This works. Is it awful? Eh, verbose, but otherwise ok... Python is certainly more compact. But frankly, the tasks one does in Java are usually very different from what one would do in Python. Very different emphases.
File[] fileList = new File(".").listFiles(new FilenameFilter() {
public boolean accept (File dir, String name) {
return name.endsWith(".gz"); }}); for (File eachFile : fileList) {
do something }
This seems like EDS making a huge PR mistake. They're clueless as to how fast a quote will be taken by internet media and spread far and wide. And many of those companies (Oracle, Dell, EMC) are big Linux proponents, with huge budgets riding on Linux marketing and Linux R&D.
Oracle in particular. I would be surprised if Larry Ellison didn't withdraw from this alliance shortly, or at least give them a public spanking.
Instead of practicing due diligence, they decided to short-cut the whole process by saying that the information might be a trade secret, might have done damage, and might have come from someone under contractual obligation, but they really needed to know who leaked it before they could determine that!
There is no "might" about the trade secret. It was deemed to be information that could not have been revealed except through breaking an NDA or through corporate espionage.
Contracts would be useless if we could ignore them just because we felt like it. That's the point of this case -- the contract should be enforced and remedies can be saught by default, and only in extenuating circumstances should it be overlooked (such as if the public good was served by breaking the contract).
That means that in a case like this the individuals legally protected right to privacy must be weighed against the company's right to enforce their contract. I think it is a very bad trade off when we decide that even without any concrete proof of contractual violation, nor any proof of damage to the company, the company's right to protect its contract summarily overrides the individual's right to privacy.
Unfortunately, people don't have as clearly spelled out right to privacy. They haven't fought for one, or at least their representatives haven't. Companies, however, HAVE faught for this -- trade secret law.
Which is why we're back where we are. Enough people have to speak up about "right to privacy" for it to mean anything. There are positive developments here (the telemarketer no-call list) but otherwise it's a rare confluence of events that stokes the public enough to put a stake in the ground.
Until then, this kind of thing should be expected.
Citing contempt because of the content of someone's answer to a question is unnacceptable to me.
It's more about refusing to testify in the face of a court order, AND that information has nothing to do with incriminating you. It's balancing your rights and the right of the court to get evidence.
Anyway, if you don't agree with that, that's fine, but it's a hard thing to change.
does the entire significance of this ruling escape everyone? This ruling basically says, that unless there is some public good being protected, that a news venue can be compelled to reveal their sources, simply because a company wants them to.
This isn't about "Apple is great". Apple is using the law to squeeze out something many Apple fans, including myself, enjoy -- rumours and leaks. They're using it against individuals that don't have a lot of money. That's rarely something that one enjoys seeing.
Yet Apple isn't doing anything evil here: speech isn't getting squelched. We can talk about Asteroid and other leaked products freely. They're protecting their interests by finding out who breached contract so they can penalize them. A contract was broken, and consequences ensue.
What this whole affair seems to be doing is educating the techie masses on what has been the case for years. No one has a right to leak information protected under contract law. Journalists can be coerced through threat of contempt to give up their sources.
Whistleblower laws exist to only protect cases that are in the public interest. Otherwise, the law and society will be against you at every turn. Even if you successfully get protected by whistleblower laws, you'll probably leave your job, because it's going to be a hostile environment there. Unfortunately it will be very hard to find another job -- people won't hire you after speaking up.
Yeah, it sucks. It would be a long and hard road to change this, if enough people wanted to. Somehow I don't think "enough" will want to -- there have been much graver cases involving criminal actions and death that didn't stir up the public's interest to ensure whistleblowers could live a decent life afterwards.
Personally, I think that if a precedent is truly being set that any publication can be forced to reveal any source who broke an NDA, provided that the material doesn't address a threat to the public welfare, then pretty much the entire tech reporting industry might as well pack up and find new jobs, because companies are quite capable of putting out their own carefully controlled press releases without all the expense of 'reporters' having to copy them down and parrot them back on websites and in magazines.
That was quite the run-on sentence.
