Businessweek seems to think that Video Games are the future of entertainment, not just technologically, but in terms of marketshare, as well.
AFAIK, The Video Game Industry (TM) is bigger than The Movie Industry (TM).
Soccer moms are actually a smaller demographic, but they may represent the same sort of small but noisy demographic that tends to get laws passed over the large but indifferent demographic.
With a modern, metadata, high-performance filesystem (read Reiser4), a hierarchy of short text files can be far 'richer' (in Microsoftian terms) than the Win32 registry, while being faster to boot (haha, pun not intended).
The registry is an ugly pile of spaghetti.
A directory tree of 10 million files with correctly set permissions and metadata is easy to navigate by hand, and applicaitons can pull/put whatever they need using metadata searches (which are blazingly fast).
It's not quite as full-featured as SQL, but it can be pretty good, all the while remaining hand-editable and easily human parsable. Not to mention you can do a metadata search far faster (near instant) than you can search the registry.
In a contest between the Registry, and/etc full of random config files, I'd have to say the pros and cons are pretty equal.
In a contest between the Registry, and a bleeding-edge Reiser4 setup, XML config files win in every single way. Each one of the advantages you list is actually easier to achieve in the config file hierarchy than the Win32 registry.
With cutting-edge filesystems, like ReiserFS4, accessing 10 million one line text files for configuration data is just as fast, if not faster, than parsing through 1 all-in-one config files.
ReiserFS4 is designed to be the opposite of the latest "the-database-is-the-filesystem" fad.
In ReiserFS4, there are no performance limitations with using your filesystem AS the database. Stick whatever settings you want in a short config file, drop it in your config directory tree, add pertinent metadata, and lather, rinse, repeat.
Potentially, your apps don't need to know exactly where the settings are; you can find out using correctly set metadata. Keep everything in zipped XML, add appropriate metadata whenever possible, and duplicate a subset of the/etc directory in each users home directory, and you have a much more perfect configuration management setup than the Win32 registry.
The only other feature I could possibly want is config files that recreate themselves when you delete them. Tweaking on Mac OS X is a lot less hairy raising than doing so on Linux, because on OS X ifi you botch a config file you just delete it and you a default one appears the next time you run the app.
It helps for those idiots like me that believe they can succesfully rewrite all their configuration files on one swoop, and thus don't make backups:-)
1. A fractionalized DNS system would divide into blocks. I suspect North America, and possibly Latin America, and most likely Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan would stay with ICANN
2. The regulated 'un-regulated' EU system would supposedly permit nations to implement their own national policies.
As a result, you'd have the ICANN internet (DNS anyways), where politics played little role, but if you infringed a trademark, or put up kiddie porn, you'd get screwed.
Then you'd have the EU system. Taiwan would be official recognized as a territory of China. Tienneman square would not be discussed. North and South korea would be referred to as the unified penisula. This, plus the above stupidity in the U.S. system as well (think the EU won't regulate trademarks???)
I'd be thrilled if the system actually broke up into many pieces, as long as the IP address space did not get tampered with. I'd subscribe to OpenNIC, and the national DNS systems could go take it up the butt.
Someone has to keep the Nazi sites off the internet (Germany) Someone has to keep radical islamic schools from preaching (France) Someone has to keep rebels under wraps (S. Arabia) Someone has to suppress democracy (China) Someone has to keep Taiwan as a territory rather than an independant nation (China) Who controls Iraq's TLD? What about 'Korea'? North Korea would love to posit itself as the virtual government of the penisula.
Not that the U.S. doesn't play these games, either. Tradenames and all that jazz, you know.
Governments love to regulate. Governments always have an agenda. And no government is willing to be seen as 2nd rate (Why does U.S. get.com ???), and totalitarian states salivate over the prospect of UN control rather than market and/or U.S. control.
The EU plan was applauded by states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, leading the former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt to express misgivings on his weblog: "It seems as if the European position has been hijacked by officials that have been driven by interests that should not be ours.
"We really can't have a Europe that is applauded by China and Iran and Saudi Arabia on the future governance of the internet. Even those critical of the United States must see where such a position risks taking us."
