Another thing to note is that MySQL has placed their libraries under the GPL, making them somewhat incompatible with the PHP license. This has caused a bit of a rift in the PHP community, with the result being that MySQL will probably be less supported by the PHP developers while PostgreSQL increases in support.
This cause quite a stir earlier and caused the MySQL4 API to be not bundled at all. This was however addressed by MySQL AB and exceptions from the GPL was put in place for several Open Source Licenses, including the PHP License.
Some of the true magic about going to one of the WRC-events, is travelling to get there.. So don't let the missing native events stop you! If you live in the US, you could have gone to the Rally Mexico a couple of weeks back -- or even rally argentina which is coming up in a months time:-)
We're currently considering going to Germany in the late august, but we'll have to wait and see if it becomes a reality (we were there in 2002)!
Since you're in the US..
on
Open Maps?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You should consider yourself lucky. Most of the information you need is already avaiable to you, in the public domain. As several other has mentioned, the Tiger-files will provide loads of information and you should really have a look at those (to convert them into your own format). It took a few weeks to do it, but the task is far from impossible.
The other question asked is however much more important, what about completly open maps in a free for all use setting? As i mentioned, this is the case for the US, but quite far from the truth for some other countries in the world:| If you're going to let other people use your data, please provide them in an open and accesible format, like WFS. Have a look at GeoServer and PostGIS (for PostgreSQL) or do as we do, store everything as GML - an open standard presented by OpenGIS (which also stands behind WFS and WMS). Take a look at their website which features quite a few important standards and other resources.
Making data available as WMS or WFS allows other people to seamlessly integrate them into their own applications. Seeing an application just importing more and more information thats available by WMS is simply amazing. The norwegian rescue service uses an internal WMS-server for all their mapping data, which provides information about currents, weather, available ships in some parts of the world that supports the system and loads of other information. This comes from several different sources and are integrated into the application on the last step. All the seperate units are responsible for their own mapping data and can upgrade and improve their data at any time without any interaction from the end user.
We export information by WFS, although probably not very interesting for your use, it demonstrates the possibilities. You may browse our repository at OneMap by using our SVG client.
Re:Maybe it's time
on
Open Maps?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
We've already done a bit of work on this, although not in any open projects yet. We do however have a small testbed for integrating and designing datasets in a SVG-client before going through a peer review process by others that have data in the same area.
Our white paper on the architecture may be seen at SVG Open from the 2003 proceedings. A small amount of information (including a live demo -- it does however require that someone accepts the data submitted, so don't expect to see anything in the gateway at once) is available here.
The idea is however a good one and is absolutely doable. The problem is that you'll probably get rather large datasets for the most used paths, while the roads noone travels frequently will remain unmapped (and those are really the roads that you _do_ need a map for)..
Re:Not quite
on
Hardened PHP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
While all aspiring PHP-programmers should take the time to read the paper mentioned to understand why and how -- and to guard themselves against doing the same mistakes that we've all grown accustomed to over the years, it should be mentioned that almost all these default attack vectors has been taken care of during the years.
the default installation of PHP today makes people write a lot more robust code than it used to do. New applications has been able to move away from the 'ugly' things and a general understanding of what not to do has been developed by almost all active developers. If you've done serious PHP developement during the last years, you know how much further things has come.
Then get a DAB radio, here in Norway there's at least four (or five) stations (and we're 4.5m people in a quite large area) broadcasting on DAB. Not sure about the general coverage, thou. The quality is dependent on the station, but is mainly 128kbps or 160kbps IIRC.
WorldDAB for more information about DAB. Another option would of course be to just get music from online broadcasting services, the norwegian public radio broadcasts are available for free on the net (http://radio.hiof.no/) f.ex.
As several other readers have pointed out, home.no is a free webhost, available for anyone who wants an account. It supports (or at least did support) PHP earlier and has been fairly popular in norway, together with home.no.net (which has been a bit more commercialized during the last year). If anyone in norway want a decent free webhosting, they skip the geocities alternative and go for this instead.