This isn't a legal precedent. It's pretty much in line with legal history. What makes it a pseudo-precedent is the whole red herring of "are bloggers journalists?" and "aren't journalists protected?". If the New York Times published this , there WOULD be a similar action by Apple. The media and blogosphere has been spinning this as some sort of precedent... It's just the first case of a new medium, pushing the boundaries, being challenged by old laws.
And BTW, *most* of the tech press already is just regurgitations of press releases combined with some opinion / analysis columns. They really don't rely on leaked information. Infoworld, News.com, InformationWeek, eWeek, etc. have started to quote bloggers and rumour sites, but generally their stuff is based on conversations with spokespeople, analysts, & regurgitated PR.
Sure, this is why rumour sites are so interesting -- it feels like investigative journalism. However, investigative journalism has always had risk associated with it, especially by those who do the talking. You have to be DAMN SURE that what your leaking is in the public interest, because employers have a legal right to sue them in civil court for breach of contract. The journalists have to prove the story was in the public interest to withhold their names.
We have whistleblower laws to protect these people, and they were deemed by the judge to be inapplicable in this case. Even those laws tend to be of limited value -- because even with those laws, while you can't be sued for breach of contract, your career is effectively over -- no one will want to hire you because you've broken your word in the past.
Again -- leaking secret information -- not a good idea, in almost any circumstance. The law and even society at large is against you at every turn. People here probably don't agree with that, but it's a long, long road to come up with an alternative system....
Are you for real? Now we are determining which crimes are more important? Breaking the law is breaking the law. Period. End of story.
Considering this is a civil case, this isn't quite true. It's rare to be jailed for civil cases. It's all about getting hurt in the pocket book -- fines, liens, etc.
Then in the criminal system there are misdemeanors vs. felonies.... punishments vary.
usually you have to claim that you're invoking the 5th amendment. Though the prosecution can give you immunity as another way of coercing out your testimony...
Telling people to say things because if they don't you will hurt them is evil.
No, it's not. It's the basis of the justice system -- the coercive threat of contempt of court. "Hurt" is a relative term. Civil contempt would generally hurt you in the pocket book with fines, for example $X daily until you comply with the court order.
People didn't have a problem when MIcrosoft was being held in contempt by the EU and threatened a fine of something around $100m a day. "Oh but they're big and evil!" that's not justice, that's mob rule...
You keep using the term "standard", but I do not think it means what you think it means.
So he proceeded to define it. "STANDARD" doesn't mean "standards group".
In any case, MS word is THE STANDARD word processing format across the world. De facto. There is no de jure standard. So it is The Standard. It sucks, you can hate it, but it's reality. Perhaps some day enough people will want to change that. Apparently not today.
If Itanium dies, what do we have left for a 64-bit chip? POWER5 and Opteron? SPARC still really lags, and while they're going down the crazy multi-core/hyper-threaded route, I'm not sure it will make up for the horsepower gap.
HP is the only major manufacturer left of the Itanium line - their Superdome Integrity SMP boxes are wonderfully fast machines. After using both a Superdome and an IBM pSeries SMP(though, it was POWER4 based), I have to say I'm supremely impressed with both. But now, POWER5 is out and Itanium is still where it was last year. And POWER5 absolutely smokes. I don't think data centres are too keen on jumping onto the Itanic.... HP needs an ace-in-the-hole to get out of this one.
I wasn't trying to make light of war. I deliberately picked an exagerrated set of events to juxtapose a very small, local social critique (language wars) to an international and important social critique, both of which start from just a few voices. Progress occurs through critique and dissent. It's all politics, it's just a matter of what community you're dealing with.
Well, I would say "amoral" - i.e. not inherently immoral or unethical, but without any imbred set of ethics, mainly because it's a community based on function, not tradition.
Corporations have no ethical imperative; instead they exist solely to maximise the return for their shareholders.
Right, but shareholders are people, managers are people, and people arguably have ethical imperitaves. Transitively, corporations ought be held to an ethical standard (and often are).
When people claim corporations act without ethics, its because people often act without ethics. Of course, current law and culture surrounding "shareholder value" makes it way too easy to rationalize this anti-social behaviour.
Yes, Microsoft is an ethically dubious company. But so are 90+% of other companies out there.
Eh, I'm going to guess you picked that number out of the air. I think it's less. Glass half empty / glass half full.
