Quoting from the article: Many of the improvements are the result of user experiences with GNOME. "The application launch feedback program is designed to indicate that a program is in the process of being loaded," said Stachowiak. "We've had complaints about people clicking on the Netscape launcher 10 to 15 times before the program appears on the screen."
Well, if that's not taking user feedback to heart, I don't know what is. It takes a long time to load apps and users get impatient, so lets make a loading box to sooth them (instead of putting some work into making apps load faster).
Why does it take so damn long to load? What's going on that could possibly need 10-15 seconds? Come on, on a modern PC, that's enough time to transfer about 100 megs from a modern disk drive (or over 100 Mbit/sec ethernet), enough time to do an unimaginable number of computations, even in floating point. Only two types of things take time in the modern computing world:
network latency, usually 20ms to 300ms
software bloat, anywhere from 100ms to well beyond anyone's patience for software
It's refreshing to see that the gnome developers are keeping a keen eye on being lean-and-mean, NOT!
Ok, maybe this message was a bit of a troll, but I'm still a bit pissed about having to upgrade the RAM on a machine where I installed Redhat 6.2. 64 megs of RAM and I was getting quite a bit of swapping running gnome with netscape, xmms, ssh, and several terminals. With this sort of attitude towards bloat and slowness, it sounds like gnome will continue the trend of software getting slower more rapidly than hardware getting faster, just like another OS & windowing environment vendor that we're all familiar with...
Re:Is there free speech when all the places are ma
on
ACLU Takes on ICANN
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· Score: 2
"Themashby" really summed it up and cut right to the chase:
Controlling DNS' is like telling you what street you can stand on to give your speech.... If all the good streets (recognized and traveled by most people) are owned by major corporations then your right to speech is effectively denied.
It is critically important to be able to register your own domain name. Even if every web visitor finds your page from a search engine, if your speach offends someone with clout, all they have to do is threaten whomever is nice enough to host your pages under their domain name. You get censored very easily.
In the present example, you are unhappy with GM and create a GM-sucks page, and of course being a free-speech example, someone (probably with GM) doesn't like the page. You're not going to be an easy target, but whoever has been nice enough to host your page under their domain name probably is. Afterall, they're a business (in the theoritical world of corporate-only well-known TLDs), and your page isn't in their mission, and even one cease-and-desist letter with words like "confusingly similar to our regsitered trademark" is going to make the decision to stop helping you a no-brainer.
If you don't have your own domain name, you're screwed. All those links and bookmarks to your old URL now dead. Eventually the serach engines will index your page at the new site, but old links continue to propagate for a damn long time. My site was once hosted at a university web site, for about 3-4 years, and hundreds of links were made and all the search engines indexed it. Now, nearly 2 years after the move, still about 2000 hits/month (about 10-15% of my traffic) comes from a redirect that the old site was nice enough to leave in place, despite many all-night sessions resubmitting to all the major search engines and emailing to hundreds of web masters (often times taking considerable time to find out who's responsible for a page with the link). It is very important to have your own domain name.
It will take quite some time before your speech is as effective as before, and in a world where the only well-known domain names pander to corporate interests, you'll have to choose between registering a domain name that labels your page as having no valuable content, or hosting on someone else's site.
Jay, while your domain name is a.cx, it appears that you effectively control this domain name, which is a very different scenario that using "someisp.com/~you/gmsucks", where the ISP is an easy target for a trademark complain or other attempt at censorship, leaving the disgruntled consumer without the option to change the hosting to another ISP that will not be as easily pushed around.
Now, honestly, I'm not sure if this whole ICANN/ALCU thing really is a problem that will turn into corporate control of domain names.... the reason I posted this, and I hope it was clear, is that if you're going to publish anything significant on the web, you need to be able to register your own domain name. Suggesting that others will find your site from search engines and not by remembering your name is only significant until the hosting under someone else's name ends and many links, bookmarks and stored search engine result all stop working.
According to this slashdot story of about two weeks ago, 12000 (of 50 million) people were stupid enough to send £24 to these crooks for a job stuffing envelopes at home (presumably to Get Rich Quick).
Maybe someone ought to get a gaint list of these sucker's email addresses and spam them with messages saying "all these spam emails are scams, don't send a single penny and don't click their links, because idiots who get taken keep these slimballs in business".
If we were living in a world where most linux machines were completely free of any Microsoft (x86 PC only) software, then maybe MacOS X could cause people to buy more expensive macintosh hardware and run MacOS X instead of Linux on inexpensive PCs.
The sad truth is that the vast majority of Linux boxes are dual-boot and/or run wine/vmware (maybe plex86). MacOS on PPC hardware just isn't going to let you natively run those non-portable windoze apps, particularily games.
