This post is mostly correct. The IBM cluster forms the proxy layer. The Texas Memory Systems box is a cache between these systems and the SQL servers. The hardware upgrade is on the proxy layer -- basically, they are replacing 1U SP 32-bit boxes with blade DP 64-bit Opteron boxes.
As far as Stackless goes, they aren't doing the coding themselves -- last I heard, they have the creator of Stackless at CCP doing the work. Going to 64-bit is a huge win though -- systems like Jita and Lagsulert (whose real name is Oursalert, but you get the idea) are now approaching 500 people in that system in prime time. Considering the number of agent missions they are running, and all the market activity that goes on, you've got to start getting close to your 32-bit architecture memory limit.
My father is one of the leading people working on this problem (carbon sequestration). His name is Brandon Nuttall, go Google on his name and read some of his stuff.
Executive summary: The same rock formations that sequester natural gas (shales are good for this, and the Devonian shale particularly good) are also theorized to be good for containing carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide could be liquefied and pumped down into the shale rock formation; there it could be contained almost indefinently.
This storage plan has lots going for it: - The shale formations have already proven themselves to be adequate containers. - Pumping CO2 into these rock formations would increase the yield of surrounding natural gas wells, just as pumping water into an underproducing oil well can increase the yield of surrounding wells. - Many power plants that burn gas are located very close to the source of fuel (just as the biggest coal-fired plants sit near coal strip mines in Kentucky). These plants can be modified to capture and compress CO2, and then pump the CO2 right back to the ground, maybe even in the same pipe.
This is an easy one. Speciation is a continuum, and what we say are "species" are merely milestones that we construct. In all actuality, the form with fewer legs was probably about to breed and have viable offsprint with 97 - 98% of the other forms that were involved in the experiment. Continue the experiment long enough, however, and that number of suitable mates for the new form would drop as that form was exposed to selection pressures. When that number drops to 0% (or something arbitrarily close to it), then is when scientists would place a new milestone, as a way of saying "these two forms are different".
The reason we usually don't see the in-between forms in the fossil record is that selection pressures that apply differently to two slightly different forms would tend to drive those forms apart quite efficiently. There have been some interesting simulations performed that show that a gene that confers even a 0.01% advantage will spread through a population quite rapidly (i.e. in an eyeblink of geological time).
Also, there is the fact that scientists look to see what "bin" (i.e. species) a form could be put in before going out and proving that the form should have a new bin all to itself.
Whenever execution switches between user mode and kernel mode, a context switch is required. Context switches are expensive.
Inidentally, this is one of the advantages of the microkernel approach: by severely limiting the code that must be run in kernel space, you can minimize context switches between kernel and user mode and save a lot of time.
You seem to be confused as to what ogg really is. Blame part of this confusion on Microsoft, who would lead you to believe that because a file has the extention.ogg and plays audio when you run it that it's an audio file.
The ogg format is a stream format, much like the avi format (published by Microsoft) is. Ogg's primary advantage is flexibility: you can embed practically anything into an ogg stream (video, audio, subtitle streams, whatever) that your player can interpret at the other end. Furthermore, the stream is fault-tolerant and should play even if damaged or incomplete.
(The ogg audio file you're thinking of is actually a vorbis audio stream multiplexed into an ogg.)
Probably the best place on the web right now to learn about video codecs and stream formats is doom9. You will also find that in the forums they are doing active research concerning a new stream format called mcf (well, actually an old stream format, I think it was specified before ogg) and a way to burn raw mcf streams to a CD a la VCD.
Doom9 also performs codec comparisons every time a company / individual / group thinks that they've produced the Latest and Greatest video codec. VP3 was obselete many months ago when it was being compared to div3 and even wmv8, both of which are suboptimal when compared head-to-head these days with div5 and xvid.
Another thing to keep in mind is that VP3's patent-unencombered state is a two-edged sword: while you don't have to worry about maybe having to pay MPEG4 license fees, you also don't have a chance in hell of being playable on any next-generation DVD player. Sure, if you're a game manufacturer and you're looking for a video and audio codec to use in in-game movies, you'll probably use an ogg file with a VP3 video stream and a vorbis audio stream; however, if you're producing video of your son's first steps that you want to throw into your grandfather's new DVD player, you'll be doing it in some variety of MPEG4.
1.0 was the API freeze release. Browsers in the 1.0.x series will be guaranteed to have an API which is feature- and bug-copmatible with the original 1.0 release. This means that developers can target 1.0 and not have to worry about the API changing every release in the "stable" branch.
1.x (past x=0) is the branch for continuing development. The API can and will change in these releases.