You've forgotten the reason why Microsoft existed in the first place: To *make* a lot of people a heckuva lot of money.
No. Companies exist to fill some kind of need, to create some kind of customer. That's the reason for existence -- creating markets. Markets aren't created by god or nature, they're created by humans. You can't have profit without a market.
Regarding profit, it's more accurate to say that it's the first responsibility of business.
Sure, it has billions, but if it can't find a way to turn those billions into trillions, then it will be sold and the capital invested somewhere else.
Err. "sold"? When major investers "sell", shares shift hands,and there's no impact on invested capital (much of which is already sunk). Perhaps you're suggesting that if lots of people sell, future equity offerings will have a higher cost of capital.
Companies are the sum of its investors, and nothing more. They can come and go pretty much as they wish.
I find capitalist rhetoric fascinating, at times, in that many people describe it in terms that are so abstract and theoretical. Your above quote makes it sound like a simple game of high/low.
In a theoretical capitalistic system, individual economic actors are atomic. In practice, we have blocs of actors -- investors, managers, employees, politicians, social groups, and customers. They're not quite atomic, many of them are not subject to "profit motive", and yet they all have a stake in the system. Thus, the pure capitalist system doesn't really take hold.
So, it's pretty rare to "abandon" a company these days. Otherwise many of america's airlines and auto makers would have long died, as they ceased churning out profitability above the cost of capital long ago. But they're kept alive through corporate welfare. Why? Because of a bunch of mixed motives and benefactors: customers hate losing airfares, employees don't vote for politicians that don't save their jobs, and investors will take any edge they can get.
So, if people suggest that the Vietnam and the cold war were unfortunate events, and things shouldn't have progressed down that path, you'd say they're in need of chilling out?
Different domain, same principal. It's called social critique. It's a means of gaining some insight.
So I don't particularly like his pigoenholing of lisp - he says there were three working extensible languages, and smalltalk was one of them, kindof not mentioning however, that lisp _wrote the book_ on extensible languages.
I wouldn't be that hard on him.
If you search him further you'll see he has probably done more to promote Lisp than most others whose speciality isn't _already_ Lisp.
In his Turing award lecture this past October at OOSPLA 2004, he told the audience (paraphrased): "you owe it to yourself and your profession to seriously learn Lisp".
Do you value a string of moderate commercial successes, two or three major commercial successes, or one or two major theoretical or scientific breakthroughs?
Do musicians generate more great work as time goes on?
Do programmers become more open minded and experimental in old age?
Once the war is won, the Police maintain the status quo. They aren't interested in creating markets or inventing new products, they just want things to say the same and keep making cash for their organization. In many ways, this is Dell.
Though, from another perspective, Dell is innovative in their sales, manufacturing, and logistical model. So, while they don't care about the novelty of the end product, the reason for their success is what they do to create those products -- faster, cheaper, etc. than the competition.
Dell killed IBM's PC business and is on the way to killing HP's.
1. Sure, more bus speed good. 2. Pentium M's are only now approaching 2 GHz 3. Eh, what competition might that be? The best all around competitor to the PB lineup, imho, is the Dell D600 and D800, in terms of performance, screen, weight, etc. My D800 lasts around 3 hours. My powerbook 17-inch 1.33 usually lasted about the same for the first year of its life, but now due to use it's down to a bit over 2 hours. 4. Don't be petty.
A contrast of two laptops:
My PB runs Oracle 10g and J2EE app servers at similar speeds to my D800. I find it handles full memory situations much more gracefully, yet my PB has only 1 gb ram vs. my D800's 2 gb.
On the other hand, Eclipse is faster on my D800 due to Windows SWT optimizations. And my D800 has a faster hard drive (7200 rpm), which is definitely noticable.
On the video front, the Powerbook's Radeon 9600 w/ 64 MB seems to play World of Warcraft faster than the GeForce FX 5200Go w/ 32 MB in my D800. Given the new powerbooks have a full ATI 9700 w/ 128 megs, I'd say the new one would play games even better.
Is the PBG4 "f'ing slow"? Not at all. It's not a dual G5, by any means, but I get as much done with it as my D800, and more, because I truly miss the interface when I'm in XP.