As I've said before, I'll be happy if the issue of IP address allocation is handled by the ITU. DNS should not be under the control of a central organization.
Notice that in the U.S. you are permitted to use any DNS you may like? Sure the root DNS server is Icann moderated, but you can select anything?
Anyone believe Iran (I'm 1/2 Persian) will allow that? Or China?
Or that China will permit a Taiwanese TLD in the New, UN-moderated, EU-sponsored DNS governing association?
Places like S. Arabia, China, and Iran can't wait for DNS to be controlled by the UN, because all kinds of silly nonsense happens in UN politics. Although China may have its sights set on the RoC, as of know, its insane to posit that Taiwan isn't an independant nation.
PDF is the format for communication with the public.
AFAIK, PDF is well supported, and the number ONE format for document interchange.
Oh, you mean vendors/interdeparment stuff/contractors?
Well, you're working of the state. Guess what; you play by their rules.
The state will interact with its consitutents, the public, in an extremely well supported format.
The state will handle its own affairs in an open format, so that these constituents will have access to the end of time. It's a record keep issue, and its done for their benefit.
Also, consider that you have to change formats anyways. It's either MS XML or OpenDocument XML.
OpenDocument is the better choice for a government.
dada21.... hmm... suspiscious, I suspect you of being a troll.
As far as I know, Fox News does not have a policy of being biased.
What they do have is a policy of being *extremely* inflammatory.
They will always make it a point to mention the truth as a 'viewpoint'.
They'll also announce every other viewpoint, true or untrue, and the headline will be the one to prompt the greatest amount of reaction, positive or negative.
Obivously, one can see where this develop its own sort of bias.
Fair and balanced? Technically, yes. They don't outright *lie*. They don't even particularly advertise one cause over another, except as-is necessary to generate viewer interest, positive OR negative.
Fox News understands that they can get more viewer by being extremist. Conservatives watch because they can toe the party line. Liberals watchs so they can dispute it. Fox News wins both ways.
Although he may have been a little bit rude, he's correct.
It's just a plain link, and none of the rest of us are seeing any e-mail address, Russ or not. There's no Session ID to be passed, barring some kind of crazy router issue on your end.
I suggest checking your system more closely for 0wernship?
Not an insult, just suggesting perhaps you missed something.
As in leveraging our synergies for efficent allocation of resources in man-watt-hours?
As in holographic agents dynamically simulating emulated off-shore technical assist?
Or, smart interface, as in 'transparent' window borders in a butt-ugly color scheme straight out of the SuSE 9.2 release?
*yawn*
Anyone see anything *interesting* in Vista which hasn't already been done elsewhere? Please don't tell me about stuff that MS is planning to release late; I mean stuff that actually exists NOW in the beta. You know, the not-vaporware stuff; like the smart interface.
I'm not a programmer, but, this stuff is *strictly* a problem of management. The corporation, not the programmer, should be held liable, if anyone at all.
"I'm giving you this project. It's going to take three weeks of work. I need it next thursday. Oh, and no bugs; You'll get sued if you screwed up, as the company liability policy excludes coverage for employees security flaws"
If your organization isn't producing secure, high-quality code, there is a chance your coders are messing up. There is also a chance you are pushing them too hard, your project requirements are a mess, you are dealing with an old crap codebase, you have crap contractor, or your QA sucks.
If it IS your programmers, the answer is NOT to sue them. There are many brilliant people out there that make mistakes. Good programming practices are NOT an innate skill; indeed, some of the most brilliant coders out there are the brilliant pile of poorly documented spaghetti code people.
I'm not sure what, exactly, the answer is. I'm sure, however, that it lies in the realm of education/training/good business practices/peer review, rather than in torts.
Does anyone know if RIM is contesting the acutal patents?
The New York Times claims that RIM's position was, "Yes, they've got patents. No, they don't apply to us, even if we provide service in the U.S., because our *servers* are located in Canada, and NTP has no patents in Canada."
Well, no shit. That's the dumbest position I've ever heard.
These patents are retarded. The USPTO is striking them down on INTERNAL REVIEWS (this is the same process that upheld the Amazon one-click-purchase patent).
Make a stupid argument in court, get your products ripped off the shelf.
