Between you're insanely patriotic message and you're obscene fanboyism, I'd almost imagine that you'd even buy a oil leaking, environmental hazzard Harley Davidson just because you think they're made in America.
I love people like you since you'll do anything to make yourself "special" because after all, if you're special, you're better.
The two platforms mirror each other almost perfectly. The only difference is UI. In fact, it might be better to say "If I run a Mac and Codeweavers Wine, I get the best of both worlds", but instead you're entirely dismissive of the competition and suggest that if you don't use it, it must be mass produced crap.
Mac has some good apps, Windows has some good apps, UNIX has some good apps. Using a Mac with Wine, you can run all 3 types, maybe with a little struggling. After all, porting Linux apps to Mac without depending on compatibility libraries for unicode is actually sometimes a hassle, but relatively painless. Running Wine will give a pretty good sucess rate as well. In reality, Mac can be viewed as a machine capable of bridging the gap for people with widespread needs.
I can assure after having been a major UNIX fanboy for years and having ported major commercial apps to Mac OS X there are in fact excellent applications available on Windows that should never be overlooked or brushed aside because you think they might make you less special if you were to submit and use a Windows app.
If you truly want to be special, learn to open your eyes. There are an infinite number of colors between black and white.
It's amazing. Power = Current * Voltage. Lower voltage with proportionately higher current = equal power consumption.
When this "Eye opening, educational explanation" starts with such gibberish. If the only change in the memory was to shorten the distance between high and low, and all other issues such as resistance (or inductance since it practically an AC circuit) remained the same, then the power consumption would obviously be lower. But since the technology does in fact increase specifications of nearly everything, I'd imagine that the current drain would generally be at least proportionally higher.
Also it just seems more than a little childish for the author to focus so heavily on overclocking and then talk about power in terms of savings as opposed to focussing on the fact that lower voltage means shorter distances between gate threshold levels, therefore allowing higher performance of gate switching over equal capacitance circuits.
I in the past have implemented DNS resolver libraries since UNIX has classically had a terrible problem of either providing only a non-reentrant gethostbyname() or a flaky (blocking) gethostbyname_r() function. In fact, for years programmers have suffered through terrible client side host resolution libraries since it blocking DNS calls were never considered poor taste before programs like web browsers needed to look up entries while rendering.
Also, since POSIX is entirely unaware of the GUI API, there has never been a good method of communicating events to the application. Ideally, there would have been a system related to select() or poll() which would have allowed host name resolution to be part of the same application loop as other socket communication.
That being said, Windows has more or less always include host name resolution as part of the application event loop. Even back when Winsock 1.1 was primarily used. When the host name is resolved, an event is passed to the application. But it is not my intention to discuss DNS from an application level, but instead from a protocol level.
This hack that the reported document is definately a hole in Windows DNS client implementation, Microsoft should fix it, they should treat any vulnerability with respect and diligence. This hack however requires a lot of things to happen at once.
First of all, it requires that the attacker is in a position where they can reliably observe point to point DNS traffic. Meaning from the workstation to the server and back. When used with switches and dslams, this is not generally possible since unless the switch has a defined observer port (which HP procurve allows, but disables by default) traffic is closed and only broadcast requests will be observable outside the point to point path.
Second, it requires that the attacker is located in a position on the network where they can respond to DNS requests faster than the server. So, if the edge switch they're connected to puts them physically closer to the target, but the switch has a higher speed uplink to the backbone, there's still little chance the attacker will inject their packets in time.
Third, it requires making the machine which is being attacked to perform multiple DNS queries. If the attacker gets lucky (another if) the user will be setup for proxy server auto discover which was typically true in earlier versions of IE. Then using a broadcast type situation, they'd be able to configure a proxy server which would inject web pages to the clients computer containing multiple DNS entries. Unfortunately, this would remove the need to perform DNS lookups and they'd have to shut off the proxy and hope the browser falls back to proxyless operation mode.
Finally, it would require that his math for calculating the next DNS event id, source port, etc... is sound. I haven't checked the math, nor am I inclined to since even if we assume he's 100% correct, requiring it to rain at an angle of 32degs precisely at 12:05.2334 UTC on April the 19th of 2009 while Christopher Columbus rises from his grave to baptise the next baby Jesus is just irrational.
Hackers, save yourself some time, if you have this kind of access to the network, use a keylogger, much higher chance of success and much easier. Just remember to not hide under the desk of the computer you're trying to log.
Don't get me wrong, but Solaris became the same thing as Linux was. Once upon a time, I could just buy a copy of Solaris x86, install it, run it, and develop for it. I used to write network drivers and loved messing with Display PostScript.
When Solaris went open, I stopped doing it because I didn't have the time or patience to dig through the different Solaris distributions to find the one I wanted/needed to work on a hobby project.
So, I just stopped bothering with Solaris. I always loved the platform since it was a UNIX with a fixed ABI, so I could write code that would run on all Solaris distributions for a single processor architecture once. Now, I don't even know if that's true anymore.
I'm sure that anyone who recalls the punch card first hand will cringe just at its' mention. However if you were to picture a DVD or CD as being a circular punch card, you wouldn't be wrong.