The reliability guarantees of TCP are not needed for many streaming application -- it's too heavy, hence why it's not used. Secondly, many streaming applications are locally multicast, hence the need for UDP. As you say, a form of re-ordering is required, which is why we have RTP.
Almost all VoIP implementations use SIP and RTP over UDP. Most streaming mediums that use RTSP (such as Real or Quicktime) use RTP+UDP. As do AIM and iChat AV video conferencing.
They don't specify, but I suspect by "backed DB server" they mean "IBM zSeries running Oracle" not "Dell Poweredge running MySQL". From the amount of data that goes on, and the fact that multiple actual game servers talk to one backend DB, I'm betting it's big iron from IBM, Sun or the like.
There's a good chance it's Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), which is what EA uses for their backend gaming database. Oracle is a big pusher of Linux/Intel/AMD blades or 1U racks attached to shared storage.
Though the downtime doesn't say anything about the quality of the DB software -- we really have no idea if it's a configuration issue, capacity planning problem , or software defect.
High profile database failures in the past (eBay, Orbitz) were blamed on the hardware/software vendor in the press, but afterwards reality showed it was administrator error (ID-10-T type mistakes) that exacerbated what were reasonably normal issues.
In most kinds of "streaming" situations, where packets do not need to be ordered or re-sent, UDP is preferable to TCP. Nearly all MP games and most video-conferencing or VoIP applications use it.
You are right, I have not read Ableson and Sussman's book, nor do I know anything about them. I was merely responding to your quotations, and if they are actually fundamentals-oriented, they would have done well to leave out what they said in those particular instances.
They were quotes from the Preface and were more "vision statements" than part of the content of the book. It's completely available online if you'd like to read it. They take CS fundamentals and teach them backwards -- abstraction first, then functions, then state, then memory & registers.
There's a very good chapter that explains how to build an abstract register-based computer in Scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
This works. Is it awful? Eh, verbose, but otherwise ok... Python is certainly more compact. But frankly, the tasks one does in Java are usually very different from what one would do in Python. Very different emphases.
File[] fileList = new File(".").listFiles(new FilenameFilter() {
public boolean accept (File dir, String name) {
return name.endsWith(".gz"); }});
for (File eachFile : fileList) {
do something
}
Your teller is probably using Java based software to bring up your account details and conduct your transactions.
This holds double true for brokerage trade executions , matches, and settlement.
And then there's your phone bill. Chances are that is touched by Java somewhere -- on the website, in the call centre, etc.
etc.
PHP is prevalent on the web, but not as prevalent in major business applications.
This seems like EDS making a huge PR mistake. They're clueless as to how fast a quote will be taken by internet media and spread far and wide. And many of those companies (Oracle, Dell, EMC) are big Linux proponents, with huge budgets riding on Linux marketing and Linux R&D.
Oracle in particular. I would be surprised if Larry Ellison didn't withdraw from this alliance shortly, or at least give them a public spanking.
Instead of practicing due diligence, they decided to short-cut the whole process by saying that the information might be a trade secret, might have done damage, and might have come from someone under contractual obligation, but they really needed to know who leaked it before they could determine that!
There is no "might" about the trade secret. It was deemed to be information that could not have been revealed except through breaking an NDA or through corporate espionage.
Contracts would be useless if we could ignore them just because we felt like it. That's the point of this case -- the contract should be enforced and remedies can be saught by default, and only in extenuating circumstances should it be overlooked (such as if the public good was served by breaking the contract).
That means that in a case like this the individuals legally protected right to privacy must be weighed against the company's right to enforce their contract. I think it is a very bad trade off when we decide that even without any concrete proof of contractual violation, nor any proof of damage to the company, the company's right to protect its contract summarily overrides the individual's right to privacy.
Unfortunately, people don't have as clearly spelled out right to privacy. They haven't fought for one, or at least their representatives haven't. Companies, however, HAVE faught for this -- trade secret law.
Which is why we're back where we are. Enough people have to speak up about "right to privacy" for it to mean anything. There are positive developments here (the telemarketer no-call list) but otherwise it's a rare confluence of events that stokes the public enough to put a stake in the ground.
Until then, this kind of thing should be expected.