Plus, DVD-R/+R media is going to be dirt cheap. I wonder how much BlueRay Disks are going to cost.
I don't see a reason to bother with this stuff. Perhaps, some day, if BlueRay burners/readers get cheap enough, I'll move over my mastering to that media, and just build HUGE multi-title collections on each disk.
Perhaps; by that time, huge hard drives and high speed broadband and decent wireless might eliminate my need for physical media completely.
But, I won't buy anything with overly restricted DRM.
I won't buy anything thats not compatible with my existing plasma screen, my existing DVI monitors, or my existing 32" widescreen LCD TV.
These devices are very capable. I see no reason to discard them for an overly restricted DRM regime.
This is not a financial decision. I understand that as an earlier adopter, I should be prepared to switch to different systems if the market shifts.
I refuse, however, to buy something whose technical specifications are similar (or worse), simply because the powers that be are insane.
I suspect other "middle-upper" class geeks feel the same way. All these people who have already purchased Plasmas, or LCD, or various other HD monitors are going to be mighty pissed when they are "supposed" to buy a new one. I expect that uptake of this crap will be slow.
As for myself? I plan to figure out some way to rip the HD content to my harddrive (I'm 100% sure its possible), and then either playback from a console unit HD, or store it in MPEG4 on existing dual layer DVDs.
My understanding is you can do 720p at 6 Mbps, and 1080i at 12 Mbps, with very good quality.
Both of those will fit on a dual-layer DVD fairly nicely.
I boycott Sony, and I express a great deal of disdain whenever I see someone showing off one of their craptacular products.
Geeks get so excited over Sony products, and I don't understand why. I've never seen a Sony product that fulfilled all my expectations for it, and I've seen quite a few of their products that died far earlier than I thought they should have.
IBM's worried about their reputation. Essentially, SCO said, "You violated a contract with us! You damaged us! Let's negotiate a settlement!"
IBM slaps SCO, and says, "We never violate contracts with anyone. Our word is binding, and we've never damage anyone in any such fashion. See you in court."
SCO then went on a media barrage, claiming IBM hurt them in 8 million ways, violating this and/or that agreement, releasing confidential SCO materials to Linux, screwing SCO on a joint venture.
All of this reinforces IBM's dis-like of SCO.
IBM is a huge company. IBM is well known in the business world, and they have a reputation to keep as old reliable. Nobody ever got screwed for working with IBM. IBM never breaks a contract without legitimate cause.
This kind of damage to their reputation is a very big deal for IBM. The fact that SCO's case has 0 merit adds insult to injury.
IBM will not accept any settlement that does not have SCO admitting guilt. Perhaps if SCO admit they made it all up, and gave the company to IBM, IBM might stop.
Slashdot Mirror
Pages does kick ass.
However, its file format is a mess, and will never be supported by anyone.
AFAIK, there aren't _any_ good options of OpenDocument on OS X.
I say this as someone who relies on NeoOffice/J on a daily basis. It works, but its ugly/kludgy.
It doesn't take too much gray matter to realize that soccer moms outnumber gaming advocates by a pretty wide margin
0 05/id20051007_999151.htm
I'm not sure about this
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct2
Businessweek seems to think that Video Games are the future of entertainment, not just technologically, but in terms of marketshare, as well.
AFAIK, The Video Game Industry (TM) is bigger than The Movie Industry (TM).
Soccer moms are actually a smaller demographic, but they may represent the same sort of small but noisy demographic that tends to get laws passed over the large but indifferent demographic.
With a modern, metadata, high-performance filesystem (read Reiser4), a hierarchy of short text files can be far 'richer' (in Microsoftian terms) than the Win32 registry, while being faster to boot (haha, pun not intended).
/etc full of random config files, I'd have to say the pros and cons are pretty equal.
The registry is an ugly pile of spaghetti.
A directory tree of 10 million files with correctly set permissions and metadata is easy to navigate by hand, and applicaitons can pull/put whatever they need using metadata searches (which are blazingly fast).
It's not quite as full-featured as SQL, but it can be pretty good, all the while remaining hand-editable and easily human parsable. Not to mention you can do a metadata search far faster (near instant) than you can search the registry.