These specific details are at this page. Any other software players, they want $0.50 each with a minimum of $15k/year (hope you sell an aweful lot), or a much larger one-time payment. Terms are similar for hardware, but there's no free version. They want quite a bit more if you're encoding.
I've heard a number of people say that their patents only cover the encoding process. Maybe that's the case, and they're just trying to tax decoders without a leg to stand on.... but so far I've not seen a really good arguement backed up with references to the patents. If you know of one, please post a link or email me. Thanks.
Ace905 says "All forms of copy protection can be defeated"
But you'd better not tell anyone how to do it, cause that's illegal now (at least in the US). "Trafficing in Circumvention Technology", it's now called.
Stop Saying The WORD!!!
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 2
Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest... wiiiith... a herring! (holds up fish)
Yes! A herring!
We shall do no such thing.
Oh, please?
Cut down a tree with a herring? IT can't be done! (The Knights of Ni recoil in horror)
Oh! Don't say that word.
What word?
I cannot tell! Suffice to say is one of the words the Knights of Ni cannot hear!
How can we not say the word, if you don't tell us what IT is?
(cringing) AGHHH! You said IT again!
What, "is"?
No... not "is"! Wouldn't get very far in life not saying "is."
My liege, it's Sir Robin!
... packing it in and packing it up
and sneaking away and buggering off
and chickening out and pissing off home yes bravely he is throwing in the sponge...
Sir Robin!
My liege! IT's good to see you...
Now he's said the word!
Surely you've not given up your quest for the Holy Grail?
He is sneaking away and buggering off...
Shut up!... No no no! Far from IT!
He said the word again!
I was looking for IT...
AAAGHH!!!
Ah, here, here in this forest.
No, IT is far from this place.
Oh!! Stop saying the word! The word! The word we cannot hear!
Oh, stop IT!
You said IT again!
Hey, I said IT! I said IT! Oh! I said IT again! And there again! That's three ITs! Ohhh!
Okay... he's comparing OO with Communism? I don't see the connection. Does OO make assumptions about human nature?
Indeed, his point is poorly made, and as nearly as I can tell goes something like this:
Communism seemed like a good idea, but we all know it didn't work out.
Communism failed because it "got bogged down in bureaucracy"
He personally experienced bureaucracy having to fill out too many forms to get a business license (probably not in a communist state)
Object methods often are implemented requiring references to other objects, which often times are built with constructors which require a large number of fields, similar to having to fill out those unpleasant gov't forms.
Maybe I missed something, but I was under the impression that communism failed because it lacked incentives for productive behavior which ultimately resulted in a massive decline in productivity. Some people have suggested to me, also apparantly incorrectly, that communism was too suceptible to abuse of power. Because capitalism also suffers this problem, I've spent the last 15 years or so believing the fundamental problem with communism was the lack of financial incentive for productive accomplishment.
Silly me. I learned something today. The real reason communism failed and capitalism works is because communist nations had to bear the weight of excessive bureaucracy while the government structures of the western nations were able to run mean-and-lean, with very little overhead and only minimal bureaucratic hassle.
I tried to learn more things from Jacob's long rant about OOP, but somehow I didn't manage to come away with much insight.
If they in fact has a massive stockpile of cash as a result of monopoly overcharging (windows/office price remaining fixed when everything else about a new PC because 1/5th the price), morally, it's similar to having stolen property. The ill-gotten money should be returned and they should be prevented from doing it again. The other extreme should certainly be prevented.... allowing them to leverage their very strong position and massive cahce of cash to overtake other industrties and extract even more monopoly power and excessing monopoly overcharges.
As a public traded company, they have the fudicial responsibility to generate returns on shareholders investment. Modifying standards and adding their own extensions is one way of doing it. As long as they don't go and rewrite the standards, I don't see any harm in it.
There is a long-term harm to customers, both in higher costs associated with using products with poor interoperatibility (conformance with open standards). Consider the sorry state of affairs that web page authors must deal with, as one small example.
Because MS is in a monopoly position, there is also a clear harm to consumers when intentional interoperability crosses the line into anti-competitive practice. They have been found guilty, you know. The FTC and DoJ overlook much and usually just warn (witness the recent "just don't do it again" to the RIAA over nearly 10 years of price fixing). If the findings of fact in this case don't spell out the harm to you, probably nothing will.
If you can't see the harm that MS has done, you certainly haven't looked... or perhaps you have a value system, saddly, which leads you to believe that nearly any behaviour is acceptable in persuit of the almighty dollar.
...deserves the complaints from users they will get at the email address listed under 'feedback' on their page.
I've tried to send complaints to some of these folks. Usually they don't have a feedback link. When they do, they never care that the page doesn't work. I usually send an email when the site doesn't work with javascript disabled. Often times it's just a pull-down list that jumps you to a certain part of the site automatically, and lacks a little "go" button next to it.
