So on Slashdot the images are about half the size of the content. Now consider that Slashdot is pretty light in its use of images compared to many popular web sites. How much of a typical web page on a news site (where a lot of the images can't be recycled for every page) is likely to be used by the images? It's a lot.
That depends on what you want to do. Entourage is OK if you just want an email client, but it doesn't have all of the features of Outlook for interacting with Exchange Server. Here's what Microsoft has to say:
Use the following general suggestions to help choose a Microsoft e-mail program for your Macintosh computer:
If Mac OS X 10.1 or later is installed on your computer, use Entourage X.
If Mac OS 8.6 or later (but not Mac OS X) is installed on your computer, use Entourage 2001.
If you work in an organization that uses Exchange Server, use Outlook 2001 to take advantage of the full set of Exchange Server features such as scheduling and group calendar.
If you want a free, basic e-mail program, use Outlook Express for Mac.
Notes
If your organization uses Exchange Server, you can send and receive messages from your Exchange mailbox in any of these Mac e-mail programs. However, the full set of Exchange features is available only if you use Outlook 2001.
Only Entourage X is designed specifically for Mac OS X. However, all of the Mac e-mail programs listed above run in the Classic environment in Mac OS X.
So IOW if you want to make full use of Exchange, which my employer does, Entourage won't do the trick. You're stuck using Outlook. Aren't monopolies great?
It's a classic chicken and egg problem. Users don't want to switch because the applications are all written for Classic. Application writers don't want to switch because the users are all using OS9. Somebody needs to step in and force the situation. An application company could do it by writing a killer app that's OSX only, or Apple could do it by giving application companies a reasonable guarantee that there will be a large number of OSX users.
A good example of this is what's happening in my workplace. My employer would gladly shift to OSX exclusively on its Macs if they could. We have Macs as a second platform, and the better interoperability of OSX with Windows networks is a big selling point for a switch. Unfortunately, MS refuses to come out with Outlook for OfficeX, and this presents us with a big problem. Outlook is an absolute requirement for our desktop systems, so the lack of Outlook for OSX is a killer. We could use OSX and run Office under Classic, but that effectively negates the networking advantages and just makes the system harder for ordinary users to use. So the lack of Outlook for OSX effectively prevents us from switching. As soon as it's available and tested, our computer people plan on switching as fast as they can install the new software.
Whether one could get away with this in gcc (or whatever is questionable, but at some point every compile must be done with a binary.
Not necessarily. It's possible to understand the code that goes into a compiler, so it's theoretically possible to step through a compilation manually by looking through the source of the compiler and the code it's trying to compile. Obviously your first target would be the simplest compiler you could write, which you could then use to compile something more complete like GCC.
Alternately, you could write a new compiler in a different language and compile the source using that. There's no perfect guarantee that this will protect you against a Trojan, but it can get the risk low enough to be acceptable to anyone but the most diehard paranoid. After all, what's the chance that somebody's Trojaned Java (or Perl, or Visual Basic, or Pascal, or Emacs Lisp) so that it will created a Trojan when it's used to compile gcc using your home-built C compiler?
And one goal of good management should be to encourage everyone to be in a useful category. So given the categories above, one might suggest the following approaches:
[Consiencious programmers] Reward these people. Given them raises, praise them publically, and encourage other people to look at and understand why their code is good.
[Smart but difficult programmers] Force these guys to work together with somebody else. Pair programming might be a good idea. It might not make the code that much better, but at least there will be a second person who understands how it works and can explain it to everyone else.
[Straight line programmers] These might be a good type to pair with those in group 2. Other than that (and trying to train them to be more like group 1) they may not be easy to work with. Perhaps they should be used as code maintainers, where they'll be working on smaller, more discreet problems where a straight line approach might be less harmful.
[Job security by obscurity] Force these people to maintain their own code until their projects become obsolete and you can fire them. Even better, route around the problem by putting them in teams where they can't get away with their tricks.
These are obviously just suggestions and ideas, but they get the general picture. Part of the job of a manager is to figure out how to use the strengths and weaknesses of his subordinates to best effect.