In a contest between the Registry, and
In a contest between the Registry, and a bleeding-edge Reiser4 setup, XML config files win in every single way. Each one of the advantages you list is actually easier to achieve in the config file hierarchy than the Win32 registry.
With cutting-edge filesystems, like ReiserFS4, accessing 10 million one line text files for configuration data is just as fast, if not faster, than parsing through 1 all-in-one config files.
/etc directory in each users home directory, and you have a much more perfect configuration management setup than the Win32 registry.
:-)
ReiserFS4 is designed to be the opposite of the latest "the-database-is-the-filesystem" fad.
In ReiserFS4, there are no performance limitations with using your filesystem AS the database. Stick whatever settings you want in a short config file, drop it in your config directory tree, add pertinent metadata, and lather, rinse, repeat.
Potentially, your apps don't need to know exactly where the settings are; you can find out using correctly set metadata. Keep everything in zipped XML, add appropriate metadata whenever possible, and duplicate a subset of the
The only other feature I could possibly want is config files that recreate themselves when you delete them. Tweaking on Mac OS X is a lot less hairy raising than doing so on Linux, because on OS X ifi you botch a config file you just delete it and you a default one appears the next time you run the app.
It helps for those idiots like me that believe they can succesfully rewrite all their configuration files on one swoop, and thus don't make backups
lol
1. A fractionalized DNS system would divide into blocks. I suspect North America, and possibly Latin America, and most likely Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan would stay with ICANN
2. The regulated 'un-regulated' EU system would supposedly permit nations to implement their own national policies.
As a result, you'd have the ICANN internet (DNS anyways), where politics played little role, but if you infringed a trademark, or put up kiddie porn, you'd get screwed.
Then you'd have the EU system. Taiwan would be official recognized as a territory of China. Tienneman square would not be discussed. North and South korea would be referred to as the unified penisula. This, plus the above stupidity in the U.S. system as well (think the EU won't regulate trademarks???)
I'd be thrilled if the system actually broke up into many pieces, as long as the IP address space did not get tampered with. I'd subscribe to OpenNIC, and the national DNS systems could go take it up the butt.
Yes!!!!
:(
I'm *terrified* of what misguided EU legislation and UN rules could do to the IP address space.
Seriously.
Who cares what they do with DNS... Let DNS segment.
Just don't screw up the IP address space! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
As a non-EU citizen, however, I have no voice
Hmm.... I've been in Italy and the UK on business, and I've seen some strike behavior that I found odd. 3 hour public transit strikes, for example.
Does the EU experience this kind of thing with the phone system?
Would we expect to experience this kind of thing with the DNS system?
Because:
.com ???), and totalitarian states salivate over the prospect of UN control rather than market and/or U.S. control.
Someone has to keep the Nazi sites off the internet (Germany)
Someone has to keep radical islamic schools from preaching (France)
Someone has to keep rebels under wraps (S. Arabia)
Someone has to suppress democracy (China)
Someone has to keep Taiwan as a territory rather than an independant nation (China)
Who controls Iraq's TLD?
What about 'Korea'? North Korea would love to posit itself as the virtual government of the penisula.
Not that the U.S. doesn't play these games, either. Tradenames and all that jazz, you know.
Governments love to regulate. Governments always have an agenda. And no government is willing to be seen as 2nd rate (Why does U.S. get
FTA:
The EU plan was applauded by states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, leading the former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt to express misgivings on his weblog: "It seems as if the European position has been hijacked by officials that have been driven by interests that should not be ours.
"We really can't have a Europe that is applauded by China and Iran and Saudi Arabia on the future governance of the internet. Even those critical of the United States must see where such a position risks taking us."
As I've said before, I'll be happy if the issue of IP address allocation is handled by the ITU. DNS should not be under the control of a central organization.
Notice that in the U.S. you are permitted to use any DNS you may like? Sure the root DNS server is Icann moderated, but you can select anything?
Anyone believe Iran (I'm 1/2 Persian) will allow that? Or China?
Or that China will permit a Taiwanese TLD in the New, UN-moderated, EU-sponsored DNS governing association?