They could not care less. When they do respond, it's usually "Javascript is required". One of the really good recent examples I recall is the search page at iwon.com. If javascript is disabled, you get a blank page with only their logo in the corner. They didn't seem to care when I mentioned that every other search engine/portal works without javascript. If you're up for a challenge, try poking around at iwon.com's site to find an email address or feedback entry page. They obviously don't want to hear from their users.
That's just great. You can't come up with any specific actions of Microsoft's or Pepsi's to classify as a crime
I can, easily. Soft-money political contributions and other dubious lobbing of politicians. In many cases, large corporations resort to tricks that are illegal by today's (very lax) rules. Against the law, plain and simple!
Ok, perhaps M$ and Pepsi aren't the best examples, but dubious soft money contributions are the norm today. In some cases, they are illegal, and in most others, they are so clearly an injustice to democracy that "there ought to be a law".
I am so completely unoppressed by Pepsi that I openly flaunt them by drinking Coke, content in the knowledge that they don't even care.
Indeed, but are you equally sure that they've been held to the same legal standards that you have? Do they get special tax breaks, leaving other companies or hard-working citizens to take up the slack? Have they been allowed to pollute or trash the environment, only to have it later repaired with taxpayer's dollars? Has a blind eye been turned to anti-competitive practices, limiting your choice or causing you to pay more? In the case of MS, they're finally going to court for such a grand abuse, but monopoly abuse is a large problem, and more often that not, they get only a slap on the wrist, sometimes amounting to only a verbal warning "don't do it again" (RIAA price fixing, recently).
Your freedom and quality of life are impacted if your neighbors (be they a group of citizens or corporations) have a more favorable position before the law and lawmakers.
The system is (almost) perfect. Vote for who you want.
Except that there's effectively only two choices, both bad. Most voters dislike one, so they end up voting for the other. "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" is the way it turned out.
I've been considering starting a project to make a low-cost linux-based single-board computer, perhaps similar to the uCsimm, now sold by Lineo. Some time ago, the uCsimm sounded really exciting, but the price is now $300 for a slow CPU (people report 25-50 kbytes/sec ftp throughput), and that runs uClinux instead of the "real" linux. I don't want to spread FUD about uClinux, it's a great effort, but the fact is that it lacks fork, larger executables, protected memory, and both drivers and userland applications need to be ported. Still, I've got my eye on the Motorola Coldfire chip (runs uClinux), but....
It'd sure be cool to make a low-cost board that could run the real linux, with real memory management (MMU), and a pretty speedy CPU. By low cost, I'm thinking able to sell at $120-$150 for board where you add a SDRAM DIMM and use a network bootstrap or add compact flash card for a local boot. So far, it's looking like the available PPC based off-the-shelf boards are quite expensive. I probably ought to do a bit more homework, but since you're here, my question is....
What are the propects for making a really low cost PPC-based embedded linux computer? Has anyone done it or tried? Is it even possible?
bugg writes It seems that many projects, especially the hobby ones floating online, are using a specific-purpose DSP designed for mp3 decoding- the MAS3507d, the STA013, etc. I'd argue in a heartbeat that this is a mistake, and that a general purpose DSP can be significantly cheaper with still enough power to do mp3, and can be updated by software to decode other formats (limited by the power of the DSP, of ocurse).
Mine is one of those players you mention. I used the STA013 chip. There's a few compelling reasons to use the STA013 or MAS3507D. First of all, you get a really high quality decoder without having to write code, which is difficult and requires the expensive ISO standard (I paid $170 for it). Witness the poor performance of the NJB on slightly corrupt MP3 files that winamp and the STA013 can play just fine (and Creative spent a lot). The free MP3 decoder software all uses floating point. Floating point DSPs are very expensive. A second motivation is that the STA013 and MAS3507D use less power than a general purpose DSP chip. Third, these chips include the royalty paid to Thompson, which you don't get if you write the code yourself. Finally, I do not believe there is a MP3-capable programmable DSP chip that's "significantly cheaper" (at 100 qty, say) than the STA013. Perhaps you will reply to this and give a part number of a programmable DSP (don't forget the cost of external flash memory if it doesn't have built-in in-circuit upgradable flash memory).
Perhaps WMA and Ogg will be a big deal someday, but so far, the vast majority of people I've had contact with want cool user-interface features. Of course, I'm working to get there, and it's a damn good thing I designed the board to be flash upgradable!
Someday maybe MS will force WMA on everyone, perhaps right after their antitrust case is dismissed? But consider the a closed-source upgradable design is worthless if the company holding the code doesn't spend the time and money to create the upgrade. How likely is it that you'll get Vorbis decoding from a commercial closed-source implmentation??
