypted and you can still timeshift it.
What's New in iCal 1.0.1
iCal 1.0.1 provides a number of performance and stability enhancements, and improved support for importing vCal and Entourage information.
Before you download
Check the system requirements:
Mac OS X v.10.2.2 "Jaguar" required.
Publishing calendars on the Internet requires a.Mac membership or a WebDAV server.
Note for iSync Public Beta users:
The iSync Public Beta is not compatible with iCal 1.0.1. iSync Public Beta users must upgrade to iSync 1.0 after installing iCal 1.0.1.
Read the license agreement before making such assumptions. They let you compile it. You just can't use the binary you compiled for everyday use.
What You Can Do. Under this license, you have the right to:
download the PGP source code files and make a reasonable number of copies on a single computer as necessary to exercise the rights granted below;
review the source code in these source code files in order to verify that there are no unknown vulnerabilities or the like and in order to make your own assessment of the security features of PGP software;
compile the source code for each PGP software program into an executable code version of the program;
run the executable code version on one computer solely in order to assist in your testing and cryptographic analysis of the security features of the PGP software; and
modify the source code in the course of exercising the rights granted above.
Moxi will be available via cable providers or other Premium TV companies, and the hardware will be custom for each one of them.
IMO, that will be the biggest problem for them. Standalone TiVo is ubiquitous. It can be used with just about any source... anyone's cable box... any satellite system.
It's funny, the people on the TiVo forums feel the opposite way. They generally think that the biggest threat to TiVo is the fact that cable companies will be delivering their own boxes to their customers for $10/month with no hardware to buy. If it integrates a digital cable tuner in the box, it has a huge advantage over the TiVo, which has to change the channels over IR (or serial in one rare circumstance).
Personally, I think TiVo has an amazing interface, but I could see how someone who didn't have TiVo could be happy with a Moxi box from their cable company.
I don't have the new edition (mine is the first edition, publiched July 1998), but I couldn't imagine being a developer of web-facing applications without this book. The JavaScript reference and the DOM references are great, and the CSS reference is really useful as well. I don't care much for the layer aspects of DHTML (behavior is inconsistent), but this book is still a great addition to any developer's library.
Darwin is great for OSX developers because it lets you look into the source of OSX and see how it works. It's not particularly useful as an x86 platform
This article on a first read is great. The reason, I realized, is that it's because I agree with it. This article boils down the problem (oversimplified maybe, but works for the AOL users out there) to a level where non-geeks can understand how bad this really is.
I think this article would make a GREAT spam campaign. Any slashdotters also spammers at night? Take this article, and blast it out to those 20 million AOL users. They'll be so scared of "Palladium" that they won't consider buying a PC that has it.
The real truth is that this technology will appeal to companies a lot more than individuals. But if individuals refuse to use it, applications outside of Microsoft won't bother to use it, and just maybe we could prevail.
It's funny that someone would be stupid enough to post a story about their own auction, and funnier still that the moderators would post it.
What's not funny is that this guy is selling a bunch of "preinstalled" software with no CDs, which essentially is pirated software. I suspect that all of his serial numbers can be found in "Cracks & Numbers" or "Hackers Helper".
This guy might want to be careful lest he end up in jail for grand theft (the value of the software listed is several thousand dollars).
TiVo simply records the MacroVision along with the signal. It also records closed captioning and VBI data like the "press thumbs up to record" called TivoMatic.
Boy, you don't know much about Apple users, do you? If you went into any Apple store in America and asked if anyone would like to do a free testimonial about how they love their Macs, you'd have 30 people clamoring to be first in line.
You think Linux advocates are loyal, but you have no idea how fiercely loyal Apple users are.
In case this get slashdotted, here is RMS' post (and I quote):
The new restrictions on Bitkeeper, saying that people who contribute to CVS or Subversion and even companies that distribute them cannot even run Bitkeeper, have sparked outrage. While these specific restrictions are new, their spirit fits perfectly with the previous Bitkeeper license.
The spirit of the Bitkeeper license is the spirit of the whip hand. It is the spirit that says, "You have no right to use Bitkeeper, only temporary privileges that we can revoke. Be grateful that we allow you to use Bitkeeper. Be grateful, and don't do anything we dislike, or we may revoke those privileges." It is the spirit of proprietary software. Every non-free license is designed to control the users more or less. Outrage at this spirit is the reason for the free software movement. (By contrast, the open source movement prefers to play down this same outrage.)