The point of the branching is that developers can target 1.0 and be confident that their applications won't be breaking on the very next release. Also, the developers can continue hacking at the code like they like to do, and the bugfixes that don't break the API can be backported to the 1.0.x branch. Best of both worlds scenario, really.
This seemingly random behavior is due to the mouse gestures being mapped to the left mouse button by default. You can change which button you use to use mouse gestures in the preferences panel.
...because I will clearly state what exactly a song is worth to me, because I want to be able to do whatever I want to do with the content I purchase, and because I am not afraid to tell others the value I place on content.
For.50$US a song, I would like permanent, fast access to a low-bitrate lossy copy of the song for my portable device (128 CBR mp3 would be reasonable), plus a high-bitrate lossy copy for my personal music collection on my hard drive (--alt-preset standard would be acceptable) from fast, reliable servers. These copies must be in an "unlocked" format.
For 1$US a song, I would like everything I get for.50$US a song, plus a losless copy of the song (in whatever format the RIAA decides is cheapest to distribute in, as long as the format is as unlocked as.wav) from fast, reliable servers.
For 2$US a song, I would like everything I get for 1$US a song, plus access to a few streaming videos of the band performing the song, and access to a streamed music video for the song (if it exists) from fast, reliable servers.
For 5$US a song, I would like everything I get for 2$US a song, plus access to downloadable copies of said video in unlocked formats from fast, reliable servers.
For 10$US a song, I would like everything I get for 5$US a song, plus what I like to call "all access" to the song: -If I want a copy of the song in a specific format in a specific quality, there is a service that will automatically generate that copy for me and deliver it to me like automagic. -I get access to any demo recordings of the song. -I get access to all the materials I would need to reproduce the song on instruments (guitar tabulature, etc.) -I get access to a multi-track recording of the song, where the individual tracks each represent one musical element of the final song when mixed together; i.e. one is the bassline, one is the lead guitar, one is the drummer, etc.
With a scheme such as this, I can "buy in" to a song to a level equal with my enjoyment of that song. I also have incentive to buy in to levels above.50$US: I'd gladly drop a dollar a song to have fast access to lossless copies of songs that I want to make a mix CD of, and I'd gladly drop another dollar on top of that to have fast access to some videos with maybe the band talking about the song, the music video, and maybe a video of them playing the song live. Let's say I decide to show said videos to my friends: three bucks on top of what I've already paid, and I get a VCD mailed to my house with SEVENTY MINUTES of video footage about my favorite song: the video, live performances, artist interviews, the works. If my band wants to try to learn to play the song, just pony up five more dollars and there you go. I know I'd pay five dollars for the bass tabs for Tool - Intolerance + an mp3 of just the bassline.
Hell, I even have some CDs where I'd gladly drop 10$US a song for the entire CD if the distributors (the RIAA, natch) would GIVE ME WHAT I WANT.
I DON'T WANT CRAP-QUALITY LOCKED COPIES OF CRAP SONGS, I WANT "COMPLETE" COPIES OF THE SONGS I LIKE, AND I AM WILLING TO PAY FOR FAST, RELIABLE ACCESS TO THE THINGS I WANT.
And put this in your pipe and smoke it: since the middleman is cut out (record stores), the artists can get a larger cut. If I buy a 12-track entire CD at.50$US/song, and the artist sees 20% of what I spend, that artist has pocketed 1.20$US of what I've paid, which is about as much as the artist makes if I were to buy the CD retail. If I buy Tool - Intolerance at the 10$US level, the artist pockets 2$US -- more than Tool probably makes for selling the entire Undertow CD at retail. If I turn around and buy the rest of that album at.50$US/song, then I'll have paid 14.50$US (less than what I would pay retail) and the artist will have pocketed 2.90$US, which is probably much, much more than they make per disc now.
Since when did the customer stop being always right?
C, C++, Fortran, and Pascal may have been specified after the fact. However, if you had studied programming languages you would know that to be able to implement a language you also have to implement a grammar.
A document describing the grammar of the language + the source code for the implementation of the language (a compiler) is much more descriptive than the implementation (the compiler) alone.
There is no way that you could write a compiler without said language grammar. The notion that you could conceviably write a useful compiler for a language that you only have knowledge of in an informal manner (i.e. me trying to write a Java compiler from just my knowledge of how the Java language works and not from design documents like grammars) is insanity.
Also, you mention Algol 60 being specified and then implemented. Two points:
1. Call-by-name is bizarre, but useful in some cases. Can you provide proof that the designers of Algol 60 considered the call-by-name parameter passing scheme implemented in that language a fault? 2. The whole point of having a series of steps before you get to implementation is because faults you catch in the requirements, specification, or design stages of development are much cheaper to correct than if you caught that same fault as you were implementing / after the product is already complete.