You say this like it's a bad thing! It's relied on every day.
DRAM (tiny charge requiring sustained refresh operations) is relied upon during normal operation of the computer. The proposal here is to also rely upon DRAM during and after the events that lead to a crash.
To respond specifically to your examples above, your battery supported laptop and palm pilot memory is reliable, but what happens if they crash? Is your laptop memory intact after something goes wrong? The microcontroller in a palm has no MMU, so if something does wrong, it'll be able to easily trash the memory.
Regarding data being sent as "a clump of electrons moving along a wire" (propagation of a change in voltage potential would be more accurate)... that just simply isn't the way it's done. Communication takes place using protocols which verify that the data has been properly received. Newer ATA transfer modes use a CRC, and even with the older modes, status bits are provided to verify that the data was properly written. It would be horribly unreliable to send a "clump of electrons" and hope that the data is received and stored properly.
Now, regarding the comment:
I almost think you're just looking to spread some FUD.
FUD, Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt is a marketing tactic, generally used by an established vendor when their well-known product is inferior and more expensive, and the best way to convince a customer to buy the established product is to scare the customer away from the competitor.
Why would I do that? I don't have any vested interest in the current practices. I'm not participating in the development of any journaled filesystems. I do a bit of freelance hardware design and small quantity sales, so if I thought this was a really good idea, I might go after making such a card and kernel patch.
But I believe the idea is fundamentally flawed.
During the unpredictable events that will lead to a crash, and the unpredictable behavior immediately following a crash, DRAM is going to be a much less reliable way to be holding data. It doesn't matter how well DRAM works during normal operation. DRAM has proven quite reliable, as long as the computer and memory controller operate properly.
Even with a specially designed memory controller (as a standard one won't do), it is quite risky to rely upon DRAM during a crash. Call it FUD if you like, but DRAM just isn't a reliable place to have data when a machine crashes. You say FUD now, but if anyone were to actually make such a card, the term I'd use would be Snake Oil.
Sure, a battery backup sounds like it solves this, but consider that DRAM stores its charge on tiny capacitors, and requires a controller to be performing "refresh" access cycles regularily (usually every 15.26 s). This means that not only must the battery be good, but the controller accessing the DRAM must continue providing the refresh cycles without interruption. That may sound simple, but not all DRAMs are created alike.... SDRAM DIMMs have a feature called Serial Presence Detect (SPD) that is a small non-volatile 2-wire serial EEPROM memory that hold identifying data about the size and timing parameters for the memory. A typical DRAM controller would be initialized at boot time... a card like this would require a special DRAM controller that only initialized its timings when the DRAM/battery is first installed. Perhaps the controller would be designed to use relatively slow and conservative timings, always, so it'd never be able to reinitialize to other settings (that could be wrong) and/or stop providing the critical refresh at any point.
The point is that to retain memory, DRAM requires not only power but a properly operating controller to supply the refresh cycles. Magnetic media maintains its memory without either of these conditions. Compared to magnetic media, DRAM is very volatile. "Mission Critical" data, whatever that may be, would be existing at tiny charges on the very tiny capacitors, which could dissipate in only about 4-8 ms, if the DRAM controller doesn't perform perfectly.... inside a computer (designed as a reliable server) which has just crashed for some unknown reason!
Only a couple days before
CmdrTaco posted this story about my little homebrew MP3 player effort, there was a run of banners for the
PJB-100. I was a bit worried that maybe they would change their mind, but they posted the story, even though my little home-grown open-source project is more or less aims to be the same thing as the PJB-100 and NJB.
Much as I like a good conspiracy theory, my personal experience (getting slashdot'd) suggests that they really don't tie the adverts to the articles, and in my case ran an article for an open-source project that aims to compete with what they had been advertising recently.
I'm trying to resist the urge to make a shameless plug for my little project..... you can find it if you want, and compare with the PJB and NJB. The short story is that my little project is a circuit board that you assemble with a drive, and currently has very few features and no display, but is GPL'd and has great audio output. Maybe someday it'll compare with the PJB when I get the display board designed.
Your inflated wage is a product of market dynamics, skilled computer workers are in short supply ... You are wise to "grab your share" before the market drops out
Since the mid 80's, there's been a decline in the number of students interested in engineering and computer programming. There's been a steady increase in the complexity of systems, requiring more and more skilled engineers. This hasn't just been the last few years. Maybe the trend will change... maybe the need for engineers will decrease, and maybe more students will be interested in learning technical skills. Maybe the economy will take a down turn and maybe there will be some cutbacks, but the overall trend of increasing complexity and lower student enrollment doesn't seem to be changing. Lots of "Maybe". The recent tech-IPO craze appears to have been a short-lived fad, but the larger trend is a steady increase in complexity, leading to a need for more skilled engineers, and there's no reason to believe that will change. Engineering studies seem to be "too hard" to a great number of students... perhaps that perception will change, but so far it seems like there's no end in sight.
Maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part:)
BTW: I did finish school, and in the last couple years as an undergrad, and in some of the grad work the courses were valuable, but most of the good learning has been in doing
my own projects.
ok, I know it's in a FAQ, but I was hoping to hear from the horse's mouth, so to speak. It was mod'd up to +5, you know. (wish I'd been the one who asked)
Well, anyway, stand out on Market Street in San Francisco some time with your dollar. See if you get on the 40s streetcar or the 80s bus, and see which provides better service.
I visited SF about a year ago, and at least the two days I was there, the busses were more accessible that the trollies.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the improvements are the result of user experiences with GNOME. "The application launch feedback program is designed to indicate that a program is in the process of being loaded," said Stachowiak. "We've had complaints about people clicking on the Netscape launcher 10 to 15 times before the program appears on the screen."
Well, if that's not taking user feedback to heart, I don't know what is. It takes a long time to load apps and users get impatient, so lets make a loading box to sooth them (instead of putting some work into making apps load faster).
Why does it take so damn long to load? What's going on that could possibly need 10-15 seconds? Come on, on a modern PC, that's enough time to transfer about 100 megs from a modern disk drive (or over 100 Mbit/sec ethernet), enough time to do an unimaginable number of computations, even in floating point. Only two types of things take time in the modern computing world:
- network latency, usually 20ms to 300ms
- software bloat, anywhere from 100ms to well beyond anyone's patience for software
It's refreshing to see that the gnome developers are keeping a keen eye on being lean-and-mean, NOT!Ok, maybe this message was a bit of a troll, but I'm still a bit pissed about having to upgrade the RAM on a machine where I installed Redhat 6.2. 64 megs of RAM and I was getting quite a bit of swapping running gnome with netscape, xmms, ssh, and several terminals. With this sort of attitude towards bloat and slowness, it sounds like gnome will continue the trend of software getting slower more rapidly than hardware getting faster, just like another OS & windowing environment vendor that we're all familiar with...
Controlling DNS' is like telling you what street you can stand on to give your speech.... If all the good streets (recognized and traveled by most people) are owned by major corporations then your right to speech is effectively denied.
It is critically important to be able to register your own domain name. Even if every web visitor finds your page from a search engine, if your speach offends someone with clout, all they have to do is threaten whomever is nice enough to host your pages under their domain name. You get censored very easily.
In the present example, you are unhappy with GM and create a GM-sucks page, and of course being a free-speech example, someone (probably with GM) doesn't like the page. You're not going to be an easy target, but whoever has been nice enough to host your page under their domain name probably is. Afterall, they're a business (in the theoritical world of corporate-only well-known TLDs), and your page isn't in their mission, and even one cease-and-desist letter with words like "confusingly similar to our regsitered trademark" is going to make the decision to stop helping you a no-brainer.
If you don't have your own domain name, you're screwed. All those links and bookmarks to your old URL now dead. Eventually the serach engines will index your page at the new site, but old links continue to propagate for a damn long time. My site was once hosted at a university web site, for about 3-4 years, and hundreds of links were made and all the search engines indexed it. Now, nearly 2 years after the move, still about 2000 hits/month (about 10-15% of my traffic) comes from a redirect that the old site was nice enough to leave in place, despite many all-night sessions resubmitting to all the major search engines and emailing to hundreds of web masters (often times taking considerable time to find out who's responsible for a page with the link). It is very important to have your own domain name.
It will take quite some time before your speech is as effective as before, and in a world where the only well-known domain names pander to corporate interests, you'll have to choose between registering a domain name that labels your page as having no valuable content, or hosting on someone else's site.
Jay, while your domain name is a .cx, it appears that you effectively control this domain name, which is a very different scenario that using "someisp.com/~you/gmsucks", where the ISP is an easy target for a trademark complain or other attempt at censorship, leaving the disgruntled consumer without the option to change the hosting to another ISP that will not be as easily pushed around.
Now, honestly, I'm not sure if this whole ICANN/ALCU thing really is a problem that will turn into corporate control of domain names.... the reason I posted this, and I hope it was clear, is that if you're going to publish anything significant on the web, you need to be able to register your own domain name. Suggesting that others will find your site from search engines and not by remembering your name is only significant until the hosting under someone else's name ends and many links, bookmarks and stored search engine result all stop working.
Maybe someone ought to get a gaint list of these sucker's email addresses and spam them with messages saying "all these spam emails are scams, don't send a single penny and don't click their links, because idiots who get taken keep these slimballs in business".