"VRML" is still in active use and is still under development. While being a fad in the fact that it was hyped up as a HTML-replacement, the technology still lives on and is currently about to be replaced by x3d.
"Graphics cards that allow you to watch television on your monitor, by plugging a coax cable into the card.".. These are still sold and quite a few companies has made a living by selling cards with those features. Naming ATI, Pinnacle, Miro, Hauppage etc. In fact, this was a very nice way to avoid getting the national License Fee on Televisions.. No fad there.
Both the Commodore 16 and Windows 1.0 may seem stupid at the moment, but as another poster pointed out, much of the stuff on your list is just natural evolution. I still have several hundreds of tape decks that were used for storage.. and they still have the data "intact".:-)
This is from 1979. Nothing to see here. It was published after 6 months of delay (originally scheduled for the April issue, but didn't come out before November). I would suggest reading the introduction or at least look at the first page next time.;)
I would also like to give you (as in the US) the full credit for sharing your geodata on the web. There are very, very few countries who are this generous (only here in norway, we're talking something on the level of five or six digits when it comes to getting data.. and that's from the goverment!).. If all goverments shared this much, the world would be a better place for us mappers;)
We're currently looking forward to implementing VMAP0 and VMAP1 in our repository. Should be fun:)
This is exactly what we've implemented in OneMap, but there are several other issues that you have to resolve in such a setting. There may be inconsistencies between the two sets, their representation may be different etc. You'll never get a perfect map, so in many cases you're interested in getting "parts" of both. In addition, you have to have some sort of technique to handle overlapping sections.
We've described this to some extent in our papers.
We're already way ahead of you. I'm one of the developers at project OneMap. We are currently building and serving one of the largest, free repositories in the world, completly built on open standards. We serve content in the fashion of GML and store everything internally as XML. We've integrated quite a few sources so far, both from a few custom norwegian sources and from the US TigerLine-files.
The main goal is to be able to update and review the content of our repository from within your own browser -- and we have the infrastructure to solve this. The biggest problem being that no-one has ever done anything like this in such a large scale, so we're kinda going along and feeling how the ground is all the way.
Our gateway (for viewing the maps) are currently built on SVG and utilizes the open, formatted GML response. The source is going to be opened up and everything is going to be available for free, but currently we're having a few issues we would like to solve before going public. As always, this is a work in progress. I'm probably doing my MSc with just this topic (updating a map by many individuals) and a way of making sure that only REAL changes go into the repository.
Works as an External Memory
The player shows as an external harddrive directly under Explorer on your PC. No installation needed (Windows 98 needs installation).
"No installation necessary" should indicate that it works like a standard USB storage device.. Maybe someone who already has the previous unit can confirm this?
#1: determine the top 10% of the users #2: cap their bandwidth so that they're no longer in that group #3: if (bandwidth_used > 0) goto #1 #4: sell off your backbone #5: profit!
Ok, flamebait, but i'll bite. Do you really consider Half-Life 2 to be "Resting"? How about the developement of TF2? How about the developement of Steam? The also took over the developement of Counter-Strike somewhere along the road (probably around version 1.0 if I remember correctly).. They published a stand alone version of Counter-Strike, they also started Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (which someone else took over).. And for the other poster, about Steam.. come on, at least they're trying. And it's not looking as bad as it could be..
They're a company, they've been making money and they're apparently still developing new ideas, trying new stuff and setting new standards.. cut them some slack:>.. Valve has been really friendly to communities and people supporting their games, they've kept WON up and running for 5 years now (a pay service like MCO went down in what? a year?).. they answer people when you write an email to them etc. About not being linux-friendly, sure thing, that's not good and I would chose iD any day for something to run on my linux-based box:-) It should also be noted that they actually made some changes in their server side cheat protection to ensure that people could keep running Half-Life / Counter-Strike under wine (which works just nice, btw).