Implementation before specification = bugfest.
Specifications more important than Implementation
on
The Future of Ogg Vorbis
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What I'm going to say is what software engineers already know.
The specifications for software are much, much more important than your implementation. If the specifications are written completely and well, the design of said software project will "fall" from the specifications, and the implementation will "fall" from the design. "Specification" isn't something you can do after-the-fact; at best, you will have an incomplete specs document (because of developers who incompletely document their own code), and at worst you will have WRONG specs (because a developer makes an innocent typo that doesn't get caught).
Sure, the ogg stream format and the vorbis audio format have been frozen for a year; however, code is not self-documenting. One of my wisest professors said that the only man he has known that writes self-documenting code is Knuth, and you might be a good hacker, but you are NOT Knuth. Every mortal man needs specifications and design documents to be able to make ANYTHING out of ANY piece of code; hell, I have some relatively simple Java apps I hacked together six months ago that would read like Greek if I didn't have my specs and my design documents.
How can anyone expect to reasonably use an undocumented format?
Ok, so public support for Operation Bomb the Towelheads is declining; what's the government to do? I know! Let's make the American people xenophobic of ANOTHER socioreligious group!
What this all boils down to is a game of hide-the-sasuage that the government is playing with us. The general public is like a herd of buffalo: pretty dumb, hard to get moving, hard to turn, hard to stop when they ARE moving. Apparently support of the US' support of Israel (as Israel plays their own game of Bomb the Towelys) is waning, so the US needs another shiny object with which to distract the herd.
Hmm, I know how to distract them! Let's release a shiny press releas^H^H^H^H news item! Let's see, it's buzzword bingo time:
Hackers? CHECK Cyber-terrorism? CHECK Red commie Chinese? CHECK
SHINY OBJECT COMPLETED. DO YOU WISH TO DEPLOY? (Y/N)
DISTRACTION SUCCESSFUL, YOU MAY RECOMMENCE BOMBING OF THE ARAB NATION.
[/flamebait]
I'm sorry if I sound cynical, but the public seems to be infinitely stupid and the government seems to be infinitely willing to leverage this stupidity to their advantage. Just planting the meme of "Chinese Cyber-terrorists!" is bad enough. What's even worse is that the lemmings will be talking about this vaporous Chinese threat over the watercooler tomorrow morning instead of talking about how Israel murdered so many Palestinians and buried them in a mass grave.
It's a red herring planted by a cynical government which isn't afraid to use blatant misdirection to draw attention away from itself.
Perhaps you're right, I just noticed my total lack of perspective. Here at school what I lack is processor power and disk space, and what I have is gobs of bandwidth. I suppose this isn't the case in the real world, eh?
"It of course assumes that there are any graphical UNIX mail clients that are not mediocre."
Hmm. At least one person likes using Mulberry on UNIX. The KMail client that ships with KDE3 is actually usable (once they fixed that showstopper bug with its IMAP support that drove me to Mozilla mail when I was using KDE2). It even works perfectly with my school's SSL-enabled IMAP server.
/me returns to setting up his X-Windows for next year, when he is going to run all his Linux clients' desktops off a remote FreeBSD machine running X;)
/me prays to the Great Golden God of gigabit switches in a university setting...
If you're in a mixed environment, I don't understand why you don't use X, use your favorite client on UNIX, and farm out that mail client you like to your other systems using X-Windows. Why bother having three monolithic binaries of a mediocre mail client, one binary on each machine type when you could just be running the mail client you really like on the UNIX machine and use X to use it from the other platforms?
I know there are competent X Servers on Windows (Exceed and Reflection aren't bad) and on Mac OSX; don't know about classic Macs, though...
The idea when creating a user interface is to make it consistent and easy to use on the flat 2d space of your computer monitor.
I truly can't think of a much worse idea than your suggestion. The last thing users need is a mail client that plays hide-the-sasuage with emails automatically based on built-in, arbitrary criteria. I can see the support calls now:
Me: ITS Help Desk, this is Brandon.
Them: [hysterical] I can't find that email from my boss, it's disappeared!
Me: Ok, see if your boss has a folder on the folder list for your email account.
Them: Folder list? What folder list?
Me: [ten minute hunt for what (l)user has done with their folder lists, cumulating in the revelation that the user thought she had a virus in her mail that was creating all these strange folders and that she deleted on sight]
I have to support Mulberry here at Vanderbilt, where I work on the help desk. We are migrating faculty and staff to Mulberry.