If the latest outrage brings the spirit of the non-free Bitkeeper license into clear view, perhaps that will be enough to convince the developers of Linux to stop using Bitkeeper for Linux development.
I used Linux (RH 6.2, RH 7.1) for over 2 years, and I think it's a great OS. But it's not an OS that regular users can use like OSX 10.1.5 and 10.2. It's harder to be productive in Linux than OSX. I've said it before, but the fact remains that OSX is significantly easier to set up and use on a daily basis than Linux.
Want some reasons that regular people like OSX better? All the control panels are in one place and follow a consistent design. You can get Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash MX, and AOL for it.
Want some reasons that many geeks like us like OSX better? Excellent free development IDE (ProjectBuilder & InterfaceBuilder) that makes native apps with an audience of 5 million paying customers. Great commercial tools like BBEdit, Oracle, Sybase, SQLGrinder, and JBuilder Enterprise, that make developing for production systems as easy as developing on Linux.
The DVD issue is really a money issue. With Linux, there's no one willing to pay the money to legally play DVDs. When I worked at ZapMedia, we had a software-only DVD player working under Linux. We had to pay for it, but it can be done. With MacOSX, a small portion of the purchase price covers the R&D and licensing required to have this feature.
I have a 600MHz iBook/DVD that I carry to work every day. The office is all-Windows, but thanks to OSX's built-in SMB browser and CUPS printing support, I can do everything that the Windows machines can do. I might be able to make that happen with Linux using a compiler and a lot of free time, but my experience with Linux in the past is that it's not nearly as simple or obvious.
IMHO, you're missing the point. It's not a question of whether Linux is a good desktop (for some people it is), or whether a non-geek can use it once it's installed by a geek (they can if it's set up correctly).
The question is, is Linux easy enough to install and use that more people are doing it that buying/using MacOS. The answer is no. The real truth is, for all intents and purposes, almost all Windows users use the same version of Windows from they day the get their computer to the day they get their next computer.
I suspect that same can be said of MacOS, which is one reason Apple works so hard to attract new users to the platform. Mac users tend to stay mac users, and Windows users tend to stay Windows users.
The Windows users are the "unwashed masses" of the computer world, and MacOS X and Linux are more sophisticated. The question is, of those who switch, are they more likely to switch to a Mac when they buy a new PC, or to undertake installing Linux on their old one.
I love Linux. I ran it for 2 years as my desktop OS for development at work and at home. But I have worked at mega-corporations and tiny companies, and I have NEVER seen a non-geek running Linux. I, like many of you, like to be able to compile my own software from the source.
The fact is that no one's mom runs Linux unless someone set it up for them. My mom can't install a plug-n-play modem on Windows. My dad is an Mechanical Engineer, and he has trouble with his computer all the time. There's NO WAY regular people like this, who are very smart, will ever install Linux of their own volition.
Macs on the other hand are almost universally seen as "easier than Windows" by everyone, including Windows and Linux users. Regular people buy Macs for lots of reasons (creative people, geeks who like the UNIX OS and neat hardware, soccer moms who want to use AOL, computer phobic people who want to see what the fuss is about, college kids who like to edit video and rip MP3s).
It's just absurd to think that Linux could be overtaking MacOS at this stage of market share on the desktop. I like Linux a lot, but I run MacOS X on my laptop now, because as a desktop OS it's just better.
I installed 10.2 on (a) my iBook 600 (640MB RAM) with an 8meg RAGE 128 Mobility, and (b) on my G4/450 (640MB RAM) with an ATI Radeon 7500 32MB AGP card.
Honestly, 10.2 is a little faster on the iBook, but not a ton. I'd say the same for the G4. I haven't tried any games, but the GUI really isn't much faster. It could be that the 450MHz G4 can't keep up, or that the 100MHz bus isn't fast enough, but the Radeon 7500 is a fast card. Overall, I like 10.2, but it's not such a speed demon that I was surprised by the performance.
Oh, and to the Windows printer-sharing question, as far as I can tell there is no support for it in 10.2. I tried to share my HP Laserjet 6MP hooked up to my WindowsXP Professional box, but OSX could not see it. It was able to mount SMB shares at home and at work with no problems though.
Apple has not shipped a hardware ROM since the "new world" macs came out (1999 -- see the tech note.
There's nothing stopping someone from writing a Mac emulator other than the size of it. I am quite sure it could be done if someone could get the specs for some of those custom ASICs Apple uses for its memory controllers and daughtercard bridges.