Not to be annoying, but you're being ridiculously Eurocentric. Yes, it's true that baseball is not the most popular U.S. export sport in Europe. (Including Ice Hockey is a bad joke, FWIW, because that was imported from Europe to North America, not the other way around.) It is among the most popular U.S. exports in other parts of the world, and absolutely the most popular in many places. To say that it's not being marketed overseas because it doesn't happen to be popular where you are is exactly the kind of parochial worldview that Americans are accused of.
Sure, it's big in the Carribean, parts of Latin America, Japan and Korea, and these nations are represented on MLB rosters and have their own professional and semi-professional leagues, but where is the game in Europe, or Africa, or Asia, or Australasia?
Well, there was a professional league in Taiwan, but it suffered from the influence of professional gamblers and had to be shut down. It's not as though the game isn't popular there, and there are Taiwanese players in both the North American and Japanese professional leagues. There is also a professional league in Australia (bet you didn't know that) and a number of Aussie players are currently active in the U.S. majors. Atlanta Braves' pitcher Damian Moss, for instance, is an Australian currently vying for the NL Rookie of the Year award.
There are at least a few amateur leagues in Europe. ISTR that baseball is taken at least semi-seriously in both the Netherlands and Italy, and I know of teams in the U.K. and Poland. It's obviously not a hugely popular sport in Europe in general, but it is played there. There's also some effort currently under way to introduce the game to Africa and the rest of Asia. There was an amusing article recently about American servicemen introducing baseball in Afghanistan.
That said, when I ask my staff to put in long hours, I'm there with them.
That, IMO, is key. Any boss with the gall to demand harder work and longer hours from his subordinates than he's willing to give himself is asking for trouble. The most terrifying idea, as many people here have pointed out, is that once management finds that it can get its workers to put in 80+ hour weeks that it will begin to expect them. If the boss is in the trenches sloggin away with the workers, though, it serves as an effective promise that massive overtime is not going to become the rule.
A possible answer to this kind of problem is to demand that the boss be there the whole time that he expects his coders to be there. Let him work a few weeks of 15 hour days plus weekends and see whether he thinks that it's good for productivity and morale.
Actually, using effect is still gramatically correct. It just means something different. "Do long hours effect code quality?" is asking whether working that extra time would help the quality of the code.
Not necessarily true. While it is true that code should be written so that it's easy to understand what it's doing, you will frequently need comments to let people know why it's being done that way. When I make changes to my code to fix any non-obvious bug (frequently a result of the inputs it's processing not being quite as well formatted as promised) I always try to put in a comment about what subtle problem that code is fixing. I know that this is important because when I've looked back on code months or years later I haven't been able to figure out why certain things are done without the hints provided by those comments. For particularly bug-addled problems, that may result in a lot of comments.
It might not affect hardware players that much, but it could be a big deal when talking about software players. Freeware mp3 programs have been a big part of making the format so popular, and those are now going to be pretty much impossible. After all, how can you give away a free product if every one you pass out costs you $0.75?
I'm not very intimately familiar with Mozilla, is there a way to have popups move to a tab in their parent window instead of becomming their own window?
I don't know if there's an automatic way, but if you have tabbed browsing set up to open in new tab with a middle click, then middle clicking will take precidence over the popup directive. You'll wind up with the popup in a new tab instead of a new window.
Well, some of those people actually know what they're doing. As you say, the ride/handling aspects of a suspension are a balance, and the designers have picked a point that they think gives a good balance between the two. The problem is that the optimum point for a street racer may not be the optimum point for the ordinary drivers those designers were thinking of when they chose that balance point. That means that a street racer may well have some reason to adjust the balance for more handling and less ride.
The people who really need a boot to the head are the ones who manage to mess up both ride and handling in the interests of looks. Everyone knows that getting optimum handling from an ordinary car frequently involves lowering it, so some people will get their cars inexpertly lowered in an attempt to make their car look fast. In the process they kill their ride and handling. There's a wonderful web site ridiculing these bozos, but be forewarned. Some of the cars on that page are scary.
