I think you are making it more complicated than it needs to be. Not that I've really paid attention to Zope over the past few years but wouldn't you basically get all of this for free if their Wiki were running on Zope? Doesn't ZEO give you distributed databases with automagic replication? A cursory search shows they've got some kind of protocol for distributed commits on replicated ZEO backends.
Of course, you could always reinvent the wheel and do the same thing with virtually any toolset. No doubt there are others out there that offer similar functionality.
I've often wondered why more "community" websites don't try something like this in order to leech bandwidth from their users. I may not have the bandwidth to handle ALL of slashdot's load but I probably could handle a good chunk of my state. Get together a few dozens of people who are willing to contribute their excess bandwidth to something like this and all your bandwidth and hardware costs are gone.
I'm not going to donate money to most of these community sites I frequent but the success of p2p apps, SETI@Home, etc, show that many people are willing to donate bandwidth and processing.
Maybe you've never read John Keegan's classic The Face of Battle. His section on the battle of Waterloo talks in detail about cavalry versus infantry engagements.
You are correct that if they break the line cavalry are very good at breaking ranks. However, you miss two things. One, breaking ranks doesn't mean the cavalry have really caused much in the way of casualties to the infantry.
One Waterloo cavalryman reported, "Many threw themselves on the ground until we had gone over, and then rose and fired." Keegan points out, "To lie down was usually enough to put one beyond a swordsman's reach, and those who shammed were already safely behind the cavalry, whose attention was focused on the enemy lines to which their impetus was carrying them." Thus cavalry can easily break lines but those lines can be readily reformed by good commanders. There is no indication that the orcs armies have poor commanders, poor organization, or poor morale.
More importantly, however, Keegan points out that cavalry are in actuality completely ineffective against trained infantry. "And indeed if the story of Waterloo has a leitmotiv it is that of cavalry charging square and being repulsed...The feat of breaking a square was tried by the French cavalry time and again at Waterloo -- there were perhaps twelve main assaults during the great afternoon cavalry effort -- and always with a complete lack of success."
Cavalry break the line of infantry not because of anything particularly irresistible about cavalry. They break the line because the infantry fear the horses riding down on them and give up the line voluntarily.
Keegan's examination of cavalry versus infantry at the battle of Agincourt, which might seem more germane to Tolkiens technological levels, finds essentially the same thing. The French cavalry charge of the British archer lines failed completely. "The 'shock' which cavalry seek to inflict is really moral, not physical in character...The charge, momentarily terrifying for the English...had stopped only a few feet distant, had been a disaster for the enemy."
I don't see any reason why Gandalf's cavalry charge would have worked out as anything but a similar disaster.
Come on now, if you're going to compare LOTR to other trilogies to see how it stacks up how about going up against some real competition instead of milquetoasts like Star Wars and Jurassic Park and Tremors.
Is it better than The Godfather? Better than the Satyajit's Apu trilogy? Better than Krysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy (or his Decalogue)? Better than Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy? Sergio Leone's man-with-no-name trilogy? Truffaut's adventures of Antoine Doinel?
Sure you might think LOTR is better than all of those but at least mention them when deciding it is the best trilogy.
I never watched it while it was on the air (a friend gave me copies a few months ago) but what I liked about it was the writing and storylines, which I felt were a notch above most other sci-fi on TV.
How does the RIAA or the studio care about that? They've already made the sale to the music store who will the one seeing the apparent profit disappear.
You don't understand business very well. MS sees limited opportunities for continued growth in their core markets. Everyone alreadys owns Windows and Office. Sure, they can get money from the upgrade treadmill but they can't push that too far without alienating customers. And investors have come to expect a certain level of return from MSFT. 3% ROI isn't what people look to them for. So what are they going to do? Use their huge cash reserves to branch out in a somewhat down economy.
businesses in today's market
The US GDP grew 7.2% in the third quarter, the highest single-quarter growth rate since 1982. Business investment grew at 11%, the fastest rate since the bubble popped in 2000. Your conception of "today's market" is actually a reflection of "yesterday's market". Smart companies are spending money today.
NFS is no more a "unix feature" than samba is. (If I don't have NFS on my box is it no longer "unix"? If I do have NFS (as my Windows XP box does) does that make it more unix-y?)) It was a "Sun feature" and other OSes added support as "a kludgy addon to play nice with SunOS". Samba is just an implementation of CIFS that attempts to interoperate with the largest CIFS provider...just as early NFS implementations concerned themselves with playing nicely with Sun's NFS.
[it] shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who,
during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.
I don't see anything in there saying "in the past 20 or 30 years...make sure you wait so you don't have egg on your face."
I agree that in the field of science waiting is prudent but I have never understood where the Committee gets the legal backing for doing it the way they do. In my mind the greatest effect is in the Literature field, which has become a de facto lifetime achievement award when that seems to have been very far from what Nobel intended.
Who said the library has to be dynamically loaded? I know this is kinda of a big secret that maybe I'm not supposed to be sharing but it is possible to statically link against a library.
should they pump money into research for circumstances that in all likelihood will never occur?
You sound just like my relatives who play the lottery. Do you play the lottery? Or do you acknowledge that when you look at the prize values, the probability of winning, the potential cost, and the probability of losing that the expected returns are such that your finite fiscal resources are better off spent elsewhere?
Any analysis that focuses only on price is misguided. There are a number of ways the human race could go extinct. Should we spend money to protect against all of them?