I had an odd failure on my iBook. Somehow I managed to snap off the male plug end of the battery charger INSIDE the female power connector of the iBook. The 'book was under warranty, but past the 90 days of free phone support.
This was obviously a hardware problem, but the tech was not able to even discuss it with me without a credit card number. He told me that if it was a hardware problem I would not be charged, but if it were a software problem I would.
I explained that there was no way that it could be a software problem since it was a physical plug not going into a physical hole because a physical piece broke off.
Long story short, I had to give my card number (was not charged), they sent me an Airborne box, which I filled with my iBook and gave back to the guy who was dropping it off. They had to wait for a part so it took a week to get it back, but all is well with it now.
I just thought it was funny that even Apple has some strange policies in their tech support department.
Slashdot Mirror
Baysian filtering IS word-counting with (not very sophisticated) statistical heuristics applied to the results
This may be the case, but most of the newer filters available now are not really Bayesian filtering by this definition. I use spambayes, and it has some very sophisticated algorithms to determine the statistical probability of the "spamminess" of a ham/spam.
Some of these fancier algorithms were developed by Gary Robinson and are discussed in some detail here. You can see the results of these different classification techniques (gary combining, chi-squared) in some nice graphs here.
On a related note, spambayes is VERY accurate in catching spam for me. Amazingly so in fact. It does a far better job than SpamAssassin or the Bayesian filter in Mail.app in my personal experience.
At my company, "nterprise" means supported software with automatic failover, guaranteed uptime, and linear scalability by adding more servers and CPUs.
That means that session data has to be either shared or stored (which means the application servers have to be clustered), or you have to set the sticky bit on two cross-linked load balancers (which is not an option in many cases since Foundry Server Irons cost $30,000 apiece and you need two so the irons can fail over too).
You can't do that with Perl or PHP as far as I know. Enterprise has nothing to do with size or features, it is all about consistent performance, uptime, and failover.
Show me some objective evidence that Java is superior, not brochure cliches.
There's not going to be objective evidence of a subjective comment. "Superior" is ultimately a matter of opinion. I personally think python is the "superior" language of all those I have tried, but that's my opinion.
What I can say conclusively is that a programmer of equal skill in C++ and Java can write the same program in less lines of Java code. Java does lots of stuff "for free" that gets the job done faster, like memory allocation and garbage collection, and handling pointers transparently. If your goal is a good application written quickly, Java may very well be "superior" for your needs.
Another advantage of Java over other languages (except Perl and Python) is the huge and wonderful library of methods and classes. You can accomplish these goals with C or C++, but generally you have to go out and find the libraries to do what you want, then compile them for your particular platform. Java generally includes them, and for those that are not included, they're distributed pre-compiled for the JVM.
So it's not fair to say Java is "Superior", because that really depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking to build enterprise web applications, Java is likely superior. If you're looking to crunch numbers as fast as possible, you're likely to be happier with C or C++. It depends on the project and the goals.
I assumed it was a reference to Apple's other code names -- Puma (10.1), Jaguar (10.2), etc. All animals you'd see on a safari.
In what way does encrypting the video prevent you from recording it?
Why can't you simply record the video on your HD-TiVo of the future in encrypted form, then play it back in encrypted form, which the TV can then decrypt?
Most of us are interested in making copies for timeshifting or backup or whatever. If every TV on earth can decrypt the file, just save it encrypted and you can still timeshift it.
What's wrong with this idea?
iCal 1.0.1 provides a number of performance and stability enhancements, and improved support for importing vCal and Entourage information.
Before you download .Mac membership or a WebDAV server.
Check the system requirements:
Mac OS X v.10.2.2 "Jaguar" required.
Publishing calendars on the Internet requires a
Note for iSync Public Beta users:
The iSync Public Beta is not compatible with iCal 1.0.1. iSync Public Beta users must upgrade to iSync 1.0 after installing iCal 1.0.1.
Slashdot should make a "public" account with login "Slashdot", and every single Slashdot user should go on and review one item.
We'd be the number 1 reviewer in no time. The current #1 reviewer has 4052 reviews.
Read the license agreement before making such assumptions. They let you compile it. You just can't use the binary you compiled for everyday use.
Moxi will be available via cable providers or other Premium TV companies, and the hardware will be custom for each one of them.
IMO, that will be the biggest problem for them. Standalone TiVo is ubiquitous. It can be used with just about any source... anyone's cable box... any satellite system.