Let it be known that it's a user interface disaster. I mean, have you seen the preferences dialog box? Tabbed panes inside tabbed panes with some extra controls along the outside. It's the poster child for crappy UI design.
On this same topic, open Mulberry and pull down ANY menu... you get something like fifty options, some of them with little triangles that point to MORE options; there's just too much there, and it's too poorly organized to be able to use, much less support.
And my final bitch. It's an MDI interface with no internal taskbar. IMHO, that is the cardinal sin of MDI interfaces when you can make windows lay on top of iconified windows and you have to play Window Jenga to find anything; it totally kills the usefulness of MDI interfaces because you have to dig around to find anything you've minimized. Good: Mozilla, Bad: Forte for Java (in MDI mode), Mulberry.
Doom9's site is the premiere site on the web for video encoding. Doom9 actively tries to get his hands on the newest encoding tools, and periodically he tests them to see which codecs give the best results.
It used to be that along with the lastest versions of DivX, he tested WMV and VP3; he doesn't anymore: WMV and VP3 consistently lost and lost badly to div3 sbc, div4, and xvid. You can't say that VP3 is "the next DivX" when it's can't outperform the ancient div3, much less div4 or the newly released div5 / xvid.
[shameless plug]
I really, really,/really/ like xvid. It's an open source reimplementation of Project Mayo, the project that led to the development of div4. Development is fast; I have realized significant gains in quality and usability in even the past two weeks. The codec is fast; on my crappy windows machine it crunches frames faster than div4 and div5 and its playback filter (w/postprocessing!) uses fewer CPU cycles than div4 or div5's.
If you want to play around with xvid, the easiest way to start is to go to the xvid forums at doom9.org and read about what the codec can do for you.
Most of those applications I run and let hang out in the background (vdub + dbgv, trillian, my file manager, etc.). It's funny, the OS I would like to have virtual desktops doesn't ship with them (Windows) and the OS that ships with virtual desktops (SuSE is the distro I use) I don't use for any applications where I need that kind of fleibility.
"Using tabbed windows also works poorly when you want a notepad window to be associated with one task, and an irc window to be associated with another task."
If I understand you correctly, you are saying you want to associate say a notepad task with one mozilla window, and an IRC task with another mozilla window, and that tabbed interfaces are bad because they don't let you do things like this.
My build of Mozilla will let you open multiple Mozilla sessions, within any one of which one or more tabs can be open. You can have a virtual desktop (task-oriented grouping) say with Forte for Java open along with a single instance of mozilla, within which are several windows displaying Java documentation. In another virtual desktop, associated with another virtual task, I can have a separate Mozilla window open, with separate tabs all displaying pages related to the task I am performing on that desktop.
Oh yes, ALT+TAB is surely convenient when I'm trying to switch between individual Internet Exploder windows when I have 25 separate windows going right now linked to 13 different applications...
If you read the site, you would have noticed that by default the gestures are controlled by your left mouse button. I change this to something more convenient like the middle mouse button.
I actually prefer opening new tabs, mainly because it's fast and easy to switch from tab to tab at the keyboard; CTRL+PGUP and CTRL+PGDN. I haven't investigated programming mouse gestures in Moz to switch tabs, but it seems to be a Really Good Idea.
And you can't accuse Mozilla of crashing all the time or not rendering pages quickly or accurately; maybe when it was at M18, certainly not now.
Learn to love tabbed browsing if you have complaints about startup time. Once it's running, hit CTRL+T under Windows to open a new tab; it's much faster than opening a new window because of the reduced window manager overhead. Hell, if you're ambitious you can configure Mozilla to open a new tab whenever you middle-click on a link; that's a KILLER feature.
Add the Mozilla mouse gestures package and you will be setup to browse.
What I used to do: get online, troll the web for about 90 minutes, get bored, get offline.
What I do now: log on to FTP, download a pile of Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar, troll the web for about 45 minutes, get bored, get offline and watch the episodes I downloaded.
Though I spend less time browsing the web now, the Internet enables much more of my entertainment than it did in the past. Though I spent only 45 minutes online, If I downloaded three episodes of TSFS in that 45 minutes my total entertainment time is 45+60 or 105 minutes, a longer time than what I have spent in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
This post is mostly correct. The IBM cluster forms the proxy layer. The Texas Memory Systems box is a cache between these systems and the SQL servers. The hardware upgrade is on the proxy layer -- basically, they are replacing 1U SP 32-bit boxes with blade DP 64-bit Opteron boxes.