Anyone who says that using perl is easier than using C++ do to any task that requires load is an woefully uneducated C++ programmer.
I'm not sure if that's necessarily true. When people have done benchmarks of text-heavy tasks on programs written in Perl vs. ones written in lower level languages, they've frequently found that the Perl performed better. This seems like it shouldn't be possible- the Perl interpreter is written in C, so it's hard to see how Perl could outperform native C- but the answer is that Perl has been optimized to within an inch of its life. The Perl string functions are much better written than what most programmers would be able to create themselves, so programs written in Perl may well be more efficient than what those programmers would have written.
Re:Dear Larry: Are you crazy?
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I think that you're overreacting. Larry has specifically mentioned that there will be a Perl5 compatibility mode. Just put a:p5 after your matching character (m or s) and you can do things the old way. Meanwhile, those of us who want to do non-capturing groups can now use [...] instead of (?...), and for defined groups can use <[...]> instead of [...]. As Larry says, which do you use more, non-capturing groups or non-named character classes? Note that at the same time you're gaining the very powerful ability to create your own named character classes, so when you have an odd group of characters that you want to use again and again it won't be a problem.
The first movie I saw digitally projected (Spriggan) was pretty noticable: you could clearly see that it was made up of pixels. OTOH if you know what to look for you can frequently see the grain in film, so the existence of artifacts is hardly something unique to digital projection. OTOH, Attack of the Clones wasn't noticable at all.
The real benefit is going to be a bit later in the live of the movie, though. I watched a rather old print of Ghost in the Shell recently, and it was just awful. The film was obviously scratched and spotted, and there were occasional skips from where the film had burned or torn and had to be spliced back together. The same thing isn't going to happen to a digital movie no matter how many times you show it.
The judge basically equated "central" with "single" and spent quite a while explaining why "central computer" by anyone's definition must mean a "single" computer.
I think that you're misreading what he said. His point was that the patent was intended to cover a system in which there was a central server that was the only thing that the terminals could talk to. In the web there is no central computer, but instead each client is free to connect to any web server it chooses. That's a huge difference, and it's that difference that the judge was harping on.
Wow, the judge said that? He must be a pretty 1337-Judge..
As I understand it, the judges don't necessarily originate everything that winds up in their decisions. Instead, when somebody else makes a point that they like, they take that and incorporate it into their decisions. Even so, it's pretty clear that this particular judge knows something about technology.
To continue, the OS has to ask the IDE controller, the IDE controller asks the harddisk controller, and I wonder what else...
Not really. The OS tells the IDE controller to fetch the data at such and such a track and sector and the IDE controler returns it. Now it may be the case that there is some additional translation that goes on inside the disk controller, but that probably would be covered by the doctrine of equivalents. That didn't exist at the time that the patent was filed, and because it's functionally equivalent to the process described it would probably count as an equivalent.
No, it doesn't nullify the patent. OTOH, it does say that the patent does not and can not apply to the Web no matter how hard BT tries to strech it. Since nobody here is likely to try using the type of system that the patent does cover, it's just as good as ruling it invalid.
I find it interesting, of course, since DNS is not the only address translation required. Before reaching the end server (and the patent says, "Central computer"), an ARP translation will be required as well to translate an IP address into a MAC address for transit across the physical+datalink layers of IP.
Actually, the judge did mention several additional levels of translation required. He mentioned that the web server needs to resolve the relative address in the the URL into a local address by looking up the base directory in a configuration file, and then needs to ask the OS to find the actual physical track and sector where the file is located. (Apparently the BT people specifically said that a complete address would have to include track and sector information!) He didn't even get into the idea that in many cases the data sent out isn't even a file at all, but is generated dynamically by the server.
There was absolutely nothing along the lines of, "look, your claim is idiotic, and you know it, now go away."
