Kinda expensive, but understandably everything Just Works.
10 years ago I would've messed around with Myth and STBs and the like but these days I just can't be bothered. We just use a wireless mouse to control it. If we need to type anything, we use a standard wireless keyboard, but we hardly ever need it.
It's small, silent and unobtrusive, sits nicely in the unit under the TV and is compatible with pretty much every website and server there is. It's even wireless so I didn't have to bother cabling it.
Agreed. I've been working in this industry for 25 years, even actively like functional programming, but monads still blow my fragile little mind.
A few years back I came across an plain-english explanation of them that made perfect sense, and boy am I annoyed that I didn't bookmark it. I might try to beat my head against the issue again at some point. If anyone thinks they might know where a good description is please post a link:-)
The U.S. voluntarily signed a treaty that is enforced by those 'foreign bankers'. The treaty involves obligations on those that signed it, some of which the U.S. is breaking by having this local law in place. The other parties to the treaty are honouring their obligations, yet the U.S. is not. Surely some punishment is in order?
Frameworks tend to define the structure of your application, and if you attempt to use two different frameworks together in the same project they'll generally not play nicely together. The problem with frameworks is that when the one you're using is out of date it's hard to switch to a new one because they'll conflict.
Libraries attempt to enhance the power of the underlying platform, but don't impose as much structure on your project. As a result you can mix them or introduce them to existing projects. For example, I was able to introduce jQuery to clean up and enhance an existing old-style web site, without significantly changing its architecture.
I was in the same situation as the article poster a few years ago. I had to create a new interactive website, and had a tough choice to make: Flash or HTML? Flash was still strong, and the only website that really demonstrated what I needed could be done was Google Maps. But I wasn't keen on the vendor lock-in and the nature of the Flash plug in. I went with HTML and the then-immature jQuery. I knew the web wasn't going away soon, and jquery could be replaced if necessary. Fortunately I was lucky there and the choice has served me very well.
If it's not your core product, you can use a framework (and be prepared to live with the consequences). But if this IS your core product, so you need to invest in creating and maintaining your own framework. Your business depends on it so you need to be able to control it.
I live in NZ, and a quote I heard on the radio lately says it all: "streaming is the new torrenting". Instead of torrenting you connect to one of the indexing sites and simply stream what you want to watch. That's what we do now. Not only does it use less data allowance, but as far as I know it's actually legal too, as you're not offering a copy to anyone else.
About the only hassle is the stupid ads, and some of the sites stream data to you too slowly to watch in real time. We've gotten in the habit of kicking those off at night and running hobocopy to copy the stream files from Temp inside my profile folder. Then VLC plays 'em whenever I like:)
And music? There are indexing sites for that too. We really did try to go legit there, but with all the region restrictions and limited catalog rubbish it was such a pain in the ass. The indexing sites have it all...
Knuth's stuff assumes everything is RAM-resident - as long as you don't violate that what he wrote is as valid as ever. I'm quite certain that he'll have different suggestions for tasks involving storing data on disk. Even though the disk writes are implicit because the OS is doing them, they're still there, just as they would be had he coded them explicitly. So of course you're going to get poor performance using a RAM-resident algorithm for a disk-resident application.
The RAM resident stuff is still useful, both at a lower level, but also for those of us creating applications that can live entirely in memory. A web site I did recently is careful to ensure that the entire primary data set can fit in memory, and for that site everything he wrote is still perfectly valid.
In fact, for very high performing websites you try to ensure that at least most of your requests come from memory rather than disk, which makes Knuth's stuff more important than ever. If you can't do it in RAM then you'd better have a lot of spindles!
... course I'm just one guy, but I'm always dealing with people sending me documents.
I upgraded machines, and my new box already happened to have OO on it, so I gave it a go before deciding to buy a new copy of office.
OO 2.4 and now 3 has performed well for me in the past year - I've yet to have a document a client has sent fail to open. On the odd occasion it looked odd, I used the free word/excel viewer to open the documents (which confirmed they were broken - it looked odd there too). Note I only really deal with Word and Excel documents.
Really, it'll just depend on whether there are any specific must-haves for you in Office - for me there were none.
Ummmm... I *love* the compile on save - errors highlight as you make them, and you thump the run button and your project just runs. For small projects, why would you ever turn it off?
I have to admit I know nothing about Eclipse distros, I just downloaded this thing called Europa that the Eclipse site pointed me at, and never looked back - I've had very little problems with it.