It's funny, the people on the TiVo forums feel the opposite way. They generally think that the biggest threat to TiVo is the fact that cable companies will be delivering their own boxes to their customers for $10/month with no hardware to buy. If it integrates a digital cable tuner in the box, it has a huge advantage over the TiVo, which has to change the channels over IR (or serial in one rare circumstance).
Personally, I think TiVo has an amazing interface, but I could see how someone who didn't have TiVo could be happy with a Moxi box from their cable company.
Obviously there was no market for the cube, hence the discontinuation of that product line.
If you want a G4 Cube, buy one on eBay.
I don't have the new edition (mine is the first edition, publiched July 1998), but I couldn't imagine being a developer of web-facing applications without this book. The JavaScript reference and the DOM references are great, and the CSS reference is really useful as well. I don't care much for the layer aspects of DHTML (behavior is inconsistent), but this book is still a great addition to any developer's library.
What about Darwin Streaming Server and Rendezvous? What about OpenPlay and OpenDirectory? Apple is releasing lots of neat projects as open-source. This just doesn't happen to be one of them.
Darwin is great for OSX developers because it lets you look into the source of OSX and see how it works. It's not particularly useful as an x86 platform
I even still have the maze memorized, and I was 6 years old when I played this?
I gotta go grab an Atari emulator for OSX. Grundle, Yorgle, and Rhindle, here I come!
This article on a first read is great. The reason, I realized, is that it's because I agree with it. This article boils down the problem (oversimplified maybe, but works for the AOL users out there) to a level where non-geeks can understand how bad this really is.
I think this article would make a GREAT spam campaign. Any slashdotters also spammers at night? Take this article, and blast it out to those 20 million AOL users. They'll be so scared of "Palladium" that they won't consider buying a PC that has it.
The real truth is that this technology will appeal to companies a lot more than individuals. But if individuals refuse to use it, applications outside of Microsoft won't bother to use it, and just maybe we could prevail.
It's funny that someone would be stupid enough to post a story about their own auction, and funnier still that the moderators would post it.
What's not funny is that this guy is selling a bunch of "preinstalled" software with no CDs, which essentially is pirated software. I suspect that all of his serial numbers can be found in "Cracks & Numbers" or "Hackers Helper".
This guy might want to be careful lest he end up in jail for grand theft (the value of the software listed is several thousand dollars).
TiVo simply records the MacroVision along with the signal. It also records closed captioning and VBI data like the "press thumbs up to record" called TivoMatic.
It costs $349.00 US, and there is a $50 rebate, bringing the price down to $299.00 once you wait for that rebate check to come.
Of course, it's Windows-only. You'd think they would include an iTunes plug-in to try and get some of the Apple users.
Boy, you don't know much about Apple users, do you? If you went into any Apple store in America and asked if anyone would like to do a free testimonial about how they love their Macs, you'd have 30 people clamoring to be first in line.
You think Linux advocates are loyal, but you have no idea how fiercely loyal Apple users are.
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/021
In case this get slashdotted, here is RMS' post (and I quote):
The new restrictions on Bitkeeper, saying that people who contribute
to CVS or Subversion and even companies that distribute them cannot
even run Bitkeeper, have sparked outrage. While these specific
restrictions are new, their spirit fits perfectly with the previous
Bitkeeper license.
The spirit of the Bitkeeper license is the spirit of the whip hand.
It is the spirit that says, "You have no right to use Bitkeeper, only
temporary privileges that we can revoke. Be grateful that we allow
you to use Bitkeeper. Be grateful, and don't do anything we dislike,
or we may revoke those privileges." It is the spirit of proprietary
software. Every non-free license is designed to control the users
more or less. Outrage at this spirit is the reason for the free
software movement. (By contrast, the open source movement prefers to
play down this same outrage.)
If the latest outrage brings the spirit of the non-free Bitkeeper
license into clear view, perhaps that will be enough to convince the
developers of Linux to stop using Bitkeeper for Linux development.
I used Linux (RH 6.2, RH 7.1) for over 2 years, and I think it's a great OS. But it's not an OS that regular users can use like OSX 10.1.5 and 10.2. It's harder to be productive in Linux than OSX. I've said it before, but the fact remains that OSX is significantly easier to set up and use on a daily basis than Linux.
Want some reasons that regular people like OSX better? All the control panels are in one place and follow a consistent design. You can get Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash MX, and AOL for it.