I'm not so sure I'd agree. The judge essentially says that BT's claim is bogus because it refers specifically to a hub and spoke data system (central computer and terminals that are hooked exclusively to it) while the Internet is the exact opposite. Saying (as the judge does):
The Internet, is, in short, an entirely different beast from the system described in the Sargent patent. Consequently, the Internet does not infringe the Sargent patent either literally or under the doctrine of equivalents. Prodigy is therefore entitled to summary judgment as a matter of law.
Sounds very close to "look, your claim is idiotic, and you know it, now go away."
Re:Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why would any self-respecting anime fan buy a English dub of "Spirited Away" when the Japanese DVD includes a very good set of English subtitles?
Because this isn't a DVD release. It's a theatrical release, and even the hardest of hardcore subtitle fans realize that watching a movie on the big screen is much better than seeing it on DVD.
FWIW, Disney and American Cinematheque are doing an advanced showing at the El Capitan theater on 10 September. Miazaki will be there in person to answer questions after the showing. I was at a showing of a subtitled version of Cowboy Bebop: Tengoku no Tobira where the preview was mentioned, and after the show essentially the whole theater walked over to El Capitan to buy tickets. That ought to give you some idea of how vital those people thought that subtitles are. Tickets weren't available that day (or the might have sold out immediately) but I bought mine the first day they were available. Good thing, too, because they sold out the next day.
Re:A non-literal translation
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
·
· Score: 1
But, if you remember, the beginning of the movie contains a paragraph of written Japanese that explains the background for the movie. This text was of course changed to English in the English version.
Not quite. The text was removed in the English version and replaced with a voice-over that said essentially the same thing. My understanding is that and the title changes are the only difference between the English and Japanese releases. Studio Ghibli put in their contract that Disney wasn't allowed to remove anything without permission and used that to prevent so much as a single cell being removed.
Slashdot Mirror
So on Slashdot the images are about half the size of the content. Now consider that Slashdot is pretty light in its use of images compared to many popular web sites. How much of a typical web page on a news site (where a lot of the images can't be recycled for every page) is likely to be used by the images? It's a lot.
That depends on what you want to do. Entourage is OK if you just want an email client, but it doesn't have all of the features of Outlook for interacting with Exchange Server. Here's what Microsoft has to say:
So IOW if you want to make full use of Exchange, which my employer does, Entourage won't do the trick. You're stuck using Outlook. Aren't monopolies great?
It's a classic chicken and egg problem. Users don't want to switch because the applications are all written for Classic. Application writers don't want to switch because the users are all using OS9. Somebody needs to step in and force the situation. An application company could do it by writing a killer app that's OSX only, or Apple could do it by giving application companies a reasonable guarantee that there will be a large number of OSX users.
A good example of this is what's happening in my workplace. My employer would gladly shift to OSX exclusively on its Macs if they could. We have Macs as a second platform, and the better interoperability of OSX with Windows networks is a big selling point for a switch. Unfortunately, MS refuses to come out with Outlook for OfficeX, and this presents us with a big problem. Outlook is an absolute requirement for our desktop systems, so the lack of Outlook for OSX is a killer. We could use OSX and run Office under Classic, but that effectively negates the networking advantages and just makes the system harder for ordinary users to use. So the lack of Outlook for OSX effectively prevents us from switching. As soon as it's available and tested, our computer people plan on switching as fast as they can install the new software.
Not necessarily. It's possible to understand the code that goes into a compiler, so it's theoretically possible to step through a compilation manually by looking through the source of the compiler and the code it's trying to compile. Obviously your first target would be the simplest compiler you could write, which you could then use to compile something more complete like GCC.
Alternately, you could write a new compiler in a different language and compile the source using that. There's no perfect guarantee that this will protect you against a Trojan, but it can get the risk low enough to be acceptable to anyone but the most diehard paranoid. After all, what's the chance that somebody's Trojaned Java (or Perl, or Visual Basic, or Pascal, or Emacs Lisp) so that it will created a Trojan when it's used to compile gcc using your home-built C compiler?
And one goal of good management should be to encourage everyone to be in a useful category. So given the categories above, one might suggest the following approaches:
These are obviously just suggestions and ideas, but they get the general picture. Part of the job of a manager is to figure out how to use the strengths and weaknesses of his subordinates to best effect.