It's a big beastie alright, and digging thru the options (esp for J2ME work) can be a mission. Could use a tidy-up. The other thing is the initial startup experience - it starts well with a nice intro screen, but there's not a lot of follow-through.
Aside from that, I run it on an old P4-3Ghz with 1Gb of RAM. If it's slow, it's not java - I changed my mind about that when I tried Azureus on my old P2-350 - and that looks and feels like any other windows app.
Perfect? Nah. If I were doing a windoze app I'd use C# and VS before java. Now if you want to see something slow 'n bloated try running Visual Studio...
... I was of prime buying age: employed with money to burn. At least once a week you'd find me cruising round the CD stores for the latest music to buy. The evidence of that remains in the large tower case of CDs that are now ignored in favour of the collection on my PC.
But I still buy plastic discs - I haven't changed that much. It's just that there's more to choose from now: DVDs. Those CD shops I bought from are still there, but now as much as 50% of their floor space is now devoted to movies. I could buy a CD which has maybe 8-10 minutes of stuff I want on it, or for the same cost I could get a DVD, which contains up to 2 hours of decent content, and costs about the same. Makes a CD sound like pretty poor value!
But regardless even if they were the same, people have only so much to spend, and that's now split between DVDs and CDs.
... is to not have to choose at all. I just want it to let me get on with my work. The good thing about Gnome on Ubuntu is I could install it and do just that: it's well laid out, has very little bullshit, is consistent with what I'm already familiar with, and I'm able to find or figure out everything important easily without running for documentation. It's better than Vista even, in that I didn't have to go round turning annoying features off.
I hear about Linus adding crap like allowing different mouse buttons do different things to title bars. If this option goes into the window manager, I want it to be hard to find, so that only advanced users who know what they're getting themselves in for change it. Most people just want something that works and is consistent, and that's something gnome seems to do pretty well.
I would love to see more people use Linux: more people means more mainstream support for the things I want to use it for, better driver support, better application support, even better game support. We can only get that if it Just Works for more people. KDE may be flexible but Gnome Just Works.
That's not to say gnome's perfect. For example, when you copy a large file from a samba share, the gnome-vfs will sit there chomping 30%+ CPU on my celeron 2.4Ghz. If I mount the file system myself using smbmount and copy the files that way I see less than 4% - what's with that?!
It's kinda clunky code-wise, but I did have it up and running in a couple of hours. Had to hack the code to change some of the defaults and the built-in response messages. But other than that, it works well enough for me and my clients.
With so few PS3s available, they'll all sell out, despite the high price - there are enough suckers that will buy them. They could really do with a killer game though. Or in my case, a decent copy of Ubuntu on the beast might do the trick;)
In a way the high cost of the BD drive is a good thing - it gives Sony room to move. As more drives are made the cost will inevitably fall, and quickly - say by $100 or more. Having creamed the die-hards, Sony would pass some of the lower costs on in 2007. PS3s going for $349 next year?
Microsoft is the main fly in Sony's ointment, and what they're able to do with the 360's price and game set will make a big difference in this war. But they're going to hurt later on for not including HD-DVD built-in. Sure, it's available as an add-on but can they seriously expect major buy-in from a couch-prone consumer base? I doubt it. On the other hand they could've included it like Sony did but then they'd be in the same pricing situation as Sony.
Add to that the controller (blatant rip off from Nintendo, bless Sony's black little heart), and there you have it: PS3 has everything built-in, but is presently more expensive; 360 is cheaper but you have to buy extras. Game makers will have to produce to the lowest common denominator, which is going to be that much lower on the 360. A large game that's a single disc on the PS3 will have you swapping discs part way through on the 360.
I don't like Sony one bit, continually trying to foist their proprietary formats and DRM on us - but long term I still think they're generally doing the right thing with the PS3. Time will tell.
They used to have a ROM chip on the board. Deviced drivers came in the form of 'modules' - and one specific to the device would be loaded off its ROM chip. If you had a newer driver, you'd load it from disk and it would replace the ROM one. It meant that the hardware worked 'out of the box', but if you needed newer drivers you could still use them.
Main catch is that it made the card bigger/more expensive - important especially when you look at some of today's tiny cards. In this age of the internet we're probably better off just working off the unique PCI ID that every card type has. The ideal would just be a little utility that scans the IDs and fetches (or tells you) what you need. MS has done a half-assed job of it with Windows Update, but it definitely could be better.
I'd kill for one of these. Doesn't even need to be very big - even 8Mb would be fine. Doesn't strictly need the power fail mechanics either, as long as the battery lasts a few hours.