....by all those receipients who won't be able to Get Rich Quick until next week.
The sad truth is that the vast majority of Linux boxes are dual-boot and/or run wine/vmware (maybe plex86). MacOS on PPC hardware just isn't going to let you natively run those non-portable windoze apps, particularily games.
In other words, you can play what you like, but you're not allowed to contribute without paying the ante.
According to Thomson's licensing terms, you're only allowed to play for free if it meets these 4 conditions:
- Software implmentation for "desktop" use
- Distributed free of charge
- Downloaded via the Internet
- For personal use of end-users
These specific details are at this page. Any other software players, they want $0.50 each with a minimum of $15k/year (hope you sell an aweful lot), or a much larger one-time payment. Terms are similar for hardware, but there's no free version. They want quite a bit more if you're encoding.I've heard a number of people say that their patents only cover the encoding process. Maybe that's the case, and they're just trying to tax decoders without a leg to stand on.... but so far I've not seen a really good arguement backed up with references to the patents. If you know of one, please post a link or email me. Thanks.
But you'd better not tell anyone how to do it, cause that's illegal now (at least in the US). "Trafficing in Circumvention Technology", it's now called.
Yes! A herring!
We shall do no such thing.
Oh, please?
Cut down a tree with a herring? IT can't be done! (The Knights of Ni recoil in horror)
Oh! Don't say that word.
What word?
I cannot tell! Suffice to say is one of the words the Knights of Ni cannot hear!
How can we not say the word, if you don't tell us what IT is?
(cringing) AGHHH! You said IT again!
What, "is"?
No ... not "is"! Wouldn't get very far in life not saying "is."
My liege, it's Sir Robin!
Sir Robin!
My liege! IT's good to see you ...
Now he's said the word!
Surely you've not given up your quest for the Holy Grail?
He is sneaking away and buggering off ...
Shut up! ... No no no! Far from IT!
He said the word again!
I was looking for IT ...
AAAGHH!!!
Ah, here, here in this forest.
No, IT is far from this place.
Oh!! Stop saying the word! The word! The word we cannot hear!
Oh, stop IT!
You said IT again!
Hey, I said IT! I said IT! Oh! I said IT again! And there again! That's three ITs! Ohhh!
Of course, you only gave two solid examples, admittedly from two of the best known and most respected men in the field, but still only two.
Even with a third, I'm sure Bryce wouldn't back down.
>BTW, where are your 3 examples?
>Where is one?
>What, no proof?
>Ah, poor widdle kid.
Why don't you dig up some of those references you accidentally lost?
Indeed, his point is poorly made, and as nearly as I can tell goes something like this:
- Communism seemed like a good idea, but we all know it didn't work out.
- Communism failed because it "got bogged down in bureaucracy"
- He personally experienced bureaucracy having to fill out too many forms to get a business license (probably not in a communist state)
- Object methods often are implemented requiring references to other objects, which often times are built with constructors which require a large number of fields, similar to having to fill out those unpleasant gov't forms.
Maybe I missed something, but I was under the impression that communism failed because it lacked incentives for productive behavior which ultimately resulted in a massive decline in productivity. Some people have suggested to me, also apparantly incorrectly, that communism was too suceptible to abuse of power. Because capitalism also suffers this problem, I've spent the last 15 years or so believing the fundamental problem with communism was the lack of financial incentive for productive accomplishment.Silly me. I learned something today. The real reason communism failed and capitalism works is because communist nations had to bear the weight of excessive bureaucracy while the government structures of the western nations were able to run mean-and-lean, with very little overhead and only minimal bureaucratic hassle.
I tried to learn more things from Jacob's long rant about OOP, but somehow I didn't manage to come away with much insight.
That's probably the case.
If they in fact has a massive stockpile of cash as a result of monopoly overcharging (windows/office price remaining fixed when everything else about a new PC because 1/5th the price), morally, it's similar to having stolen property. The ill-gotten money should be returned and they should be prevented from doing it again. The other extreme should certainly be prevented.... allowing them to leverage their very strong position and massive cahce of cash to overtake other industrties and extract even more monopoly power and excessing monopoly overcharges.
There is a long-term harm to customers, both in higher costs associated with using products with poor interoperatibility (conformance with open standards). Consider the sorry state of affairs that web page authors must deal with, as one small example.
Because MS is in a monopoly position, there is also a clear harm to consumers when intentional interoperability crosses the line into anti-competitive practice. They have been found guilty, you know. The FTC and DoJ overlook much and usually just warn (witness the recent "just don't do it again" to the RIAA over nearly 10 years of price fixing). If the findings of fact in this case don't spell out the harm to you, probably nothing will.