As far as Stackless goes, they aren't doing the coding themselves -- last I heard, they have the creator of Stackless at CCP doing the work. Going to 64-bit is a huge win though -- systems like Jita and Lagsulert (whose real name is Oursalert, but you get the idea) are now approaching 500 people in that system in prime time. Considering the number of agent missions they are running, and all the market activity that goes on, you've got to start getting close to your 32-bit architecture memory limit.
My father is one of the leading people working on this problem (carbon sequestration). His name is Brandon Nuttall, go Google on his name and read some of his stuff.
Executive summary: The same rock formations that sequester natural gas (shales are good for this, and the Devonian shale particularly good) are also theorized to be good for containing carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide could be liquefied and pumped down into the shale rock formation; there it could be contained almost indefinently.
This storage plan has lots going for it:
- The shale formations have already proven themselves to be adequate containers.
- Pumping CO2 into these rock formations would increase the yield of surrounding natural gas wells, just as pumping water into an underproducing oil well can increase the yield of surrounding wells.
- Many power plants that burn gas are located very close to the source of fuel (just as the biggest coal-fired plants sit near coal strip mines in Kentucky). These plants can be modified to capture and compress CO2, and then pump the CO2 right back to the ground, maybe even in the same pipe.
This is an easy one. Speciation is a continuum, and what we say are "species" are merely milestones that we construct. In all actuality, the form with fewer legs was probably about to breed and have viable offsprint with 97 - 98% of the other forms that were involved in the experiment. Continue the experiment long enough, however, and that number of suitable mates for the new form would drop as that form was exposed to selection pressures. When that number drops to 0% (or something arbitrarily close to it), then is when scientists would place a new milestone, as a way of saying "these two forms are different".
The reason we usually don't see the in-between forms in the fossil record is that selection pressures that apply differently to two slightly different forms would tend to drive those forms apart quite efficiently. There have been some interesting simulations performed that show that a gene that confers even a 0.01% advantage will spread through a population quite rapidly (i.e. in an eyeblink of geological time).
Also, there is the fact that scientists look to see what "bin" (i.e. species) a form could be put in before going out and proving that the form should have a new bin all to itself.
Two words: context switches.
Whenever execution switches between user mode and kernel mode, a context switch is required. Context switches are expensive.
Inidentally, this is one of the advantages of the microkernel approach: by severely limiting the code that must be run in kernel space, you can minimize context switches between kernel and user mode and save a lot of time.
You seem to be confused as to what ogg really is. Blame part of this confusion on Microsoft, who would lead you to believe that because a file has the extention .ogg and plays audio when you run it that it's an audio file.
The ogg format is a stream format, much like the avi format (published by Microsoft) is. Ogg's primary advantage is flexibility: you can embed practically anything into an ogg stream (video, audio, subtitle streams, whatever) that your player can interpret at the other end. Furthermore, the stream is fault-tolerant and should play even if damaged or incomplete.
(The ogg audio file you're thinking of is actually a vorbis audio stream multiplexed into an ogg.)
Probably the best place on the web right now to learn about video codecs and stream formats is doom9. You will also find that in the forums they are doing active research concerning a new stream format called mcf (well, actually an old stream format, I think it was specified before ogg) and a way to burn raw mcf streams to a CD a la VCD.
Doom9 also performs codec comparisons every time a company / individual / group thinks that they've produced the Latest and Greatest video codec. VP3 was obselete many months ago when it was being compared to div3 and even wmv8, both of which are suboptimal when compared head-to-head these days with div5 and xvid.
Another thing to keep in mind is that VP3's patent-unencombered state is a two-edged sword: while you don't have to worry about maybe having to pay MPEG4 license fees, you also don't have a chance in hell of being playable on any next-generation DVD player. Sure, if you're a game manufacturer and you're looking for a video and audio codec to use in in-game movies, you'll probably use an ogg file with a VP3 video stream and a vorbis audio stream; however, if you're producing video of your son's first steps that you want to throw into your grandfather's new DVD player, you'll be doing it in some variety of MPEG4.
-inq
This has been discussed before.
1.0 was the API freeze release. Browsers in the 1.0.x series will be guaranteed to have an API which is feature- and bug-copmatible with the original 1.0 release. This means that developers can target 1.0 and not have to worry about the API changing every release in the "stable" branch.
1.x (past x=0) is the branch for continuing development. The API can and will change in these releases.
The point of the branching is that developers can target 1.0 and be confident that their applications won't be breaking on the very next release. Also, the developers can continue hacking at the code like they like to do, and the bugfixes that don't break the API can be backported to the 1.0.x branch. Best of both worlds scenario, really.
-inq
About the gestures.
This seemingly random behavior is due to the mouse gestures being mapped to the left mouse button by default. You can change which button you use to use mouse gestures in the preferences panel.