But most of the solid state stuff I see is geared as hard disc replacement - in the order of gigabytes, usually operating using slow IDE interfaces. Anyone know of something that plugs in (and interfaces through) a PCIX port?
On my round the world trip I used it to remote desktop back into my machine at home. Was expecting satellite lag like the days of old, but it really wasn't an issue, performance was fine. IM'ing your friends from 30,000 feet is kinda cool:) Also renewed my primary domain name mid-flight (oops!).
Unfortunately then the battery ran out, and that's the real problem. If in-seat power is impractical, I wonder if airlines could hire out battery power packs instead...
I've been waiting for Halo2 on PC. Having played thru Halo 1 on PC with the good ol' mouse and keyboard, fumbling 'round with the controllers on Halo 2 was comical, to say the least!
Anyone gonna release a 'compatibility patch' for H2 after it comes out?:)
I have been seeing general file corruption as a result of NAV. Leave it scanning the database directory long enough and eventually zero data will be written to a page instead of what the system really wanted to write. Add the database directory to the exclusion list and all is OK. At one point we even had a machine bluescreening in the NAV dll simply as a result of copying a file it didn't like onto the server.
Yummy!
I remember the good ol' days where if an app screwed itself up you could simply uninstall it and reinstall it again and everything would be peachy (cross fingers!).
I can't count the number of times I've wanted to reinstall IE on various PCs: aside from the lame-ass repair option (which never worked), now the only way to do it is to nuke the whole OS.
Maybe WMP is 'fixable' again!
Kylix vs. Delphi: the CLX
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 3, Informative
When I heard about Kylix I was pretty interested - we have a portfolio of stuff we've written using the VCL, the native library that comes with Delphi. When Kylix and its associated version of Delphi came out suddenly we had TWO libraries to choose from: the original VCL and this new thing, the CLX. The CLX is VCL's poorer cousin, which you must use if you want to port to Kylix. To port our apps we'd have to go through it all replacing all the VCL stuff with CLX stuff. Could've been very different if they'd managed to let us continue to use the VCL. Impractical, I guess.
In addition using CLX means you've got to distribute DLLs with the app. Until now we've managed to avoid this. Something you don't often hear about but in our eyes a major advantage of Delphi is that for many apps the EXE is all you need - no DLL hell for support staff to worry about.
Price wasn't an issue for us: Kylix 3 came free with our copy of Delphi 7.
I think the problem we have is that these days *most* people on dynamic IPs *do* seem to be spammers. In terms of your analogy we'd be saying "most people print child porn, better look at outlawing all private publications" - I don't think your analogy holds up very well!
As far as blocking goes, there's nothing particularly religious about it - in my case I run a small ISP, and the calls we dread are customers calling asking why they're getting spam. They don't know what it is, they don't care. And they threaten to move to a competitor to run away from spam, even though we know it won't help.
Our blocking of IP ranges stops thousands of spam messages and has saved us from losing customers, so we'll continue to block dynamic SMTP servers like you. Dynamic SMTP servers are almost a thing of the past, from the good ol' days when open relays might have been a neighbourly thing to have. Times have changed and we can't afford to talk with you: you'll either need to catch up or be left behind.
Is there some form of authenticated SMTP relay service you can use to get around the issue?
Slashdot Mirror
Kinda expensive, but understandably everything Just Works.
10 years ago I would've messed around with Myth and STBs and the like but these days I just can't be bothered. We just use a wireless mouse to control it. If we need to type anything, we use a standard wireless keyboard, but we hardly ever need it.
It's small, silent and unobtrusive, sits nicely in the unit under the TV and is compatible with pretty much every website and server there is. It's even wireless so I didn't have to bother cabling it.
Agreed. I've been working in this industry for 25 years, even actively like functional programming, but monads still blow my fragile little mind.
:-)
A few years back I came across an plain-english explanation of them that made perfect sense, and boy am I annoyed that I didn't bookmark it. I might try to beat my head against the issue again at some point. If anyone thinks they might know where a good description is please post a link
The U.S. voluntarily signed a treaty that is enforced by those 'foreign bankers'. The treaty involves obligations on those that signed it, some of which the U.S. is breaking by having this local law in place. The other parties to the treaty are honouring their obligations, yet the U.S. is not. Surely some punishment is in order?
Frameworks tend to define the structure of your application, and if you attempt to use two different frameworks together in the same project they'll generally not play nicely together. The problem with frameworks is that when the one you're using is out of date it's hard to switch to a new one because they'll conflict.