The biggest problem with archival solutions is that to create a method which is small enough to store in a few boxes, the technology will typically be required to operate on a miniscule scale. This increases the probability that the media won't be properly identified as an archival media a thousand years from now.
While it's possible we'll have simple flatbed scanner like devices in the distant future capable of simply scanning a DVD or BluRay disc and then simply applying an image recognition program to read the data, it's more likely these forms of media will not be sufficient.
Recordable CD and DVD suffer an obvious flaw which is that the method of recording requires the disc itself to be a degradable form of media. Something that can be burned through at a rate of billions of times per minute with a single laser with high precision. Obviously, even using a relatively high power laser, the material must be thin enough to support this. Therefore, it stands to reason that even in a perfect DVD recordable media, time, sunlight, cosmic radiation, and new-age music is bound to degrade the disc past error correction friendly levels in relatively short times (likely years, maybe decades, certainly centuries).
In the case of circular media of high density, it requires precisely timed devices to read a disc. The disc spins and the bits are positioned in locations that are identified by precise timing. The device to read this type of media is very complex. The bandwidth of the laser required to read the disc is also precise. An archival grade media should not have such technical difficulties, otherwise, the effort required to read the media a century from now if no device is left in existance is substantial. Especially since the plans for the reader is likely to be stored on one of these discs.
Punch cards are wonderful since they are linear, rectangular and can be read relatively easy using somewhat primative equipment. Of course, I'm not suggesting using holes large enough to push a pen tip through, instead I'm suggesting a relatively high density punch card where at least a gigabyte can be stored on the surface of a drink coaster sized card.
The card can be made of many different types of materials, in fact, it could be paper or uranium. I would suggest personally a dense metal with a half life relative to the desired duration the media should live.
On one side of each card the plans to build a reader should be stored as human readable images, although on a microscopic scale (similar to microfilm or microfiche) since anyone likely to be able to build a reader will of course have a microscope. The reader presented should be the simplest form and should clarify the encoding used for characters. The device should be able to be built using parts that have been historically available. Meaning that if they existed 50 years ago, and they're still common today, they'll be common 50-100 years from now at least.
The data on the card should be stored through a process of laster engraving or etching for example. Punching directly through the card is ideal, but could interfere with the location of the design. Of course, if you have a box of 1000 cards, you only need the design once.
The process of reading and writing these cards does not need to be incredibly fast. After all, the purpose is for archival. If a single inexpensive device can write one gigabyte an hour, that means with 20 devices, 20 gigabytes can be archived an hour. Besides, unless you're backing up film masters which are typically 3-5 terabytes each or audio masters which can usually be 4 gigabytes, all other files (pictures included) can be backed up in little time.
Every time I read about long term archival, this solution always seems obvious to me. I highly doubt that there's any new patents to be had on it. Pretty sure that pool is not only tapped, but most of the patents should have even expired by now. But if anyone actually decides to make this device from my description or something similar to it, I would love a chance to try one.
Last time I programmed Ada was for a class in the University around 1991. What I recall is that language documentation was poor at best. I also recall that the compilers generated error messages which must have been worded to save ink on the teletype.
This article has convinced me that maybe I should evaluate if Ada has advanced, but I'm predicting beforehand that given the minimal interest in it, it probably has not come too far during this time.
If I find otherwise, I'll come back here and eat my words.
P.S. Back then, the libraries were not quite so huge hehe
Does Sony think they'll sell more discs or do they think AppleTV, Unbox and the others will increase movie sales and rentals so much it will devistate the entire DVD/Bluray market?
This may sound ridiculos, because what you said is logical, but incomplete.
Responsible people will not spend....
is more correct. Problem is, the recession is directly connected to people being irresponsible up and down the board. For example, taking a 100% mortgage on a house that they knew they couldn't afford. Problem is, these are exactly the people the entertainment industry has classically targetted.
The entertainment industry thrives on recession since the unemployment rate goes sky rocketing. And people tend to stay home more often. So, they'll spend an unemployment check on a bigger TV and a bluray player while the getting is good. Cause when people say "recession" those people find excuses not to look for new jobs like :
"We Honey, there's a recession, it's not like the employer's are lining up to hire overqualified guys like me, things will get better soon. By the way, what did you bring home from the diner for dinner?"
Hate the break the news to you, there are a lot more people like that than there are of the ones who believe "It's a bad idea to spend $400 to upgrade my DVD player to bluray when I don't know how long I'll have an income for at the moment".
So, they want to charge a tax on porn in California... that works great since after all, all the porn sites in California are based there and trackable there. Besides, don't forget that the porn industry is the most legitimate there is, they would never move their company off-shore to evade having to worry about collecting and paying the tax.
Boy, these politicians just get smarter by the minute. I bet that one of the one day will try to take credit for inventing the Internet!.
thank you for making this comment. There is just nothing even slightly interesting about this.
I mean seriously, does the operating system matter or is it the software on the operating system that matters? What the heck does Linux have to do with the playlist? Was it something that could only be done on Linux... or could they have used Windows, QNX, VxWorks, Mac OS X or other systems to also have a video play list?
We're in a political and business oriented debate started by buzz-word junkies... I mean C-Level's and business staff who believe they understand IT skill well enough to suggest they can find "Qualified".