Want some reasons that many geeks like us like OSX better? Excellent free development IDE (ProjectBuilder & InterfaceBuilder) that makes native apps with an audience of 5 million paying customers. Great commercial tools like BBEdit, Oracle, Sybase, SQLGrinder, and JBuilder Enterprise, that make developing for production systems as easy as developing on Linux.
The DVD issue is really a money issue. With Linux, there's no one willing to pay the money to legally play DVDs. When I worked at ZapMedia, we had a software-only DVD player working under Linux. We had to pay for it, but it can be done. With MacOSX, a small portion of the purchase price covers the R&D and licensing required to have this feature.
I have a 600MHz iBook/DVD that I carry to work every day. The office is all-Windows, but thanks to OSX's built-in SMB browser and CUPS printing support, I can do everything that the Windows machines can do. I might be able to make that happen with Linux using a compiler and a lot of free time, but my experience with Linux in the past is that it's not nearly as simple or obvious.
IMHO, you're missing the point. It's not a question of whether Linux is a good desktop (for some people it is), or whether a non-geek can use it once it's installed by a geek (they can if it's set up correctly).
The question is, is Linux easy enough to install and use that more people are doing it that buying/using MacOS. The answer is no. The real truth is, for all intents and purposes, almost all Windows users use the same version of Windows from they day the get their computer to the day they get their next computer.
I suspect that same can be said of MacOS, which is one reason Apple works so hard to attract new users to the platform. Mac users tend to stay mac users, and Windows users tend to stay Windows users.
The Windows users are the "unwashed masses" of the computer world, and MacOS X and Linux are more sophisticated. The question is, of those who switch, are they more likely to switch to a Mac when they buy a new PC, or to undertake installing Linux on their old one.
I love Linux. I ran it for 2 years as my desktop OS for development at work and at home. But I have worked at mega-corporations and tiny companies, and I have NEVER seen a non-geek running Linux. I, like many of you, like to be able to compile my own software from the source.
The fact is that no one's mom runs Linux unless someone set it up for them. My mom can't install a plug-n-play modem on Windows. My dad is an Mechanical Engineer, and he has trouble with his computer all the time. There's NO WAY regular people like this, who are very smart, will ever install Linux of their own volition.
Macs on the other hand are almost universally seen as "easier than Windows" by everyone, including Windows and Linux users. Regular people buy Macs for lots of reasons (creative people, geeks who like the UNIX OS and neat hardware, soccer moms who want to use AOL, computer phobic people who want to see what the fuss is about, college kids who like to edit video and rip MP3s).
It's just absurd to think that Linux could be overtaking MacOS at this stage of market share on the desktop. I like Linux a lot, but I run MacOS X on my laptop now, because as a desktop OS it's just better.
I installed 10.2 on (a) my iBook 600 (640MB RAM) with an 8meg RAGE 128 Mobility, and (b) on my G4/450 (640MB RAM) with an ATI Radeon 7500 32MB AGP card.
Honestly, 10.2 is a little faster on the iBook, but not a ton. I'd say the same for the G4. I haven't tried any games, but the GUI really isn't much faster. It could be that the 450MHz G4 can't keep up, or that the 100MHz bus isn't fast enough, but the Radeon 7500 is a fast card. Overall, I like 10.2, but it's not such a speed demon that I was surprised by the performance.
Oh, and to the Windows printer-sharing question, as far as I can tell there is no support for it in 10.2. I tried to share my HP Laserjet 6MP hooked up to my WindowsXP Professional box, but OSX could not see it. It was able to mount SMB shares at home and at work with no problems though.
Apple has not shipped a hardware ROM since the "new world" macs came out (1999 -- see the tech note.
There's nothing stopping someone from writing a Mac emulator other than the size of it. I am quite sure it could be done if someone could get the specs for some of those custom ASICs Apple uses for its memory controllers and daughtercard bridges.
I had an odd failure on my iBook. Somehow I managed to snap off the male plug end of the battery charger INSIDE the female power connector of the iBook. The 'book was under warranty, but past the 90 days of free phone support.
This was obviously a hardware problem, but the tech was not able to even discuss it with me without a credit card number. He told me that if it was a hardware problem I would not be charged, but if it were a software problem I would.
I explained that there was no way that it could be a software problem since it was a physical plug not going into a physical hole because a physical piece broke off.
Long story short, I had to give my card number (was not charged), they sent me an Airborne box, which I filled with my iBook and gave back to the guy who was dropping it off. They had to wait for a part so it took a week to get it back, but all is well with it now.
I just thought it was funny that even Apple has some strange policies in their tech support department.