If you can't see the harm that MS has done, you certainly haven't looked... or perhaps you have a value system, saddly, which leads you to believe that nearly any behaviour is acceptable in persuit of the almighty dollar.
I've tried to send complaints to some of these folks. Usually they don't have a feedback link. When they do, they never care that the page doesn't work. I usually send an email when the site doesn't work with javascript disabled. Often times it's just a pull-down list that jumps you to a certain part of the site automatically, and lacks a little "go" button next to it.
They could not care less. When they do respond, it's usually "Javascript is required". One of the really good recent examples I recall is the search page at iwon.com. If javascript is disabled, you get a blank page with only their logo in the corner. They didn't seem to care when I mentioned that every other search engine/portal works without javascript. If you're up for a challenge, try poking around at iwon.com's site to find an email address or feedback entry page. They obviously don't want to hear from their users.
I can, easily. Soft-money political contributions and other dubious lobbing of politicians. In many cases, large corporations resort to tricks that are illegal by today's (very lax) rules. Against the law, plain and simple!
Ok, perhaps M$ and Pepsi aren't the best examples, but dubious soft money contributions are the norm today. In some cases, they are illegal, and in most others, they are so clearly an injustice to democracy that "there ought to be a law".
I am so completely unoppressed by Pepsi that I openly flaunt them by drinking Coke, content in the knowledge that they don't even care.
Indeed, but are you equally sure that they've been held to the same legal standards that you have? Do they get special tax breaks, leaving other companies or hard-working citizens to take up the slack? Have they been allowed to pollute or trash the environment, only to have it later repaired with taxpayer's dollars? Has a blind eye been turned to anti-competitive practices, limiting your choice or causing you to pay more? In the case of MS, they're finally going to court for such a grand abuse, but monopoly abuse is a large problem, and more often that not, they get only a slap on the wrist, sometimes amounting to only a verbal warning "don't do it again" (RIAA price fixing, recently).
Your freedom and quality of life are impacted if your neighbors (be they a group of citizens or corporations) have a more favorable position before the law and lawmakers.
Except that there's effectively only two choices, both bad. Most voters dislike one, so they end up voting for the other. "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" is the way it turned out.
It'd sure be cool to make a low-cost board that could run the real linux, with real memory management (MMU), and a pretty speedy CPU. By low cost, I'm thinking able to sell at $120-$150 for board where you add a SDRAM DIMM and use a network bootstrap or add compact flash card for a local boot. So far, it's looking like the available PPC based off-the-shelf boards are quite expensive. I probably ought to do a bit more homework, but since you're here, my question is....
What are the propects for making a really low cost PPC-based embedded linux computer? Has anyone done it or tried? Is it even possible?
It seems that many projects, especially the hobby ones floating online, are using a specific-purpose DSP designed for mp3 decoding- the MAS3507d, the STA013, etc. I'd argue in a heartbeat that this is a mistake, and that a general purpose DSP can be significantly cheaper with still enough power to do mp3, and can be updated by software to decode other formats (limited by the power of the DSP, of ocurse).
Mine is one of those players you mention. I used the STA013 chip. There's a few compelling reasons to use the STA013 or MAS3507D. First of all, you get a really high quality decoder without having to write code, which is difficult and requires the expensive ISO standard (I paid $170 for it). Witness the poor performance of the NJB on slightly corrupt MP3 files that winamp and the STA013 can play just fine (and Creative spent a lot). The free MP3 decoder software all uses floating point. Floating point DSPs are very expensive. A second motivation is that the STA013 and MAS3507D use less power than a general purpose DSP chip. Third, these chips include the royalty paid to Thompson, which you don't get if you write the code yourself. Finally, I do not believe there is a MP3-capable programmable DSP chip that's "significantly cheaper" (at 100 qty, say) than the STA013. Perhaps you will reply to this and give a part number of a programmable DSP (don't forget the cost of external flash memory if it doesn't have built-in in-circuit upgradable flash memory).
Perhaps WMA and Ogg will be a big deal someday, but so far, the vast majority of people I've had contact with want cool user-interface features. Of course, I'm working to get there, and it's a damn good thing I designed the board to be flash upgradable!
Someday maybe MS will force WMA on everyone, perhaps right after their antitrust case is dismissed? But consider the a closed-source upgradable design is worthless if the company holding the code doesn't spend the time and money to create the upgrade. How likely is it that you'll get Vorbis decoding from a commercial closed-source implmentation??
DRAM (tiny charge requiring sustained refresh operations) is relied upon during normal operation of the computer. The proposal here is to also rely upon DRAM during and after the events that lead to a crash.
To respond specifically to your examples above, your battery supported laptop and palm pilot memory is reliable, but what happens if they crash? Is your laptop memory intact after something goes wrong? The microcontroller in a palm has no MMU, so if something does wrong, it'll be able to easily trash the memory.