Citing contempt because of the content of someone's answer to a question is unnacceptable to me.
It's more about refusing to testify in the face of a court order, AND that information has nothing to do with incriminating you. It's balancing your rights and the right of the court to get evidence.
Anyway, if you don't agree with that, that's fine, but it's a hard thing to change.
does the entire significance of this ruling escape everyone? This ruling basically says, that unless there is some public good being protected, that a news venue can be compelled to reveal their sources, simply because a company wants them to.
This isn't about "Apple is great". Apple is using the law to squeeze out something many Apple fans, including myself, enjoy -- rumours and leaks. They're using it against individuals that don't have a lot of money. That's rarely something that one enjoys seeing.
Yet Apple isn't doing anything evil here: speech isn't getting squelched. We can talk about Asteroid and other leaked products freely. They're protecting their interests by finding out who breached contract so they can penalize them. A contract was broken, and consequences ensue.
What this whole affair seems to be doing is educating the techie masses on what has been the case for years. No one has a right to leak information protected under contract law. Journalists can be coerced through threat of contempt to give up their sources.
Whistleblower laws exist to only protect cases that are in the public interest. Otherwise, the law and society will be against you at every turn. Even if you successfully get protected by whistleblower laws, you'll probably leave your job, because it's going to be a hostile environment there. Unfortunately it will be very hard to find another job -- people won't hire you after speaking up.
Yeah, it sucks. It would be a long and hard road to change this, if enough people wanted to. Somehow I don't think "enough" will want to -- there have been much graver cases involving criminal actions and death that didn't stir up the public's interest to ensure whistleblowers could live a decent life afterwards.
Personally, I think that if a precedent is truly being set that any publication can be forced to reveal any source who broke an NDA, provided that the material doesn't address a threat to the public welfare, then pretty much the entire tech reporting industry might as well pack up and find new jobs, because companies are quite capable of putting out their own carefully controlled press releases without all the expense of 'reporters' having to copy them down and parrot them back on websites and in magazines.
That was quite the run-on sentence.
This isn't a legal precedent. It's pretty much in line with legal history. What makes it a pseudo-precedent is the whole red herring of "are bloggers journalists?" and "aren't journalists protected?". If the New York Times published this , there WOULD be a similar action by Apple. The media and blogosphere has been spinning this as some sort of precedent... It's just the first case of a new medium, pushing the boundaries, being challenged by old laws.
And BTW, *most* of the tech press already is just regurgitations of press releases combined with some opinion / analysis columns. They really don't rely on leaked information. Infoworld, News.com, InformationWeek, eWeek, etc. have started to quote bloggers and rumour sites, but generally their stuff is based on conversations with spokespeople, analysts, & regurgitated PR.
Sure, this is why rumour sites are so interesting -- it feels like investigative journalism. However, investigative journalism has always had risk associated with it, especially by those who do the talking. You have to be DAMN SURE that what your leaking is in the public interest, because employers have a legal right to sue them in civil court for breach of contract. The journalists have to prove the story was in the public interest to withhold their names.
We have whistleblower laws to protect these people, and they were deemed by the judge to be inapplicable in this case. Even those laws tend to be of limited value -- because even with those laws, while you can't be sued for breach of contract, your career is effectively over -- no one will want to hire you because you've broken your word in the past.
Again -- leaking secret information -- not a good idea, in almost any circumstance. The law and even society at large is against you at every turn. People here probably don't agree with that, but it's a long, long road to come up with an alternative system....
Are you for real? Now we are determining which crimes are more important? Breaking the law is breaking the law. Period. End of story.
Considering this is a civil case, this isn't quite true. It's rare to be jailed for civil cases. It's all about getting hurt in the pocket book -- fines, liens, etc.
Then in the criminal system there are misdemeanors vs. felonies.... punishments vary.
usually you have to claim that you're invoking the 5th amendment. Though the prosecution can give you immunity as another way of coercing out your testimony...
Telling people to say things because if they don't you will hurt them is evil.
No, it's not. It's the basis of the justice system -- the coercive threat of contempt of court. "Hurt" is a relative term. Civil contempt would generally hurt you in the pocket book with fines, for example $X daily until you comply with the court order.