The point being; if you don't like it; don't buy it. And don't pirate it. It's your choice.
for the first time, i actually think that the slashdot submission said everything that was worth saying; there is no need to read the article if you read the submission text:>
At the same time the licencing will change to pure GPL (no more LGPL libraries !!!)
This is hardly a good thing MySQL IMHO, since this kinda makes it impossible to bundle the library with products like PHP (released under the PHP license). The bundling of the MySQL library with PHP is probably one of the reasons why MySQL got so popular in the first place, it took minimum effort to setup and configure a MySQL / PHP-configuration -- if the PostgreSQL-guys jump on the bandwagon and creates a nice, bundle-friendly client API, the positions for the lower end of the market may suddenly change (BTW, there was some mention of getting a special solution for PHP, just to make sure they still could bundle it; not sure how that ended, been of the dev-list for a month now due to summer:/).
The link to the product you posted, also states that there is only a 2 year "subscription" period for the updates, before you'll have to pay for another license -- how is this any different from symantecs practice with a 1 year default subscription? There is still a subscription-period, even though grisoft calls it a "license"..
Re:I'd be more sympathetic to anti-spammers, but..
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Problem is, the spammers are probably stupid enough to try their own product. Darn it.
This sounds like a win-win situation, better get started.
Folks blame Microsoft for their failures to prevent the bugs that allow these virii and worms, and I don't disagree. However, there is a deeper root cause. C and C++ are poor tools for any programming above the level of device driver (and perhaps compiler construction). "Programming without a Net", indeed!! (sorry, couldn't find the original of that quote.)
This thing has nothing to do with the selected programming language; you may possibly want to use that argument in the ongoing blaster discussion. Sobig.F is dependent on a user actually clicking on an attachment (at least the versions I've read about, running mutt myself, no problem here:>).. and i can honestly say that i really don't think what language the program is written in matters at all. Any program that executes in the context of the logged in user and his or hers privileges, automagically gains the possibility of doing something like this. It's not a buffer *run, it's just the matter of simply getting someone to execute a file.
Jokes aside, I like complex games because they make you think. Coming from science/engineering field I find challenging games more fun. Personally I think games are dumbed down and repetitive. I'm looking forward to Half-Life 2 because it is definitely going to be complex and entertaining. If Doom 3 is dumbed down, then it ain't for me...my little brother will probably enjoy it though.
There's a huge difference in making a complex game and making a game that makes you think; i really enjoy games that make me thing and promotes some sort puzzles and brain activity -- but I really don't want to spend 8 hours reading the manual before playing (even NWN seemed a bit excessive for me:>).. There is really no problem in making a game that makes you think without making a complex game. Pikmin for the gamecube is an excellent example.. it took about 3 minutes to understand completly, but it still made me have to think. Other games in the same genre would be the old "Castle of Dr. Brain" (maybe a bit simple these days), all Lucas Arts adventure games (great humor too!) and etc.
IE; there is no need for a complex game to make you think.
Slashdot Mirror
This cause quite a stir earlier and caused the MySQL4 API to be not bundled at all. This was however addressed by MySQL AB and exceptions from the GPL was put in place for several Open Source Licenses, including the PHP License.
Read more about it here.
Some of the true magic about going to one of the WRC-events, is travelling to get there.. So don't let the missing native events stop you! If you live in the US, you could have gone to the Rally Mexico a couple of weeks back -- or even rally argentina which is coming up in a months time :-)
We're currently considering going to Germany in the late august, but we'll have to wait and see if it becomes a reality (we were there in 2002)!
You should consider yourself lucky. Most of the information you need is already avaiable to you, in the public domain. As several other has mentioned, the Tiger-files will provide loads of information and you should really have a look at those (to convert them into your own format). It took a few weeks to do it, but the task is far from impossible.
:| If you're going to let other people use your data, please provide them in an open and accesible format, like WFS. Have a look at GeoServer and PostGIS (for PostgreSQL) or do as we do, store everything as GML - an open standard presented by OpenGIS (which also stands behind WFS and WMS). Take a look at their website which features quite a few important standards and other resources.