-inq
...because I will clearly state what exactly a song is worth to me, because I want to be able to do whatever I want to do with the content I purchase, and because I am not afraid to tell others the value I place on content.
.50$US a song, I would like permanent, fast access to a low-bitrate lossy copy of the song for my portable device (128 CBR mp3 would be reasonable), plus a high-bitrate lossy copy for my personal music collection on my hard drive (--alt-preset standard would be acceptable) from fast, reliable servers. These copies must be in an "unlocked" format.
.50$US a song, plus a losless copy of the song (in whatever format the RIAA decides is cheapest to distribute in, as long as the format is as unlocked as .wav) from fast, reliable servers.
.50$US: I'd gladly drop a dollar a song to have fast access to lossless copies of songs that I want to make a mix CD of, and I'd gladly drop another dollar on top of that to have fast access to some videos with maybe the band talking about the song, the music video, and maybe a video of them playing the song live. Let's say I decide to show said videos to my friends: three bucks on top of what I've already paid, and I get a VCD mailed to my house with SEVENTY MINUTES of video footage about my favorite song: the video, live performances, artist interviews, the works. If my band wants to try to learn to play the song, just pony up five more dollars and there you go. I know I'd pay five dollars for the bass tabs for Tool - Intolerance + an mp3 of just the bassline.
.50$US/song, and the artist sees 20% of what I spend, that artist has pocketed 1.20$US of what I've paid, which is about as much as the artist makes if I were to buy the CD retail. If I buy Tool - Intolerance at the 10$US level, the artist pockets 2$US -- more than Tool probably makes for selling the entire Undertow CD at retail. If I turn around and buy the rest of that album at .50$US/song, then I'll have paid 14.50$US (less than what I would pay retail) and the artist will have pocketed 2.90$US, which is probably much, much more than they make per disc now.
For
For 1$US a song, I would like everything I get for
For 2$US a song, I would like everything I get for 1$US a song, plus access to a few streaming videos of the band performing the song, and access to a streamed music video for the song (if it exists) from fast, reliable servers.
For 5$US a song, I would like everything I get for 2$US a song, plus access to downloadable copies of said video in unlocked formats from fast, reliable servers.
For 10$US a song, I would like everything I get for 5$US a song, plus what I like to call "all access" to the song:
-If I want a copy of the song in a specific format in a specific quality, there is a service that will automatically generate that copy for me and deliver it to me like automagic.
-I get access to any demo recordings of the song.
-I get access to all the materials I would need to reproduce the song on instruments (guitar tabulature, etc.)
-I get access to a multi-track recording of the song, where the individual tracks each represent one musical element of the final song when mixed together; i.e. one is the bassline, one is the lead guitar, one is the drummer, etc.
With a scheme such as this, I can "buy in" to a song to a level equal with my enjoyment of that song. I also have incentive to buy in to levels above
Hell, I even have some CDs where I'd gladly drop 10$US a song for the entire CD if the distributors (the RIAA, natch) would GIVE ME WHAT I WANT.
I DON'T WANT CRAP-QUALITY LOCKED COPIES OF CRAP SONGS, I WANT "COMPLETE" COPIES OF THE SONGS I LIKE, AND I AM WILLING TO PAY FOR FAST, RELIABLE ACCESS TO THE THINGS I WANT.
And put this in your pipe and smoke it: since the middleman is cut out (record stores), the artists can get a larger cut. If I buy a 12-track entire CD at
Since when did the customer stop being always right?
-inq
Is this conceviable? Could you embed a 486 and an 8mbit ROM onto a NIC and have it run its own TCP/IP stack?
About how much horsepower do you think you would need to do something like IPSec? Is that handled by a secondary processor already anyway?
C, C++, Fortran, and Pascal may have been specified after the fact. However, if you had studied programming languages you would know that to be able to implement a language you also have to implement a grammar.
A document describing the grammar of the language + the source code for the implementation of the language (a compiler) is much more descriptive than the implementation (the compiler) alone.
There is no way that you could write a compiler without said language grammar. The notion that you could conceviably write a useful compiler for a language that you only have knowledge of in an informal manner (i.e. me trying to write a Java compiler from just my knowledge of how the Java language works and not from design documents like grammars) is insanity.
Also, you mention Algol 60 being specified and then implemented. Two points:
1. Call-by-name is bizarre, but useful in some cases. Can you provide proof that the designers of Algol 60 considered the call-by-name parameter passing scheme implemented in that language a fault?
2. The whole point of having a series of steps before you get to implementation is because faults you catch in the requirements, specification, or design stages of development are much cheaper to correct than if you caught that same fault as you were implementing / after the product is already complete.