I guess that a lot of people agree with you, then. This change is being implimented in Perl6.
Not to be annoying, but you're being ridiculously Eurocentric. Yes, it's true that baseball is not the most popular U.S. export sport in Europe. (Including Ice Hockey is a bad joke, FWIW, because that was imported from Europe to North America, not the other way around.) It is among the most popular U.S. exports in other parts of the world, and absolutely the most popular in many places. To say that it's not being marketed overseas because it doesn't happen to be popular where you are is exactly the kind of parochial worldview that Americans are accused of.
Well, there was a professional league in Taiwan, but it suffered from the influence of professional gamblers and had to be shut down. It's not as though the game isn't popular there, and there are Taiwanese players in both the North American and Japanese professional leagues. There is also a professional league in Australia (bet you didn't know that) and a number of Aussie players are currently active in the U.S. majors. Atlanta Braves' pitcher Damian Moss, for instance, is an Australian currently vying for the NL Rookie of the Year award.
There are at least a few amateur leagues in Europe. ISTR that baseball is taken at least semi-seriously in both the Netherlands and Italy, and I know of teams in the U.K. and Poland. It's obviously not a hugely popular sport in Europe in general, but it is played there. There's also some effort currently under way to introduce the game to Africa and the rest of Asia. There was an amusing article recently about American servicemen introducing baseball in Afghanistan.
That, IMO, is key. Any boss with the gall to demand harder work and longer hours from his subordinates than he's willing to give himself is asking for trouble. The most terrifying idea, as many people here have pointed out, is that once management finds that it can get its workers to put in 80+ hour weeks that it will begin to expect them. If the boss is in the trenches sloggin away with the workers, though, it serves as an effective promise that massive overtime is not going to become the rule.
A possible answer to this kind of problem is to demand that the boss be there the whole time that he expects his coders to be there. Let him work a few weeks of 15 hour days plus weekends and see whether he thinks that it's good for productivity and morale.
Actually, using effect is still gramatically correct. It just means something different. "Do long hours effect code quality?" is asking whether working that extra time would help the quality of the code.
Not necessarily true. While it is true that code should be written so that it's easy to understand what it's doing, you will frequently need comments to let people know why it's being done that way. When I make changes to my code to fix any non-obvious bug (frequently a result of the inputs it's processing not being quite as well formatted as promised) I always try to put in a comment about what subtle problem that code is fixing. I know that this is important because when I've looked back on code months or years later I haven't been able to figure out why certain things are done without the hints provided by those comments. For particularly bug-addled problems, that may result in a lot of comments.
It might not affect hardware players that much, but it could be a big deal when talking about software players. Freeware mp3 programs have been a big part of making the format so popular, and those are now going to be pretty much impossible. After all, how can you give away a free product if every one you pass out costs you $0.75?
I don't know if there's an automatic way, but if you have tabbed browsing set up to open in new tab with a middle click, then middle clicking will take precidence over the popup directive. You'll wind up with the popup in a new tab instead of a new window.
Well, some of those people actually know what they're doing. As you say, the ride/handling aspects of a suspension are a balance, and the designers have picked a point that they think gives a good balance between the two. The problem is that the optimum point for a street racer may not be the optimum point for the ordinary drivers those designers were thinking of when they chose that balance point. That means that a street racer may well have some reason to adjust the balance for more handling and less ride.
The people who really need a boot to the head are the ones who manage to mess up both ride and handling in the interests of looks. Everyone knows that getting optimum handling from an ordinary car frequently involves lowering it, so some people will get their cars inexpertly lowered in an attempt to make their car look fast. In the process they kill their ride and handling. There's a wonderful web site ridiculing these bozos, but be forewarned. Some of the cars on that page are scary.
I'm not sure if that's necessarily true. When people have done benchmarks of text-heavy tasks on programs written in Perl vs. ones written in lower level languages, they've frequently found that the Perl performed better. This seems like it shouldn't be possible- the Perl interpreter is written in C, so it's hard to see how Perl could outperform native C- but the answer is that Perl has been optimized to within an inch of its life. The Perl string functions are much better written than what most programmers would be able to create themselves, so programs written in Perl may well be more efficient than what those programmers would have written.