The other question asked is however much more important, what about completly open maps in a free for all use setting? As i mentioned, this is the case for the US, but quite far from the truth for some other countries in the world
Making data available as WMS or WFS allows other people to seamlessly integrate them into their own applications. Seeing an application just importing more and more information thats available by WMS is simply amazing. The norwegian rescue service uses an internal WMS-server for all their mapping data, which provides information about currents, weather, available ships in some parts of the world that supports the system and loads of other information. This comes from several different sources and are integrated into the application on the last step. All the seperate units are responsible for their own mapping data and can upgrade and improve their data at any time without any interaction from the end user.
We export information by WFS, although probably not very interesting for your use, it demonstrates the possibilities. You may browse our repository at OneMap by using our SVG client.
We've already done a bit of work on this, although not in any open projects yet. We do however have a small testbed for integrating and designing datasets in a SVG-client before going through a peer review process by others that have data in the same area.
Our white paper on the architecture may be seen at SVG Open from the 2003 proceedings. A small amount of information (including a live demo -- it does however require that someone accepts the data submitted, so don't expect to see anything in the gateway at once) is available here.
The idea is however a good one and is absolutely doable. The problem is that you'll probably get rather large datasets for the most used paths, while the roads noone travels frequently will remain unmapped (and those are really the roads that you _do_ need a map for)..
While all aspiring PHP-programmers should take the time to read the paper mentioned to understand why and how -- and to guard themselves against doing the same mistakes that we've all grown accustomed to over the years, it should be mentioned that almost all these default attack vectors has been taken care of during the years.
the default installation of PHP today makes people write a lot more robust code than it used to do. New applications has been able to move away from the 'ugly' things and a general understanding of what not to do has been developed by almost all active developers. If you've done serious PHP developement during the last years, you know how much further things has come.
>> There's only so many buttons you can put on a
:)
>> controller
> You just aint trying hard enough.
Well.. Someone are...
Then get a DAB radio, here in Norway there's at least four (or five) stations (and we're 4.5m people in a quite large area) broadcasting on DAB. Not sure about the general coverage, thou. The quality is dependent on the station, but is mainly 128kbps or 160kbps IIRC.
WorldDAB for more information about DAB. Another option would of course be to just get music from online broadcasting services, the norwegian public radio broadcasts are available for free on the net (http://radio.hiof.no/) f.ex.
As several other readers have pointed out, home.no is a free webhost, available for anyone who wants an account. It supports (or at least did support) PHP earlier and has been fairly popular in norway, together with home.no.net (which has been a bit more commercialized during the last year). If anyone in norway want a decent free webhosting, they skip the geocities alternative and go for this instead.
.. move on :)
Nothing to see here (literally)
"VRML" is still in active use and is still under development. While being a fad in the fact that it was hyped up as a HTML-replacement, the technology still lives on and is currently about to be replaced by x3d.
.. and they still have the data "intact". :-)
"Graphics cards that allow you to watch television on your monitor, by plugging a coax cable into the card.".. These are still sold and quite a few companies has made a living by selling cards with those features. Naming ATI, Pinnacle, Miro, Hauppage etc. In fact, this was a very nice way to avoid getting the national License Fee on Televisions.. No fad there.
Both the Commodore 16 and Windows 1.0 may seem stupid at the moment, but as another poster pointed out, much of the stuff on your list is just natural evolution. I still have several hundreds of tape decks that were used for storage
This is from 1979. Nothing to see here. It was published after 6 months of delay (originally scheduled for the April issue, but didn't come out before November). I would suggest reading the introduction or at least look at the first page next time. ;)
It has been available. The article was published in November, 1979. RTFPDF or TFP!