You are in fact right. I've worked for two of the major retail software companies in Norway and in one, they are forced to open offices in Poland and Australia to staff their company and at my current position, since the typical salary is nearly 50% higher for each equivilent position, we can staff with qualified labor with no issue, in Norway. Of course we have Chinese and Indian offices, but that's to handle support and limited specialization for other regions they are more qualified to support.
Pay is everything.
On the other hand, the other big problem is that the typical engineer lacks the ability to negotiate a fair salary for themselves. Therefore, they are keeping the market low since there are too many engineers that are willing to work for far less than they are worth since they are more likely to work somewhere cool and just smile and say thanks for the salary... no matter what it is.
I personally have always applied for jobs where I lacked the educational requirements for the position, however I almost always get the position and I always get paid a healthy salary. Engineers and developers are extremely bright people, but often they lack the confidence to believe they are worth the money they are hoping to make. After all, the guy they're interviewing with has probably spent years learning to control a meeting room, he on the other hand has learned to control a computer and do it quietly.... as a final note, Indian people may seem more qualified. But in reality, when applying for a job, Indian people come from a society where they are raised from birth to negotiate over even the simplest things like an apple from the market. They know how to posture themselves when negotiating and therefore they succeed better than Americans.
To a certain extent, I believe that the enforcability of the law is extremely important, or should I say issues related to the consequences of passing and enforcing a law like this.
Americans have grown accustomed and for some reason even comfortable with their ignorance with their lack of civil liberties. The government spends a great deal of time telling us (I include myself even though I no longer reside there) how free we are. Our children perform the pledge of allegiance every morning which suggests "with liberty and justice for all". Our country is founded on the principles of a often ignored document which suggests
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Well, hogwash. Many of the founding fathers are rolling in their graves right now (more than a few founding fathers were not quite so nobel) since America has now more or less abolished liberty as the definition was intended.
I've been all over the world and I must say that most other western countries are far more free in terms of liberty. It has become so bad in the US now that merriam webster has in fact altered the definition of Liberty in American dictionary to compensate for the modern US government's perception of Liberty.
Well, I've also noticed a growing trend of tech companies to leave the states or off-shore pretty much everything. People outside of America make jokes about how one day, the U.S. will simply outsource all jobs requiring education and just build enough Walmarts, Starbucks and McDonalds to employ the entire population.
So, laws like this will definately have the impact of moving blogs and other online services to other countries. Of course this by itself won't have a huge impact. It might effect a total of a thousand IT jobs, but those guys will find work elsewhere.
So the issue of enforcement is important since, while a law might be passed, it's not until someone tries to enforce it that the servers will be moved off-shore.
Now, the best part is, I'm waiting to see the first attempt by this politician moron that lacks the knowledge to understand that the Internet is not actually a U.S. only technology to suggest extradition of a European running a server which allows anonymous postings.
Since I first started using AMD, during the era of the 486dx2 era, AMD has consistantly released products that have performed better than Intel's. During the 486dx/2 era, AMD released a clock doubled 40Mhz chip which ran the system busses at 40Mhz while Intel had learned from their mistake on the 486/50Mhz that increasing the performance of the system clock was flawed.
The 486 era was a black age for PCs. There were more players in the CPU market to begin with, there was Intel, AMD, Cyrix, Evergreen, ST and a few others. The biggest drawback of the era was the commoditization of PC components. Design decisions were even being made based on cost of production, and in reality, it was a decision of cost vs. reliability. At the time, there was a single motherboard manufacturer I could possibly name that showed even the slighest interest in quality vs. performance/cost. It was Micronics. They ended up developing their own chipsets and insisting you purchase memory from their sister organization Micron (which I think has evolved into Micron/Crucial).
After the 586/686/Pentium/Pentium Pro/Athlon/Pentium II/III/4 wars, the market narrowed to two serious players. Intel took the route of developing the most stable platform they could. They focused on chipsets and reference platforms which made it so that board producers such as ABit, ASUS, etc... could release new motherboards without even having to reroute their boards. Intel simply gave them the designs and the board makers would try to differentiate based on peripherals. AMD on the other hand tried to make the boards easier to develop chipsets for. So companies such as ATI and nVidia would release the reference designs and simply use the AMD CPU as a component of the design.
It may sound strange, but although I was never able to establish scientific proof in favor of Intel or AMD regarding quality, I always had a little bit of a dark feeling when using AMD. It just seemed that while AMD completed the benchmarks faster, the AMD machines always showed slightly higher latencies when it mattered most to me. I can qualitify it based on application switching time and if a user were to watch me use a single processor/core system, the Intel hyperthreading chips always performed better than the AMDs, but in reality, when Intel released inexpensive dual processor systems using celerons on ABit motherboards, it spoiled me. Then until the dual core world came back around, I was forced to spend huge amounts of money on Xeon systems just to get the responsiveness I had earlier on crappy celeron machines.