Regarding data being sent as "a clump of electrons moving along a wire" (propagation of a change in voltage potential would be more accurate)... that just simply isn't the way it's done. Communication takes place using protocols which verify that the data has been properly received. Newer ATA transfer modes use a CRC, and even with the older modes, status bits are provided to verify that the data was properly written. It would be horribly unreliable to send a "clump of electrons" and hope that the data is received and stored properly.
Now, regarding the comment:
I almost think you're just looking to spread some FUD.
FUD, Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt is a marketing tactic, generally used by an established vendor when their well-known product is inferior and more expensive, and the best way to convince a customer to buy the established product is to scare the customer away from the competitor.
Why would I do that? I don't have any vested interest in the current practices. I'm not participating in the development of any journaled filesystems. I do a bit of freelance hardware design and small quantity sales, so if I thought this was a really good idea, I might go after making such a card and kernel patch.
But I believe the idea is fundamentally flawed.
During the unpredictable events that will lead to a crash, and the unpredictable behavior immediately following a crash, DRAM is going to be a much less reliable way to be holding data. It doesn't matter how well DRAM works during normal operation. DRAM has proven quite reliable, as long as the computer and memory controller operate properly.
Even with a specially designed memory controller (as a standard one won't do), it is quite risky to rely upon DRAM during a crash. Call it FUD if you like, but DRAM just isn't a reliable place to have data when a machine crashes. You say FUD now, but if anyone were to actually make such a card, the term I'd use would be Snake Oil.
Sure, a battery backup sounds like it solves this, but consider that DRAM stores its charge on tiny capacitors, and requires a controller to be performing "refresh" access cycles regularily (usually every 15.26 s). This means that not only must the battery be good, but the controller accessing the DRAM must continue providing the refresh cycles without interruption. That may sound simple, but not all DRAMs are created alike.... SDRAM DIMMs have a feature called Serial Presence Detect (SPD) that is a small non-volatile 2-wire serial EEPROM memory that hold identifying data about the size and timing parameters for the memory. A typical DRAM controller would be initialized at boot time... a card like this would require a special DRAM controller that only initialized its timings when the DRAM/battery is first installed. Perhaps the controller would be designed to use relatively slow and conservative timings, always, so it'd never be able to reinitialize to other settings (that could be wrong) and/or stop providing the critical refresh at any point.
The point is that to retain memory, DRAM requires not only power but a properly operating controller to supply the refresh cycles. Magnetic media maintains its memory without either of these conditions. Compared to magnetic media, DRAM is very volatile. "Mission Critical" data, whatever that may be, would be existing at tiny charges on the very tiny capacitors, which could dissipate in only about 4-8 ms, if the DRAM controller doesn't perform perfectly.... inside a computer (designed as a reliable server) which has just crashed for some unknown reason!
Much as I like a good conspiracy theory, my personal experience (getting slashdot'd) suggests that they really don't tie the adverts to the articles, and in my case ran an article for an open-source project that aims to compete with what they had been advertising recently.
I'm trying to resist the urge to make a shameless plug for my little project..... you can find it if you want, and compare with the PJB and NJB. The short story is that my little project is a circuit board that you assemble with a drive, and currently has very few features and no display, but is GPL'd and has great audio output. Maybe someday it'll compare with the PJB when I get the display board designed.
For a second example, I noticed ads for vmware a couple days ago, not far separated from this article about Plex86, and then this one as well.
Katz, what's the status with making a printed version and the prospect for getting it widely circulated?
You are wise to "grab your share" before the market drops out
Since the mid 80's, there's been a decline in the number of students interested in engineering and computer programming. There's been a steady increase in the complexity of systems, requiring more and more skilled engineers. This hasn't just been the last few years. Maybe the trend will change... maybe the need for engineers will decrease, and maybe more students will be interested in learning technical skills. Maybe the economy will take a down turn and maybe there will be some cutbacks, but the overall trend of increasing complexity and lower student enrollment doesn't seem to be changing. Lots of "Maybe". The recent tech-IPO craze appears to have been a short-lived fad, but the larger trend is a steady increase in complexity, leading to a need for more skilled engineers, and there's no reason to believe that will change. Engineering studies seem to be "too hard" to a great number of students... perhaps that perception will change, but so far it seems like there's no end in sight.
Maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part :)
BTW: I did finish school, and in the last couple years as an undergrad, and in some of the grad work the courses were valuable, but most of the good learning has been in doing my own projects.
ok, I know it's in a FAQ, but I was hoping to hear from the horse's mouth, so to speak. It was mod'd up to +5, you know. (wish I'd been the one who asked)
Oh well.
I visited SF about a year ago, and at least the two days I was there, the busses were more accessible that the trollies.