People didn't have a problem when MIcrosoft was being held in contempt by the EU and threatened a fine of something around $100m a day. "Oh but they're big and evil!" that's not justice, that's mob rule...
The poster he responded to said:
You keep using the term "standard", but I do not think it means what you think it means.
So he proceeded to define it. "STANDARD" doesn't mean "standards group".
In any case, MS word is THE STANDARD word processing format across the world. De facto. There is no de jure standard. So it is The Standard. It sucks, you can hate it, but it's reality. Perhaps some day enough people will want to change that. Apparently not today.
If Itanium dies, what do we have left for a 64-bit chip? POWER5 and Opteron? SPARC still really lags, and while they're going down the crazy multi-core/hyper-threaded route, I'm not sure it will make up for the horsepower gap.
HP is the only major manufacturer left of the Itanium line - their Superdome Integrity SMP boxes are wonderfully fast machines. After using both a Superdome and an IBM pSeries SMP(though, it was POWER4 based), I have to say I'm supremely impressed with both. But now, POWER5 is out and Itanium is still where it was last year. And POWER5 absolutely smokes. I don't think data centres are too keen on jumping onto the Itanic.... HP needs an ace-in-the-hole to get out of this one.
I wasn't trying to make light of war. I deliberately picked an exagerrated set of events to juxtapose a very small, local social critique (language wars) to an international and important social critique, both of which start from just a few voices. Progress occurs through critique and dissent. It's all politics, it's just a matter of what community you're dealing with.
Capitalism is inherently unethical.
Well, I would say "amoral" - i.e. not inherently immoral or unethical, but without any imbred set of ethics, mainly because it's a community based on function, not tradition.
Corporations have no ethical imperative; instead they exist solely to maximise the return for their shareholders.
Right, but shareholders are people, managers are people, and people arguably have ethical imperitaves. Transitively, corporations ought be held to an ethical standard (and often are).
When people claim corporations act without ethics, its because people often act without ethics. Of course, current law and culture surrounding "shareholder value" makes it way too easy to rationalize this anti-social behaviour.
Yes, Microsoft is an ethically dubious company. But so are 90+% of other companies out there.
Eh, I'm going to guess you picked that number out of the air. I think it's less. Glass half empty / glass half full.
You've forgotten the reason why Microsoft existed in the first place: To *make* a lot of people a heckuva lot of money.
No. Companies exist to fill some kind of need, to create some kind of customer. That's the reason for existence -- creating markets. Markets aren't created by god or nature, they're created by humans. You can't have profit without a market.
Regarding profit, it's more accurate to say that it's the first responsibility of business.
Sure, it has billions, but if it can't find a way to turn those billions into trillions, then it will be sold and the capital invested somewhere else.
Err. "sold"? When major investers "sell", shares shift hands,and there's no impact on invested capital (much of which is already sunk). Perhaps you're suggesting that if lots of people sell, future equity offerings will have a higher cost of capital.
Companies are the sum of its investors, and nothing more. They can come and go pretty much as they wish.
I find capitalist rhetoric fascinating, at times, in that many people describe it in terms that are so abstract and theoretical. Your above quote makes it sound like a simple game of high/low.
In a theoretical capitalistic system, individual economic actors are atomic. In practice, we have blocs of actors -- investors, managers, employees, politicians, social groups, and customers. They're not quite atomic, many of them are not subject to "profit motive", and yet they all have a stake in the system. Thus, the pure capitalist system doesn't really take hold.
So, it's pretty rare to "abandon" a company these days. Otherwise many of america's airlines and auto makers would have long died, as they ceased churning out profitability above the cost of capital long ago. But they're kept alive through corporate welfare. Why? Because of a bunch of mixed motives and benefactors: customers hate losing airfares, employees don't vote for politicians that don't save their jobs, and investors will take any edge they can get.
So, if people suggest that the Vietnam and the cold war were unfortunate events, and things shouldn't have progressed down that path, you'd say they're in need of chilling out?
Different domain, same principal. It's called social critique. It's a means of gaining some insight.
So I don't particularly like his pigoenholing of lisp - he says there were three working extensible languages, and smalltalk was one of them, kindof not mentioning however, that lisp _wrote the book_ on extensible languages.