My underlying point however is that when I buy Intel, I know I'm buying a processor from a company that was willing to lose market share for years just to make sure their next processor would be awesome and right. When I use AMD, I know I'm always using the absolute latest and fastest chip they can make, but I know they didn't put the years of testing in which Intel has. So it's really about the name
I believe I can find him a solid and stable position within my firm with good benefits and fair pay. We haven't had a full janitorial staff on hand for a long time and if he'd like, we can start him at an entry level position where he can progress to chief toilet scrubber in the first 6 months and within 5-10 years, I'm sure he can be head janitor since the current janitor looks like he's getting ready to keal over.
Before I begin, let me just say that I'll be far more disappointed if I find my son grows up to start going to church than I would be if he told me he was smoking the occassional joint. In fact, I'd be willing to buy him the joint to keep him from going to church. But, I do have a solution to their problems, and I guess I'd prefer the church going cattle to stay locked up in their churches than out where I might have to interact with them at some point.
Here's the deal, there is nothing which specifically prohibits displaying the game on 4 TVs. More importantly, there's nothing mentioned that suggests that you have to display the whole picture on the screen. For example, if you happened to have 4 largescreen plasma TVs which each showed a quarter of the picture, there isn't anything expressly prohibiting this activity.
Not that I'd want to suggest any "illegitimate" dealings, but a single PC computer with a a Matrox QID graphics card and a standard TV card such as a Hauppauge branded device can easily display a picture cleanly across 4 screens.
I figure this should get them one more year before they get that lookhole closed, but it would work.
So, go ahead churchy people, send around that collection dish and gather up the money for 4 plasma displays and a PC with a TV card to run them. If you tell the people it'll help feed starving children in Manhatten, you should have the money in no time.
I mean seriously, once upon a time... way back in late ninety something, if a device shipped with linux at its based, the presence of Linux on the device was as important as the application of the device itself. In modern times, pretty much everything imaginable runs Linux, so these days, having to say "QNX Device" or "Vxworks device" is more interesting since it might show a shift away from Linux.
I feel it really takes away from the merits of the researchers that have developed the extensive applications on top of Linux to make the heading anything about Linux.
As an after thought, why not also point out that they used GCC or Perl or even the libraries they used. Forget the fact that the device actually solves a problem and focus on the tools used to make it. The function isn't important... is it?
I mean seriously, while the Catholic church has the biggest following of any religion I know of (and the includes baptists, which while not a religion as opposed to a fanatic cult) I haven't seen the Church provide any guidance to anyone as of late... especially since the passing of JPII. I tend to find that if nothing else, the Church seems to put more effort into being heard than listened to.
In the modern world where religion has less and less impact on the operation of governments, corporations and educational institutions. During a time when people regularly openly mock Christians in general as being brain dead (if you haven't noticed it, you're not listening). In an era where people are actually turned down for jobs because they wear a cross around their neck, the Churches will need to now, more than ever show they're evolving with the times. More and more, their followers are the sheep of society, not the leaders.
If the Church genuinely wants to make a difference, they need to, instead of playing the "Moral grounds card", since most people working on the projects do see themselves on higher moral grounds than the Church, provide research to show it's not a good idea. Hire independant (non-religion, possibly atheist) scientists to research the topic as well and present good reasoning that would specifically back up their arguments.
If we go back, long before the Catholic church to the days of exodus, Kosher was presented to a weak people dieing from tape worm, food poisening and other such issues an uneducated population travelling in the desert would be forced to survive. The morals behind Kosher had deeper meaning than "You should not cook thine cattle in the milk of its mother". The problem was that Egyptians classically would baste their meat in milk overnight to cause it to be much more tender. The moral was in reality that deadly tiny little bacteria would form in the meat when it's left on a rock in the desert overnight.
If the Church genuinely feels they have out best interest in mind, remember, we're not a bunch of uneducated brick makers with families travelling in a desert. Do the research to tell us what in fact is morally wrong. Show us the actual answer, we are reasonable and rational people. If you can show that a certain form of scientific progress will has a very highly likelyhood of having a morally negative impact on humankind, we will listen... at least we'll alter our research to avoid the complication.
Ok, I've read at a list a bit of the OOXML spec. I have also read the ODF spec. What I have to say is that, while OOXML appears to "over-represent" the objects by saying in 50 words what ODF can say in 30, the spec itself appears to be sufficient enough.
The only problem I see with OOXML is that Microsoft, instead of just implementing the standard in Word 2007, should also produce filters for Word 2003, Abiword, and KWord.
What I also find more than a little disconcerting is, noone from the open source community appears to have bothered to suggest the most obvious solution to many of these file format problems. If applications can support ODF, and the same applications can support ODF metadata, and there is an ODF import/export filter for Word, then wouldn't it make sense to abstract the document creating interfaces used by the ODF importers on all these platforms to make it possible to write a single API across all word processors?
I mean seriously... I can't for the life of me imagine how, if all the word processors actually support a single standard format (ODF), then a document loading API couldn't be made and wrapped for each application. The best part of this solution is that it would allow other application developers to be able to read all the files as part of their application without actually having to install a word processor to do it.
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Between you're insanely patriotic message and you're obscene fanboyism, I'd almost imagine that you'd even buy a oil leaking, environmental hazzard Harley Davidson just because you think they're made in America.
I love people like you since you'll do anything to make yourself "special" because after all, if you're special, you're better.