Libraries attempt to enhance the power of the underlying platform, but don't impose as much structure on your project. As a result you can mix them or introduce them to existing projects. For example, I was able to introduce jQuery to clean up and enhance an existing old-style web site, without significantly changing its architecture.
I was in the same situation as the article poster a few years ago. I had to create a new interactive website, and had a tough choice to make: Flash or HTML? Flash was still strong, and the only website that really demonstrated what I needed could be done was Google Maps. But I wasn't keen on the vendor lock-in and the nature of the Flash plug in. I went with HTML and the then-immature jQuery. I knew the web wasn't going away soon, and jquery could be replaced if necessary. Fortunately I was lucky there and the choice has served me very well.
If it's not your core product, you can use a framework (and be prepared to live with the consequences). But if this IS your core product, so you need to invest in creating and maintaining your own framework. Your business depends on it so you need to be able to control it.
... for as long as I can remember!
Here in New Zealand, MSDN Ultimate is $26,369.00.
Better to fly first-class to the U.S. and pick one up for half the price. Understandably we're a little sour about it!
I live in NZ, and a quote I heard on the radio lately says it all: "streaming is the new torrenting". Instead of torrenting you connect to one of the indexing sites and simply stream what you want to watch. That's what we do now. Not only does it use less data allowance, but as far as I know it's actually legal too, as you're not offering a copy to anyone else.
:)
About the only hassle is the stupid ads, and some of the sites stream data to you too slowly to watch in real time. We've gotten in the habit of kicking those off at night and running hobocopy to copy the stream files from Temp inside my profile folder. Then VLC plays 'em whenever I like
And music? There are indexing sites for that too. We really did try to go legit there, but with all the region restrictions and limited catalog rubbish it was such a pain in the ass. The indexing sites have it all...
The RAM resident stuff is still useful, both at a lower level, but also for those of us creating applications that can live entirely in memory. A web site I did recently is careful to ensure that the entire primary data set can fit in memory, and for that site everything he wrote is still perfectly valid.
In fact, for very high performing websites you try to ensure that at least most of your requests come from memory rather than disk, which makes Knuth's stuff more important than ever. If you can't do it in RAM then you'd better have a lot of spindles!
I upgraded machines, and my new box already happened to have OO on it, so I gave it a go before deciding to buy a new copy of office.
OO 2.4 and now 3 has performed well for me in the past year - I've yet to have a document a client has sent fail to open. On the odd occasion it looked odd, I used the free word/excel viewer to open the documents (which confirmed they were broken - it looked odd there too). Note I only really deal with Word and Excel documents.
Really, it'll just depend on whether there are any specific must-haves for you in Office - for me there were none.
dia? Eek, try InkScape - it rocks. Load it up, go through the tutorial in the help menu and you'll be away.
I have to admit I know nothing about Eclipse distros, I just downloaded this thing called Europa that the Eclipse site pointed me at, and never looked back - I've had very little problems with it.
It's a big beastie alright, and digging thru the options (esp for J2ME work) can be a mission. Could use a tidy-up. The other thing is the initial startup experience - it starts well with a nice intro screen, but there's not a lot of follow-through.
Aside from that, I run it on an old P4-3Ghz with 1Gb of RAM. If it's slow, it's not java - I changed my mind about that when I tried Azureus on my old P2-350 - and that looks and feels like any other windows app.
Perfect? Nah. If I were doing a windoze app I'd use C# and VS before java. Now if you want to see something slow 'n bloated try running Visual Studio...
... I was of prime buying age: employed with money to burn. At least once a week you'd find me cruising round the CD stores for the latest music to buy. The evidence of that remains in the large tower case of CDs that are now ignored in favour of the collection on my PC. But I still buy plastic discs - I haven't changed that much. It's just that there's more to choose from now: DVDs. Those CD shops I bought from are still there, but now as much as 50% of their floor space is now devoted to movies. I could buy a CD which has maybe 8-10 minutes of stuff I want on it, or for the same cost I could get a DVD, which contains up to 2 hours of decent content, and costs about the same. Makes a CD sound like pretty poor value! But regardless even if they were the same, people have only so much to spend, and that's now split between DVDs and CDs.