Places like S. Arabia, China, and Iran can't wait for DNS to be controlled by the UN, because all kinds of silly nonsense happens in UN politics. Although China may have its sights set on the RoC, as of know, its insane to posit that Taiwan isn't an independant nation.
Yet the UN does not recognize it as such.....
Just my 2 cents.
PDF is the format for communication with the public.
AFAIK, PDF is well supported, and the number ONE format for document interchange.
Oh, you mean vendors/interdeparment stuff/contractors?
Well, you're working of the state. Guess what; you play by their rules.
The state will interact with its consitutents, the public, in an extremely well supported format.
The state will handle its own affairs in an open format, so that these constituents will have access to the end of time. It's a record keep issue, and its done for their benefit.
Also, consider that you have to change formats anyways. It's either MS XML or OpenDocument XML.
OpenDocument is the better choice for a government.
dada21.... hmm... suspiscious, I suspect you of being a troll.
As far as I know, Fox News does not have a policy of being biased.
What they do have is a policy of being *extremely* inflammatory.
They will always make it a point to mention the truth as a 'viewpoint'.
They'll also announce every other viewpoint, true or untrue, and the headline will be the one to prompt the greatest amount of reaction, positive or negative.
Obivously, one can see where this develop its own sort of bias.
Fair and balanced? Technically, yes. They don't outright *lie*. They don't even particularly advertise one cause over another, except as-is necessary to generate viewer interest, positive OR negative.
Fox News understands that they can get more viewer by being extremist. Conservatives watch because they can toe the party line. Liberals watchs so they can dispute it. Fox News wins both ways.
Although he may have been a little bit rude, he's correct.
It's just a plain link, and none of the rest of us are seeing any e-mail address, Russ or not. There's no Session ID to be passed, barring some kind of crazy router issue on your end.
I suggest checking your system more closely for 0wernship?
Not an insult, just suggesting perhaps you missed something.
Yeah, its looks like KDE with Crystal GL, and SuSE colors.
Nothing to see here folks, move along.
As in leveraging our synergies for efficent allocation of resources in man-watt-hours?
As in holographic agents dynamically simulating emulated off-shore technical assist?
Or, smart interface, as in 'transparent' window borders in a butt-ugly color scheme straight out of the SuSE 9.2 release?
*yawn*
Anyone see anything *interesting* in Vista which hasn't already been done elsewhere? Please don't tell me about stuff that MS is planning to release late; I mean stuff that actually exists NOW in the beta. You know, the not-vaporware stuff; like the smart interface.
Hell yes.
The number one rule of litigating is go after deep pockets.
Does that mean go after Coder John Q., or go after his employer, Microsoft......
I'm not a programmer, but, this stuff is *strictly* a problem of management. The corporation, not the programmer, should be held liable, if anyone at all.
"I'm giving you this project. It's going to take three weeks of work. I need it next thursday. Oh, and no bugs; You'll get sued if you screwed up, as the company liability policy excludes coverage for employees security flaws"
If your organization isn't producing secure, high-quality code, there is a chance your coders are messing up. There is also a chance you are pushing them too hard, your project requirements are a mess, you are dealing with an old crap codebase, you have crap contractor, or your QA sucks.
If it IS your programmers, the answer is NOT to sue them. There are many brilliant people out there that make mistakes. Good programming practices are NOT an innate skill; indeed, some of the most brilliant coders out there are the brilliant pile of poorly documented spaghetti code people.
I'm not sure what, exactly, the answer is. I'm sure, however, that it lies in the realm of education/training/good business practices/peer review, rather than in torts.
In SuSE (a Novell Product) you download the nvidia drivers by clicking a checkbox in the update wizard.
In the latest OpenSuSE, you download the nvidia drivers using the GUI of apt-get, called Kynaptic.
Click on Nvidia. Then you go into your YaST control panel, and select 'nvidia' as your video driver.
Remarkably like Windows, except the drivers are downloaded automatically, rather than manually.
Does anyone know if RIM is contesting the acutal patents?
The New York Times claims that RIM's position was, "Yes, they've got patents. No, they don't apply to us, even if we provide service in the U.S., because our *servers* are located in Canada, and NTP has no patents in Canada."
Well, no shit. That's the dumbest position I've ever heard.