The two platforms mirror each other almost perfectly. The only difference is UI. In fact, it might be better to say "If I run a Mac and Codeweavers Wine, I get the best of both worlds", but instead you're entirely dismissive of the competition and suggest that if you don't use it, it must be mass produced crap.
Mac has some good apps, Windows has some good apps, UNIX has some good apps. Using a Mac with Wine, you can run all 3 types, maybe with a little struggling. After all, porting Linux apps to Mac without depending on compatibility libraries for unicode is actually sometimes a hassle, but relatively painless. Running Wine will give a pretty good sucess rate as well. In reality, Mac can be viewed as a machine capable of bridging the gap for people with widespread needs.
I can assure after having been a major UNIX fanboy for years and having ported major commercial apps to Mac OS X there are in fact excellent applications available on Windows that should never be overlooked or brushed aside because you think they might make you less special if you were to submit and use a Windows app.
If you truly want to be special, learn to open your eyes. There are an infinite number of colors between black and white.
It's amazing. Power = Current * Voltage. Lower voltage with proportionately higher current = equal power consumption.
When this "Eye opening, educational explanation" starts with such gibberish. If the only change in the memory was to shorten the distance between high and low, and all other issues such as resistance (or inductance since it practically an AC circuit) remained the same, then the power consumption would obviously be lower. But since the technology does in fact increase specifications of nearly everything, I'd imagine that the current drain would generally be at least proportionally higher.
Also it just seems more than a little childish for the author to focus so heavily on overclocking and then talk about power in terms of savings as opposed to focussing on the fact that lower voltage means shorter distances between gate threshold levels, therefore allowing higher performance of gate switching over equal capacitance circuits.
LAME!!!!
Rockstar should make a nice donation to MADD for this amazing advertisement. I recommend a few new Mustangs and a case or two of Jack.
It's just amazing, this is exactly the kind of publicity that has made GTA3 a major sucess. GTA4 is off to a good start!
Too bad the religious organizations haven't had their go yet. I really need to buy some stock in this company.
What was it that made this article interesting?
I in the past have implemented DNS resolver libraries since UNIX has classically had a terrible problem of either providing only a non-reentrant gethostbyname() or a flaky (blocking) gethostbyname_r() function. In fact, for years programmers have suffered through terrible client side host resolution libraries since it blocking DNS calls were never considered poor taste before programs like web browsers needed to look up entries while rendering.
Also, since POSIX is entirely unaware of the GUI API, there has never been a good method of communicating events to the application. Ideally, there would have been a system related to select() or poll() which would have allowed host name resolution to be part of the same application loop as other socket communication.
That being said, Windows has more or less always include host name resolution as part of the application event loop. Even back when Winsock 1.1 was primarily used. When the host name is resolved, an event is passed to the application. But it is not my intention to discuss DNS from an application level, but instead from a protocol level.
This hack that the reported document is definately a hole in Windows DNS client implementation, Microsoft should fix it, they should treat any vulnerability with respect and diligence. This hack however requires a lot of things to happen at once.
First of all, it requires that the attacker is in a position where they can reliably observe point to point DNS traffic. Meaning from the workstation to the server and back. When used with switches and dslams, this is not generally possible since unless the switch has a defined observer port (which HP procurve allows, but disables by default) traffic is closed and only broadcast requests will be observable outside the point to point path.
Second, it requires that the attacker is located in a position on the network where they can respond to DNS requests faster than the server. So, if the edge switch they're connected to puts them physically closer to the target, but the switch has a higher speed uplink to the backbone, there's still little chance the attacker will inject their packets in time.
Third, it requires making the machine which is being attacked to perform multiple DNS queries. If the attacker gets lucky (another if) the user will be setup for proxy server auto discover which was typically true in earlier versions of IE. Then using a broadcast type situation, they'd be able to configure a proxy server which would inject web pages to the clients computer containing multiple DNS entries. Unfortunately, this would remove the need to perform DNS lookups and they'd have to shut off the proxy and hope the browser falls back to proxyless operation mode.
Finally, it would require that his math for calculating the next DNS event id, source port, etc... is sound. I haven't checked the math, nor am I inclined to since even if we assume he's 100% correct, requiring it to rain at an angle of 32degs precisely at 12:05.2334 UTC on April the 19th of 2009 while Christopher Columbus rises from his grave to baptise the next baby Jesus is just irrational.
Hackers, save yourself some time, if you have this kind of access to the network, use a keylogger, much higher chance of success and much easier. Just remember to not hide under the desk of the computer you're trying to log.
Don't get me wrong, but Solaris became the same thing as Linux was. Once upon a time, I could just buy a copy of Solaris x86, install it, run it, and develop for it. I used to write network drivers and loved messing with Display PostScript.
When Solaris went open, I stopped doing it because I didn't have the time or patience to dig through the different Solaris distributions to find the one I wanted/needed to work on a hobby project.
So, I just stopped bothering with Solaris. I always loved the platform since it was a UNIX with a fixed ABI, so I could write code that would run on all Solaris distributions for a single processor architecture once. Now, I don't even know if that's true anymore.
Was this article in fact a cost cutting measure?