I would also like to give you (as in the US) the full credit for sharing your geodata on the web. There are very, very few countries who are this generous (only here in norway, we're talking something on the level of five or six digits when it comes to getting data .. and that's from the goverment!) .. If all goverments shared this much, the world would be a better place for us mappers ;)
:)
We're currently looking forward to implementing VMAP0 and VMAP1 in our repository. Should be fun
This is exactly what we've implemented in OneMap, but there are several other issues that you have to resolve in such a setting. There may be inconsistencies between the two sets, their representation may be different etc. You'll never get a perfect map, so in many cases you're interested in getting "parts" of both. In addition, you have to have some sort of technique to handle overlapping sections.
We've described this to some extent in our papers.
We're already way ahead of you. I'm one of the developers at project OneMap. We are currently building and serving one of the largest, free repositories in the world, completly built on open standards. We serve content in the fashion of GML and store everything internally as XML. We've integrated quite a few sources so far, both from a few custom norwegian sources and from the US TigerLine-files.
The main goal is to be able to update and review the content of our repository from within your own browser -- and we have the infrastructure to solve this. The biggest problem being that no-one has ever done anything like this in such a large scale, so we're kinda going along and feeling how the ground is all the way.
Our gateway (for viewing the maps) are currently built on SVG and utilizes the open, formatted GML response. The source is going to be opened up and everything is going to be available for free, but currently we're having a few issues we would like to solve before going public. As always, this is a work in progress. I'm probably doing my MSc with just this topic (updating a map by many individuals) and a way of making sure that only REAL changes go into the repository.
Great! Another possiblity to show off the wonders off Ogg Vorbis! I can't even wait to see how OpenOffice works after encoding :>
maybe we'll just lose some random featrEUs? (liek spellcheeeking)
"No installation necessary" should indicate that it works like a standard USB storage device.. Maybe someone who already has the previous unit can confirm this?
This may be implemented very simple:
#1: determine the top 10% of the users
#2: cap their bandwidth so that they're no longer in that group
#3: if (bandwidth_used > 0) goto #1
#4: sell off your backbone
#5: profit!
The scary part is that they actually got to version 1.3 before it worked.
Ok, flamebait, but i'll bite. Do you really consider Half-Life 2 to be "Resting"? How about the developement of TF2? How about the developement of Steam? The also took over the developement of Counter-Strike somewhere along the road (probably around version 1.0 if I remember correctly).. They published a stand alone version of Counter-Strike, they also started Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (which someone else took over)
They're a company, they've been making money and they're apparently still developing new ideas, trying new stuff and setting new standards.. cut them some slack
The point being; if you don't like it; don't buy it. And don't pirate it. It's your choice.
for the first time, i actually think that the slashdot submission said everything that was worth saying; there is no need to read the article if you read the submission text :>
so; RTFST!"
This is hardly a good thing MySQL IMHO, since this kinda makes it impossible to bundle the library with products like PHP (released under the PHP license). The bundling of the MySQL library with PHP is probably one of the reasons why MySQL got so popular in the first place, it took minimum effort to setup and configure a MySQL / PHP-configuration -- if the PostgreSQL-guys jump on the bandwagon and creates a nice, bundle-friendly client API, the positions for the lower end of the market may suddenly change (BTW, there was some mention of getting a special solution for PHP, just to make sure they still could bundle it; not sure how that ended, been of the dev-list for a month now due to summer
The link to the product you posted, also states that there is only a 2 year "subscription" period for the updates, before you'll have to pay for another license -- how is this any different from symantecs practice with a 1 year default subscription? There is still a subscription-period, even though grisoft calls it a "license" ..
This sounds like a win-win situation, better get started.
This thing has nothing to do with the selected programming language; you may possibly want to use that argument in the ongoing blaster discussion. Sobig.F is dependent on a user actually clicking on an attachment (at least the versions I've read about, running mutt myself, no problem here
There's a huge difference in making a complex game and making a game that makes you think; i really enjoy games that make me thing and promotes some sort puzzles and brain activity -- but I really don't want to spend 8 hours reading the manual before playing (even NWN seemed a bit excessive for me
IE; there is no need for a complex game to make you think.