These patents are retarded. The USPTO is striking them down on INTERNAL REVIEWS (this is the same process that upheld the Amazon one-click-purchase patent).
Make a stupid argument in court, get your products ripped off the shelf.
*shrug*
Yeah, but I'm not sure about that story.
;-)
I'm very willing to believe that IBM's consulting projects are consistently overbudget and late.
However, the ONE place where that doesn't seem out of place is at a DEFENSE CONTRACTOR.
Those HUGE military-industrial complex corporations practically invented "Bloat".
Seriously; When a defense contractor publishes information on a project that was on-budget and on-time, its the rare exception, not the rule.
I don't know who to believe; but at a whim I'd say that IBM was probably at fault
Still, if you notice, no-one responsible got fired because of IBM, and IBM won the contract on reputation alone.
Even the first response to the kuro5hin article is an IBM employee who worked on THAT exact project!
Those IBM drones have PR coming out the wazoo.
Exactly!
Plus, DVD-R/+R media is going to be dirt cheap. I wonder how much BlueRay Disks are going to cost.
I don't see a reason to bother with this stuff. Perhaps, some day, if BlueRay burners/readers get cheap enough, I'll move over my mastering to that media, and just build HUGE multi-title collections on each disk.
Perhaps; by that time, huge hard drives and high speed broadband and decent wireless might eliminate my need for physical media completely.
Who's more likely to build unbreakable DRM.....
Sony, or Toshiba with MS's influence.
But, I won't buy anything with overly restricted DRM.
I won't buy anything thats not compatible with my existing plasma screen, my existing DVI monitors, or my existing 32" widescreen LCD TV.
These devices are very capable. I see no reason to discard them for an overly restricted DRM regime.
This is not a financial decision. I understand that as an earlier adopter, I should be prepared to switch to different systems if the market shifts.
I refuse, however, to buy something whose technical specifications are similar (or worse), simply because the powers that be are insane.
I suspect other "middle-upper" class geeks feel the same way. All these people who have already purchased Plasmas, or LCD, or various other HD monitors are going to be mighty pissed when they are "supposed" to buy a new one. I expect that uptake of this crap will be slow.
As for myself? I plan to figure out some way to rip the HD content to my harddrive (I'm 100% sure its possible), and then either playback from a console unit HD, or store it in MPEG4 on existing dual layer DVDs.
My understanding is you can do 720p at 6 Mbps, and 1080i at 12 Mbps, with very good quality.
Both of those will fit on a dual-layer DVD fairly nicely.
I boycott Sony, and I express a great deal of disdain whenever I see someone showing off one of their craptacular products.
Geeks get so excited over Sony products, and I don't understand why. I've never seen a Sony product that fulfilled all my expectations for it, and I've seen quite a few of their products that died far earlier than I thought they should have.
SCO was ready to sell out from day 1.
IBM was never willing to legitimize that play.
IBM's worried about their reputation. Essentially, SCO said, "You violated a contract with us! You damaged us! Let's negotiate a settlement!"
IBM slaps SCO, and says, "We never violate contracts with anyone. Our word is binding, and we've never damage anyone in any such fashion. See you in court."
SCO then went on a media barrage, claiming IBM hurt them in 8 million ways, violating this and/or that agreement, releasing confidential SCO materials to Linux, screwing SCO on a joint venture.
All of this reinforces IBM's dis-like of SCO.
IBM is a huge company. IBM is well known in the business world, and they have a reputation to keep as old reliable. Nobody ever got screwed for working with IBM. IBM never breaks a contract without legitimate cause.
This kind of damage to their reputation is a very big deal for IBM. The fact that SCO's case has 0 merit adds insult to injury.
IBM will not accept any settlement that does not have SCO admitting guilt. Perhaps if SCO admit they made it all up, and gave the company to IBM, IBM might stop.
Perhaps.
Frankly, I think this is a great thing.
More strife in the media-opoly market structure might loose their currently oligarchical structure.
Wouldn't it be a *great* thing if independent film studios started receiving funding, operating in a fashion outside of the MPAA?
I can dream, can't I?
Competition = good thing. The Chinese should bring it; without competition, we whither and die.