I'm sure that anyone who recalls the punch card first hand will cringe just at its' mention. However if you were to picture a DVD or CD as being a circular punch card, you wouldn't be wrong.
The biggest problem with archival solutions is that to create a method which is small enough to store in a few boxes, the technology will typically be required to operate on a miniscule scale. This increases the probability that the media won't be properly identified as an archival media a thousand years from now.
While it's possible we'll have simple flatbed scanner like devices in the distant future capable of simply scanning a DVD or BluRay disc and then simply applying an image recognition program to read the data, it's more likely these forms of media will not be sufficient.
Recordable CD and DVD suffer an obvious flaw which is that the method of recording requires the disc itself to be a degradable form of media. Something that can be burned through at a rate of billions of times per minute with a single laser with high precision. Obviously, even using a relatively high power laser, the material must be thin enough to support this. Therefore, it stands to reason that even in a perfect DVD recordable media, time, sunlight, cosmic radiation, and new-age music is bound to degrade the disc past error correction friendly levels in relatively short times (likely years, maybe decades, certainly centuries).
In the case of circular media of high density, it requires precisely timed devices to read a disc. The disc spins and the bits are positioned in locations that are identified by precise timing. The device to read this type of media is very complex. The bandwidth of the laser required to read the disc is also precise. An archival grade media should not have such technical difficulties, otherwise, the effort required to read the media a century from now if no device is left in existance is substantial. Especially since the plans for the reader is likely to be stored on one of these discs.
Punch cards are wonderful since they are linear, rectangular and can be read relatively easy using somewhat primative equipment. Of course, I'm not suggesting using holes large enough to push a pen tip through, instead I'm suggesting a relatively high density punch card where at least a gigabyte can be stored on the surface of a drink coaster sized card.
The card can be made of many different types of materials, in fact, it could be paper or uranium. I would suggest personally a dense metal with a half life relative to the desired duration the media should live.
On one side of each card the plans to build a reader should be stored as human readable images, although on a microscopic scale (similar to microfilm or microfiche) since anyone likely to be able to build a reader will of course have a microscope. The reader presented should be the simplest form and should clarify the encoding used for characters. The device should be able to be built using parts that have been historically available. Meaning that if they existed 50 years ago, and they're still common today, they'll be common 50-100 years from now at least.
The data on the card should be stored through a process of laster engraving or etching for example. Punching directly through the card is ideal, but could interfere with the location of the design. Of course, if you have a box of 1000 cards, you only need the design once.
The process of reading and writing these cards does not need to be incredibly fast. After all, the purpose is for archival. If a single inexpensive device can write one gigabyte an hour, that means with 20 devices, 20 gigabytes can be archived an hour. Besides, unless you're backing up film masters which are typically 3-5 terabytes each or audio masters which can usually be 4 gigabytes, all other files (pictures included) can be backed up in little time.
Every time I read about long term archival, this solution always seems obvious to me. I highly doubt that there's any new patents to be had on it. Pretty sure that pool is not only tapped, but most of the patents should have even expired by now. But if anyone actually decides to make this device from my description or something similar to it, I would love a chance to try one.
Sounds like people started downloading more films when the TV shows started running out.
I'm guessing this has more to do with the fact that when there's nothing on TV to watch, people are more likely to download a film.
MPAA should sue the WGA
Last time I programmed Ada was for a class in the University around 1991. What I recall is that language documentation was poor at best. I also recall that the compilers generated error messages which must have been worded to save ink on the teletype.
This article has convinced me that maybe I should evaluate if Ada has advanced, but I'm predicting beforehand that given the minimal interest in it, it probably has not come too far during this time.
If I find otherwise, I'll come back here and eat my words.
P.S. Back then, the libraries were not quite so huge hehe
Does Sony think they'll sell more discs or do they think AppleTV, Unbox and the others will increase movie sales and rentals so much it will devistate the entire DVD/Bluray market?
This may sound ridiculos, because what you said is logical, but incomplete.
Responsible people will not spend....
is more correct. Problem is, the recession is directly connected to people being irresponsible up and down the board. For example, taking a 100% mortgage on a house that they knew they couldn't afford. Problem is, these are exactly the people the entertainment industry has classically targetted.
The entertainment industry thrives on recession since the unemployment rate goes sky rocketing. And people tend to stay home more often. So, they'll spend an unemployment check on a bigger TV and a bluray player while the getting is good. Cause when people say "recession" those people find excuses not to look for new jobs like :
"We Honey, there's a recession, it's not like the employer's are lining up to hire overqualified guys like me, things will get better soon. By the way, what did you bring home from the diner for dinner?"
Hate the break the news to you, there are a lot more people like that than there are of the ones who believe "It's a bad idea to spend $400 to upgrade my DVD player to bluray when I don't know how long I'll have an income for at the moment".
So, they want to charge a tax on porn in California... that works great since after all, all the porn sites in California are based there and trackable there. Besides, don't forget that the porn industry is the most legitimate there is, they would never move their company off-shore to evade having to worry about collecting and paying the tax.
Boy, these politicians just get smarter by the minute. I bet that one of the one day will try to take credit for inventing the Internet!.
thank you for making this comment. There is just nothing even slightly interesting about this. I mean seriously, does the operating system matter or is it the software on the operating system that matters? What the heck does Linux have to do with the playlist? Was it something that could only be done on Linux... or could they have used Windows, QNX, VxWorks, Mac OS X or other systems to also have a video play list?