I wouldn't be that hard on him.
If you search him further you'll see he has probably done more to promote Lisp than most others whose speciality isn't _already_ Lisp.
In his Turing award lecture this past October at OOSPLA 2004, he told the audience (paraphrased): "you owe it to yourself and your profession to seriously learn Lisp".
Depends on your value system.
Do you value a string of moderate commercial successes, two or three major commercial successes, or one or two major theoretical or scientific breakthroughs?
Do musicians generate more great work as time goes on?
Do programmers become more open minded and experimental in old age?
and do they meet the performance requirements? reliability requirements? Nay!
Once the war is won, the Police maintain the status quo. They aren't interested in creating markets or inventing new products, they just want things to say the same and keep making cash for their organization. In many ways, this is Dell.
Though, from another perspective, Dell is innovative in their sales, manufacturing, and logistical model. So, while they don't care about the novelty of the end product, the reason for their success is what they do to create those products -- faster, cheaper, etc. than the competition.
Dell killed IBM's PC business and is on the way to killing HP's.
1. Sure, more bus speed good.
2. Pentium M's are only now approaching 2 GHz
3. Eh, what competition might that be? The best all around competitor to the PB lineup, imho, is the Dell D600 and D800, in terms of performance, screen, weight, etc. My D800 lasts around 3 hours. My powerbook 17-inch 1.33 usually lasted about the same for the first year of its life, but now due to use it's down to a bit over 2 hours.
4. Don't be petty.
A contrast of two laptops:
My PB runs Oracle 10g and J2EE app servers at similar speeds to my D800. I find it handles full memory situations much more gracefully, yet my PB has only 1 gb ram vs. my D800's 2 gb.
On the other hand, Eclipse is faster on my D800 due to Windows SWT optimizations. And my D800 has a faster hard drive (7200 rpm), which is definitely noticable.
On the video front, the Powerbook's Radeon 9600 w/ 64 MB seems to play World of Warcraft faster than the GeForce FX 5200Go w/ 32 MB in my D800. Given the new powerbooks have a full ATI 9700 w/ 128 megs, I'd say the new one would play games even better.
Is the PBG4 "f'ing slow"? Not at all. It's not a dual G5, by any means, but I get as much done with it as my D800, and more, because I truly miss the interface when I'm in XP.
The reliability guarantees of TCP are not needed for many streaming application -- it's too heavy, hence why it's not used. Secondly, many streaming applications are locally multicast, hence the need for UDP. As you say, a form of re-ordering is required, which is why we have RTP.
Almost all VoIP implementations use SIP and RTP over UDP. Most streaming mediums that use RTSP (such as Real or Quicktime) use RTP+UDP. As do AIM and iChat AV video conferencing.
They don't specify, but I suspect by "backed DB server" they mean "IBM zSeries running Oracle" not "Dell Poweredge running MySQL". From the amount of data that goes on, and the fact that multiple actual game servers talk to one backend DB, I'm betting it's big iron from IBM, Sun or the like.
There's a good chance it's Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), which is what EA uses for their backend gaming database. Oracle is a big pusher of Linux/Intel/AMD blades or 1U racks attached to shared storage.
Though the downtime doesn't say anything about the quality of the DB software -- we really have no idea if it's a configuration issue, capacity planning problem , or software defect.
High profile database failures in the past (eBay, Orbitz) were blamed on the hardware/software vendor in the press, but afterwards reality showed it was administrator error (ID-10-T type mistakes) that exacerbated what were reasonably normal issues.
In most kinds of "streaming" situations, where packets do not need to be ordered or re-sent, UDP is preferable to TCP. Nearly all MP games and most video-conferencing or VoIP applications use it.
Ok, I think I understand your POV now.
One final comment:
You are right, I have not read Ableson and Sussman's book, nor do I know anything about them. I was merely responding to your quotations, and if they are actually fundamentals-oriented, they would have done well to leave out what they said in those particular instances.
They were quotes from the Preface and were more "vision statements" than part of the content of the book. It's completely available online if you'd like to read it. They take CS fundamentals and teach them backwards -- abstraction first, then functions, then state, then memory & registers.
There's a very good chapter that explains how to build an abstract register-based computer in Scheme.