Implementation before specification = bugfest.
What I'm going to say is what software engineers already know.
The specifications for software are much, much more important than your implementation. If the specifications are written completely and well, the design of said software project will "fall" from the specifications, and the implementation will "fall" from the design. "Specification" isn't something you can do after-the-fact; at best, you will have an incomplete specs document (because of developers who incompletely document their own code), and at worst you will have WRONG specs (because a developer makes an innocent typo that doesn't get caught).
Sure, the ogg stream format and the vorbis audio format have been frozen for a year; however, code is not self-documenting. One of my wisest professors said that the only man he has known that writes self-documenting code is Knuth, and you might be a good hacker, but you are NOT Knuth. Every mortal man needs specifications and design documents to be able to make ANYTHING out of ANY piece of code; hell, I have some relatively simple Java apps I hacked together six months ago that would read like Greek if I didn't have my specs and my design documents.
How can anyone expect to reasonably use an undocumented format?
[flamebait]
Ok, so public support for Operation Bomb the Towelheads is declining; what's the government to do? I know! Let's make the American people xenophobic of ANOTHER socioreligious group!
What this all boils down to is a game of hide-the-sasuage that the government is playing with us. The general public is like a herd of buffalo: pretty dumb, hard to get moving, hard to turn, hard to stop when they ARE moving. Apparently support of the US' support of Israel (as Israel plays their own game of Bomb the Towelys) is waning, so the US needs another shiny object with which to distract the herd.
Hmm, I know how to distract them! Let's release a shiny press releas^H^H^H^H news item! Let's see, it's buzzword bingo time:
Hackers? CHECK
Cyber-terrorism? CHECK
Red commie Chinese? CHECK
SHINY OBJECT COMPLETED. DO YOU WISH TO DEPLOY? (Y/N)
DISTRACTION SUCCESSFUL, YOU MAY RECOMMENCE BOMBING OF THE ARAB NATION.
[/flamebait]
I'm sorry if I sound cynical, but the public seems to be infinitely stupid and the government seems to be infinitely willing to leverage this stupidity to their advantage. Just planting the meme of "Chinese Cyber-terrorists!" is bad enough. What's even worse is that the lemmings will be talking about this vaporous Chinese threat over the watercooler tomorrow morning instead of talking about how Israel murdered so many Palestinians and buried them in a mass grave.
It's a red herring planted by a cynical government which isn't afraid to use blatant misdirection to draw attention away from itself.
It's possible to run YaST2 from the console in text mode, that's why the dumped the original YaST.
Perhaps you're right, I just noticed my total lack of perspective. Here at school what I lack is processor power and disk space, and what I have is gobs of bandwidth. I suppose this isn't the case in the real world, eh?
;)
"It of course assumes that there are any graphical UNIX mail clients that are not mediocre."
Hmm. At least one person likes using Mulberry on UNIX. The KMail client that ships with KDE3 is actually usable (once they fixed that showstopper bug with its IMAP support that drove me to Mozilla mail when I was using KDE2). It even works perfectly with my school's SSL-enabled IMAP server.
/me returns to setting up his X-Windows for next year, when he is going to run all his Linux clients' desktops off a remote FreeBSD machine running X
/me prays to the Great Golden God of gigabit switches in a university setting...
-inq
If you're in a mixed environment, I don't understand why you don't use X, use your favorite client on UNIX, and farm out that mail client you like to your other systems using X-Windows. Why bother having three monolithic binaries of a mediocre mail client, one binary on each machine type when you could just be running the mail client you really like on the UNIX machine and use X to use it from the other platforms?
I know there are competent X Servers on Windows (Exceed and Reflection aren't bad) and on Mac OSX; don't know about classic Macs, though...
-inq
...
Wow, another bad user interface suggestion.
The idea when creating a user interface is to make it consistent and easy to use on the flat 2d space of your computer monitor.
I truly can't think of a much worse idea than your suggestion. The last thing users need is a mail client that plays hide-the-sasuage with emails automatically based on built-in, arbitrary criteria. I can see the support calls now:
Me: ITS Help Desk, this is Brandon.
Them: [hysterical] I can't find that email from my boss, it's disappeared!
Me: Ok, see if your boss has a folder on the folder list for your email account.
Them: Folder list? What folder list?
Me: [ten minute hunt for what (l)user has done with their folder lists, cumulating in the revelation that the user thought she had a virus in her mail that was creating all these strange folders and that she deleted on sight]
Me: *dumps core*
Bad, bad, bad.