We're in a political and business oriented debate started by buzz-word junkies... I mean C-Level's and business staff who believe they understand IT skill well enough to suggest they can find "Qualified".
... as a final note, Indian people may seem more qualified. But in reality, when applying for a job, Indian people come from a society where they are raised from birth to negotiate over even the simplest things like an apple from the market. They know how to posture themselves when negotiating and therefore they succeed better than Americans.
You are in fact right. I've worked for two of the major retail software companies in Norway and in one, they are forced to open offices in Poland and Australia to staff their company and at my current position, since the typical salary is nearly 50% higher for each equivilent position, we can staff with qualified labor with no issue, in Norway. Of course we have Chinese and Indian offices, but that's to handle support and limited specialization for other regions they are more qualified to support.
Pay is everything.
On the other hand, the other big problem is that the typical engineer lacks the ability to negotiate a fair salary for themselves. Therefore, they are keeping the market low since there are too many engineers that are willing to work for far less than they are worth since they are more likely to work somewhere cool and just smile and say thanks for the salary... no matter what it is.
I personally have always applied for jobs where I lacked the educational requirements for the position, however I almost always get the position and I always get paid a healthy salary. Engineers and developers are extremely bright people, but often they lack the confidence to believe they are worth the money they are hoping to make. After all, the guy they're interviewing with has probably spent years learning to control a meeting room, he on the other hand has learned to control a computer and do it quietly.
To a certain extent, I believe that the enforcability of the law is extremely important, or should I say issues related to the consequences of passing and enforcing a law like this.
Americans have grown accustomed and for some reason even comfortable with their ignorance with their lack of civil liberties. The government spends a great deal of time telling us (I include myself even though I no longer reside there) how free we are. Our children perform the pledge of allegiance every morning which suggests "with liberty and justice for all". Our country is founded on the principles of a often ignored document which suggests
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Well, hogwash. Many of the founding fathers are rolling in their graves right now (more than a few founding fathers were not quite so nobel) since America has now more or less abolished liberty as the definition was intended.
I've been all over the world and I must say that most other western countries are far more free in terms of liberty. It has become so bad in the US now that merriam webster has in fact altered the definition of Liberty in American dictionary to compensate for the modern US government's perception of Liberty.
Well, I've also noticed a growing trend of tech companies to leave the states or off-shore pretty much everything. People outside of America make jokes about how one day, the U.S. will simply outsource all jobs requiring education and just build enough Walmarts, Starbucks and McDonalds to employ the entire population.
So, laws like this will definately have the impact of moving blogs and other online services to other countries. Of course this by itself won't have a huge impact. It might effect a total of a thousand IT jobs, but those guys will find work elsewhere.
So the issue of enforcement is important since, while a law might be passed, it's not until someone tries to enforce it that the servers will be moved off-shore.
Now, the best part is, I'm waiting to see the first attempt by this politician moron that lacks the knowledge to understand that the Internet is not actually a U.S. only technology to suggest extradition of a European running a server which allows anonymous postings.
Since I first started using AMD, during the era of the 486dx2 era, AMD has consistantly released products that have performed better than Intel's. During the 486dx/2 era, AMD released a clock doubled 40Mhz chip which ran the system busses at 40Mhz while Intel had learned from their mistake on the 486/50Mhz that increasing the performance of the system clock was flawed.
The 486 era was a black age for PCs. There were more players in the CPU market to begin with, there was Intel, AMD, Cyrix, Evergreen, ST and a few others. The biggest drawback of the era was the commoditization of PC components. Design decisions were even being made based on cost of production, and in reality, it was a decision of cost vs. reliability. At the time, there was a single motherboard manufacturer I could possibly name that showed even the slighest interest in quality vs. performance/cost. It was Micronics. They ended up developing their own chipsets and insisting you purchase memory from their sister organization Micron (which I think has evolved into Micron/Crucial).
After the 586/686/Pentium/Pentium Pro/Athlon/Pentium II/III/4 wars, the market narrowed to two serious players. Intel took the route of developing the most stable platform they could. They focused on chipsets and reference platforms which made it so that board producers such as ABit, ASUS, etc... could release new motherboards without even having to reroute their boards. Intel simply gave them the designs and the board makers would try to differentiate based on peripherals. AMD on the other hand tried to make the boards easier to develop chipsets for. So companies such as ATI and nVidia would release the reference designs and simply use the AMD CPU as a component of the design.
It may sound strange, but although I was never able to establish scientific proof in favor of Intel or AMD regarding quality, I always had a little bit of a dark feeling when using AMD. It just seemed that while AMD completed the benchmarks faster, the AMD machines always showed slightly higher latencies when it mattered most to me. I can qualitify it based on application switching time and if a user were to watch me use a single processor/core system, the Intel hyperthreading chips always performed better than the AMDs, but in reality, when Intel released inexpensive dual processor systems using celerons on ABit motherboards, it spoiled me. Then until the dual core world came back around, I was forced to spend huge amounts of money on Xeon systems just to get the responsiveness I had earlier on crappy celeron machines.