Stupid slashdot - you'd think it would have realised I was trying to post plain old text. So much for the formatting :-)
... is to not have to choose at all. I just want it to let me get on with my work. The good thing about Gnome on Ubuntu is I could install it and do just that: it's well laid out, has very little bullshit, is consistent with what I'm already familiar with, and I'm able to find or figure out everything important easily without running for documentation. It's better than Vista even, in that I didn't have to go round turning annoying features off. I hear about Linus adding crap like allowing different mouse buttons do different things to title bars. If this option goes into the window manager, I want it to be hard to find, so that only advanced users who know what they're getting themselves in for change it. Most people just want something that works and is consistent, and that's something gnome seems to do pretty well. I would love to see more people use Linux: more people means more mainstream support for the things I want to use it for, better driver support, better application support, even better game support. We can only get that if it Just Works for more people. KDE may be flexible but Gnome Just Works. That's not to say gnome's perfect. For example, when you copy a large file from a samba share, the gnome-vfs will sit there chomping 30%+ CPU on my celeron 2.4Ghz. If I mount the file system myself using smbmount and copy the files that way I see less than 4% - what's with that?!
It's kinda clunky code-wise, but I did have it up and running in a couple of hours. Had to hack the code to change some of the defaults and the built-in response messages. But other than that, it works well enough for me and my clients.
In a way the high cost of the BD drive is a good thing - it gives Sony room to move. As more drives are made the cost will inevitably fall, and quickly - say by $100 or more. Having creamed the die-hards, Sony would pass some of the lower costs on in 2007. PS3s going for $349 next year?
Microsoft is the main fly in Sony's ointment, and what they're able to do with the 360's price and game set will make a big difference in this war. But they're going to hurt later on for not including HD-DVD built-in. Sure, it's available as an add-on but can they seriously expect major buy-in from a couch-prone consumer base? I doubt it. On the other hand they could've included it like Sony did but then they'd be in the same pricing situation as Sony.
Add to that the controller (blatant rip off from Nintendo, bless Sony's black little heart), and there you have it: PS3 has everything built-in, but is presently more expensive; 360 is cheaper but you have to buy extras. Game makers will have to produce to the lowest common denominator, which is going to be that much lower on the 360. A large game that's a single disc on the PS3 will have you swapping discs part way through on the 360.
I don't like Sony one bit, continually trying to foist their proprietary formats and DRM on us - but long term I still think they're generally doing the right thing with the PS3. Time will tell.
Main catch is that it made the card bigger/more expensive - important especially when you look at some of today's tiny cards. In this age of the internet we're probably better off just working off the unique PCI ID that every card type has. The ideal would just be a little utility that scans the IDs and fetches (or tells you) what you need. MS has done a half-assed job of it with Windows Update, but it definitely could be better.
But most of the solid state stuff I see is geared as hard disc replacement - in the order of gigabytes, usually operating using slow IDE interfaces. Anyone know of something that plugs in (and interfaces through) a PCIX port?
Unfortunately then the battery ran out, and that's the real problem. If in-seat power is impractical, I wonder if airlines could hire out battery power packs instead...
Not even an s-video cable available for it. Hired one out and it looked awful, so refused to buy one. Hopefully they've fixed that on the Wii!
Anyone gonna release a 'compatibility patch' for H2 after it comes out? :)
I have been seeing general file corruption as a result of NAV. Leave it scanning the database directory long enough and eventually zero data will be written to a page instead of what the system really wanted to write. Add the database directory to the exclusion list and all is OK. At one point we even had a machine bluescreening in the NAV dll simply as a result of copying a file it didn't like onto the server. Yummy!
Here's a challenge for the boffins: white LEDS in my video projector. You don't know just how much trouble that whacking great lightbulb causes.
I can't count the number of times I've wanted to reinstall IE on various PCs: aside from the lame-ass repair option (which never worked), now the only way to do it is to nuke the whole OS.
Maybe WMP is 'fixable' again!
In addition using CLX means you've got to distribute DLLs with the app. Until now we've managed to avoid this. Something you don't often hear about but in our eyes a major advantage of Delphi is that for many apps the EXE is all you need - no DLL hell for support staff to worry about.
Price wasn't an issue for us: Kylix 3 came free with our copy of Delphi 7.
As far as blocking goes, there's nothing particularly religious about it - in my case I run a small ISP, and the calls we dread are customers calling asking why they're getting spam. They don't know what it is, they don't care. And they threaten to move to a competitor to run away from spam, even though we know it won't help.
Our blocking of IP ranges stops thousands of spam messages and has saved us from losing customers, so we'll continue to block dynamic SMTP servers like you. Dynamic SMTP servers are almost a thing of the past, from the good ol' days when open relays might have been a neighbourly thing to have. Times have changed and we can't afford to talk with you: you'll either need to catch up or be left behind.
Is there some form of authenticated SMTP relay service you can use to get around the issue?