-inq
I have to support Mulberry here at Vanderbilt, where I work on the help desk. We are migrating faculty and staff to Mulberry.
Let it be known that it's a user interface disaster. I mean, have you seen the preferences dialog box? Tabbed panes inside tabbed panes with some extra controls along the outside. It's the poster child for crappy UI design.
On this same topic, open Mulberry and pull down ANY menu... you get something like fifty options, some of them with little triangles that point to MORE options; there's just too much there, and it's too poorly organized to be able to use, much less support.
And my final bitch. It's an MDI interface with no internal taskbar. IMHO, that is the cardinal sin of MDI interfaces when you can make windows lay on top of iconified windows and you have to play Window Jenga to find anything; it totally kills the usefulness of MDI interfaces because you have to dig around to find anything you've minimized. Good: Mozilla, Bad: Forte for Java (in MDI mode), Mulberry.
-inq
Doom9's site is the premiere site on the web for video encoding. Doom9 actively tries to get his hands on the newest encoding tools, and periodically he tests them to see which codecs give the best results.
It used to be that along with the lastest versions of DivX, he tested WMV and VP3; he doesn't anymore: WMV and VP3 consistently lost and lost badly to div3 sbc, div4, and xvid. You can't say that VP3 is "the next DivX" when it's can't outperform the ancient div3, much less div4 or the newly released div5 / xvid.
[shameless plug]
I really, really, /really/ like xvid. It's an open source reimplementation of Project Mayo, the project that led to the development of div4. Development is fast; I have realized significant gains in quality and usability in even the past two weeks. The codec is fast; on my crappy windows machine it crunches frames faster than div4 and div5 and its playback filter (w/postprocessing!) uses fewer CPU cycles than div4 or div5's.
If you want to play around with xvid, the easiest way to start is to go to the xvid forums at doom9.org and read about what the codec can do for you.
[/shameless plug]
-inq
Most of those applications I run and let hang out in the background (vdub + dbgv, trillian, my file manager, etc.). It's funny, the OS I would like to have virtual desktops doesn't ship with them (Windows) and the OS that ships with virtual desktops (SuSE is the distro I use) I don't use for any applications where I need that kind of fleibility.
"Using tabbed windows also works poorly when you want a notepad window to be associated with one task, and an irc window to be associated with another task."
If I understand you correctly, you are saying you want to associate say a notepad task with one mozilla window, and an IRC task with another mozilla window, and that tabbed interfaces are bad because they don't let you do things like this.
My build of Mozilla will let you open multiple Mozilla sessions, within any one of which one or more tabs can be open. You can have a virtual desktop (task-oriented grouping) say with Forte for Java open along with a single instance of mozilla, within which are several windows displaying Java documentation. In another virtual desktop, associated with another virtual task, I can have a separate Mozilla window open, with separate tabs all displaying pages related to the task I am performing on that desktop.
What's the disadvantage here?
-inq
Oh yes, ALT+TAB is surely convenient when I'm trying to switch between individual Internet Exploder windows when I have 25 separate windows going right now linked to 13 different applications...
Wait, that's not convenient at all.
-inq
If you read the site, you would have noticed that by default the gestures are controlled by your left mouse button. I change this to something more convenient like the middle mouse button.
-inq
I actually prefer opening new tabs, mainly because it's fast and easy to switch from tab to tab at the keyboard; CTRL+PGUP and CTRL+PGDN. I haven't investigated programming mouse gestures in Moz to switch tabs, but it seems to be a Really Good Idea.
And you can't accuse Mozilla of crashing all the time or not rendering pages quickly or accurately; maybe when it was at M18, certainly not now.
-inq
No, Mozilla has a mouse gestures package, it's a toolbar you add and it drops a configure dialog in your Preferences dialog.
/me whistles.
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/
-inq
Learn to love tabbed browsing if you have complaints about startup time. Once it's running, hit CTRL+T under Windows to open a new tab; it's much faster than opening a new window because of the reduced window manager overhead. Hell, if you're ambitious you can configure Mozilla to open a new tab whenever you middle-click on a link; that's a KILLER feature.
Add the Mozilla mouse gestures package and you will be setup to browse.
-inq
What I used to do: get online, troll the web for about 90 minutes, get bored, get offline.
What I do now: log on to FTP, download a pile of Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar, troll the web for about 45 minutes, get bored, get offline and watch the episodes I downloaded.
Though I spend less time browsing the web now, the Internet enables much more of my entertainment than it did in the past. Though I spent only 45 minutes online, If I downloaded three episodes of TSFS in that 45 minutes my total entertainment time is 45+60 or 105 minutes, a longer time than what I have spent in the past.
-inq