My underlying point however is that when I buy Intel, I know I'm buying a processor from a company that was willing to lose market share for years just to make sure their next processor would be awesome and right. When I use AMD, I know I'm always using the absolute latest and fastest chip they can make, but I know they didn't put the years of testing in which Intel has. So it's really about the name
I believe I can find him a solid and stable position within my firm with good benefits and fair pay. We haven't had a full janitorial staff on hand for a long time and if he'd like, we can start him at an entry level position where he can progress to chief toilet scrubber in the first 6 months and within 5-10 years, I'm sure he can be head janitor since the current janitor looks like he's getting ready to keal over.
Before I begin, let me just say that I'll be far more disappointed if I find my son grows up to start going to church than I would be if he told me he was smoking the occassional joint. In fact, I'd be willing to buy him the joint to keep him from going to church. But, I do have a solution to their problems, and I guess I'd prefer the church going cattle to stay locked up in their churches than out where I might have to interact with them at some point.
Here's the deal, there is nothing which specifically prohibits displaying the game on 4 TVs. More importantly, there's nothing mentioned that suggests that you have to display the whole picture on the screen. For example, if you happened to have 4 largescreen plasma TVs which each showed a quarter of the picture, there isn't anything expressly prohibiting this activity.
Not that I'd want to suggest any "illegitimate" dealings, but a single PC computer with a a Matrox QID graphics card and a standard TV card such as a Hauppauge branded device can easily display a picture cleanly across 4 screens.
I figure this should get them one more year before they get that lookhole closed, but it would work.
So, go ahead churchy people, send around that collection dish and gather up the money for 4 plasma displays and a PC with a TV card to run them. If you tell the people it'll help feed starving children in Manhatten, you should have the money in no time.
I mean seriously, once upon a time... way back in late ninety something, if a device shipped with linux at its based, the presence of Linux on the device was as important as the application of the device itself. In modern times, pretty much everything imaginable runs Linux, so these days, having to say "QNX Device" or "Vxworks device" is more interesting since it might show a shift away from Linux.
I feel it really takes away from the merits of the researchers that have developed the extensive applications on top of Linux to make the heading anything about Linux.
As an after thought, why not also point out that they used GCC or Perl or even the libraries they used. Forget the fact that the device actually solves a problem and focus on the tools used to make it. The function isn't important... is it?
I mean seriously, while the Catholic church has the biggest following of any religion I know of (and the includes baptists, which while not a religion as opposed to a fanatic cult) I haven't seen the Church provide any guidance to anyone as of late... especially since the passing of JPII. I tend to find that if nothing else, the Church seems to put more effort into being heard than listened to.
In the modern world where religion has less and less impact on the operation of governments, corporations and educational institutions. During a time when people regularly openly mock Christians in general as being brain dead (if you haven't noticed it, you're not listening). In an era where people are actually turned down for jobs because they wear a cross around their neck, the Churches will need to now, more than ever show they're evolving with the times. More and more, their followers are the sheep of society, not the leaders.
If the Church genuinely wants to make a difference, they need to, instead of playing the "Moral grounds card", since most people working on the projects do see themselves on higher moral grounds than the Church, provide research to show it's not a good idea. Hire independant (non-religion, possibly atheist) scientists to research the topic as well and present good reasoning that would specifically back up their arguments.
If we go back, long before the Catholic church to the days of exodus, Kosher was presented to a weak people dieing from tape worm, food poisening and other such issues an uneducated population travelling in the desert would be forced to survive. The morals behind Kosher had deeper meaning than "You should not cook thine cattle in the milk of its mother". The problem was that Egyptians classically would baste their meat in milk overnight to cause it to be much more tender. The moral was in reality that deadly tiny little bacteria would form in the meat when it's left on a rock in the desert overnight.
If the Church genuinely feels they have out best interest in mind, remember, we're not a bunch of uneducated brick makers with families travelling in a desert. Do the research to tell us what in fact is morally wrong. Show us the actual answer, we are reasonable and rational people. If you can show that a certain form of scientific progress will has a very highly likelyhood of having a morally negative impact on humankind, we will listen... at least we'll alter our research to avoid the complication.
Ok, I've read at a list a bit of the OOXML spec. I have also read the ODF spec. What I have to say is that, while OOXML appears to "over-represent" the objects by saying in 50 words what ODF can say in 30, the spec itself appears to be sufficient enough.
The only problem I see with OOXML is that Microsoft, instead of just implementing the standard in Word 2007, should also produce filters for Word 2003, Abiword, and KWord.
What I also find more than a little disconcerting is, noone from the open source community appears to have bothered to suggest the most obvious solution to many of these file format problems. If applications can support ODF, and the same applications can support ODF metadata, and there is an ODF import/export filter for Word, then wouldn't it make sense to abstract the document creating interfaces used by the ODF importers on all these platforms to make it possible to write a single API across all word processors?
I mean seriously... I can't for the life of me imagine how, if all the word processors actually support a single standard format (ODF), then a document loading API couldn't be made and wrapped for each application. The best part of this solution is that it would allow other application developers to be able to read all the files as part of their application without actually having to install a word processor to do it.