I think that you're overreacting. Larry has specifically mentioned that there will be a Perl5 compatibility mode. Just put a :p5 after your matching character (m or s) and you can do things the old way. Meanwhile, those of us who want to do non-capturing groups can now use [...] instead of (?...), and for defined groups can use <[...]> instead of [...]. As Larry says, which do you use more, non-capturing groups or non-named character classes? Note that at the same time you're gaining the very powerful ability to create your own named character classes, so when you have an odd group of characters that you want to use again and again it won't be a problem.
The first movie I saw digitally projected (Spriggan) was pretty noticable: you could clearly see that it was made up of pixels. OTOH if you know what to look for you can frequently see the grain in film, so the existence of artifacts is hardly something unique to digital projection. OTOH, Attack of the Clones wasn't noticable at all.
The real benefit is going to be a bit later in the live of the movie, though. I watched a rather old print of Ghost in the Shell recently, and it was just awful. The film was obviously scratched and spotted, and there were occasional skips from where the film had burned or torn and had to be spliced back together. The same thing isn't going to happen to a digital movie no matter how many times you show it.
I think that you're misreading what he said. His point was that the patent was intended to cover a system in which there was a central server that was the only thing that the terminals could talk to. In the web there is no central computer, but instead each client is free to connect to any web server it chooses. That's a huge difference, and it's that difference that the judge was harping on.
As I understand it, the judges don't necessarily originate everything that winds up in their decisions. Instead, when somebody else makes a point that they like, they take that and incorporate it into their decisions. Even so, it's pretty clear that this particular judge knows something about technology.
Not really. The OS tells the IDE controller to fetch the data at such and such a track and sector and the IDE controler returns it. Now it may be the case that there is some additional translation that goes on inside the disk controller, but that probably would be covered by the doctrine of equivalents. That didn't exist at the time that the patent was filed, and because it's functionally equivalent to the process described it would probably count as an equivalent.
No, it doesn't nullify the patent. OTOH, it does say that the patent does not and can not apply to the Web no matter how hard BT tries to strech it. Since nobody here is likely to try using the type of system that the patent does cover, it's just as good as ruling it invalid.
Actually, the judge did mention several additional levels of translation required. He mentioned that the web server needs to resolve the relative address in the the URL into a local address by looking up the base directory in a configuration file, and then needs to ask the OS to find the actual physical track and sector where the file is located. (Apparently the BT people specifically said that a complete address would have to include track and sector information!) He didn't even get into the idea that in many cases the data sent out isn't even a file at all, but is generated dynamically by the server.
I'm not so sure I'd agree. The judge essentially says that BT's claim is bogus because it refers specifically to a hub and spoke data system (central computer and terminals that are hooked exclusively to it) while the Internet is the exact opposite. Saying (as the judge does):
Sounds very close to "look, your claim is idiotic, and you know it, now go away."
Because this isn't a DVD release. It's a theatrical release, and even the hardest of hardcore subtitle fans realize that watching a movie on the big screen is much better than seeing it on DVD.
FWIW, Disney and American Cinematheque are doing an advanced showing at the El Capitan theater on 10 September. Miazaki will be there in person to answer questions after the showing. I was at a showing of a subtitled version of Cowboy Bebop: Tengoku no Tobira where the preview was mentioned, and after the show essentially the whole theater walked over to El Capitan to buy tickets. That ought to give you some idea of how vital those people thought that subtitles are. Tickets weren't available that day (or the might have sold out immediately) but I bought mine the first day they were available. Good thing, too, because they sold out the next day.
Not quite. The text was removed in the English version and replaced with a voice-over that said essentially the same thing. My understanding is that and the title changes are the only difference between the English and Japanese releases. Studio Ghibli put in their contract that Disney wasn't allowed to remove anything without permission and used that to prevent so much as a single cell being removed.