Near as I can tell, the game's been around for 12 years. If it hasn't reached any kind of meaningful critical mass (which, depending on the author could just be "it works for me") by now then I don't think future language choice is going to have any substantial effect.
Why wouldn't the compressed file system on the CD just be expanded onto a ram disk once at boot? Besides, the kinds of uses the parent post mentioned all are single-app installations. Point-of-sale apps get loaded once and (under normal conditions) never exit or get tabbed-out.
A few years ago when I was working for a defense contractor a memo went out saying that UPS had just been qualified to courier classified documents. Up to that point I believe USPS was the only option, but I may be wrong on that point.
I know that it is possible to get review copies before the normal publication date. I'm referring to reviews that go:
"5 stars: When this book comes out in 2 years it will be awesome because Harry Potter rules!!!"
or
"5 stars: Id has never made a bad game, Doom 3 is going to rock."
Re:What About Amazon?
on
An IMDb for Books
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Amazon edits the reviews in ways that some might object to.
Amazon limits reviews to 1000 words. 1000 words isn't really that much for some reviews.
Amazon lets people review books that they clearly haven't read (because they aren't even available yet).
And maybe you aren't entirely comfortable with the fact that when you submit a review to Amazon "you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media."
If you live in California & travel to Oregon to visity aunty Jill, you pay Oregan sales tax while there.
Technically you don't usually have to pay sales tax when in a state you don't reside in. You can get a form from the state in question and get the taxes refunded. But the state in which you do reside generally expects you to pay a "use" tax even on things you bought outside of the state.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are making it more complicated than it needs to be. Not that I've really paid attention to Zope over the past few years but wouldn't you basically get all of this for free if their Wiki were running on Zope? Doesn't ZEO give you distributed databases with automagic replication? A cursory search shows they've got some kind of protocol for distributed commits on replicated ZEO backends.
Of course, you could always reinvent the wheel and do the same thing with virtually any toolset. No doubt there are others out there that offer similar functionality.
I've often wondered why more "community" websites don't try something like this in order to leech bandwidth from their users. I may not have the bandwidth to handle ALL of slashdot's load but I probably could handle a good chunk of my state. Get together a few dozens of people who are willing to contribute their excess bandwidth to something like this and all your bandwidth and hardware costs are gone.
I'm not going to donate money to most of these community sites I frequent but the success of p2p apps, SETI@Home, etc, show that many people are willing to donate bandwidth and processing.
Maybe you've never read John Keegan's classic The Face of Battle. His section on the battle of Waterloo talks in detail about cavalry versus infantry engagements.
You are correct that if they break the line cavalry are very good at breaking ranks. However, you miss two things. One, breaking ranks doesn't mean the cavalry have really caused much in the way of casualties to the infantry.
One Waterloo cavalryman reported, "Many threw themselves on the ground until we had gone over, and then rose and fired." Keegan points out, "To lie down was usually enough to put one beyond a swordsman's reach, and those who shammed were already safely behind the cavalry, whose attention was focused on the enemy lines to which their impetus was carrying them." Thus cavalry can easily break lines but those lines can be readily reformed by good commanders. There is no indication that the orcs armies have poor commanders, poor organization, or poor morale.
More importantly, however, Keegan points out that cavalry are in actuality completely ineffective against trained infantry. "And indeed if the story of Waterloo has a leitmotiv it is that of cavalry charging square and being repulsed...The feat of breaking a square was tried by the French cavalry time and again at Waterloo -- there were perhaps twelve main assaults during the great afternoon cavalry effort -- and always with a complete lack of success."
Cavalry break the line of infantry not because of anything particularly irresistible about cavalry. They break the line because the infantry fear the horses riding down on them and give up the line voluntarily.
Keegan's examination of cavalry versus infantry at the battle of Agincourt, which might seem more germane to Tolkiens technological levels, finds essentially the same thing. The French cavalry charge of the British archer lines failed completely. "The 'shock' which cavalry seek to inflict is really moral, not physical in character...The charge, momentarily terrifying for the English...had stopped only a few feet distant, had been a disaster for the enemy."
I don't see any reason why Gandalf's cavalry charge would have worked out as anything but a similar disaster.
The first quality game from Bioware was BG1
Um, no. The first quality game from Bioware was Fallout.
Come on now, if you're going to compare LOTR to other trilogies to see how it stacks up how about going up against some real competition instead of milquetoasts like Star Wars and Jurassic Park and Tremors.
Is it better than The Godfather? Better than the Satyajit's Apu trilogy? Better than Krysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy (or his Decalogue)? Better than Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy? Sergio Leone's man-with-no-name trilogy? Truffaut's adventures of Antoine Doinel?
Sure you might think LOTR is better than all of those but at least mention them when deciding it is the best trilogy.
I never watched it while it was on the air (a friend gave me copies a few months ago) but what I liked about it was the writing and storylines, which I felt were a notch above most other sci-fi on TV.
How does the RIAA or the studio care about that? They've already made the sale to the music store who will the one seeing the apparent profit disappear.
Except MacOSX has the same problems re: drivers and games, doesn't it?
You don't understand business very well. MS sees limited opportunities for continued growth in their core markets. Everyone alreadys owns Windows and Office. Sure, they can get money from the upgrade treadmill but they can't push that too far without alienating customers. And investors have come to expect a certain level of return from MSFT. 3% ROI isn't what people look to them for. So what are they going to do? Use their huge cash reserves to branch out in a somewhat down economy.
businesses in today's market
The US GDP grew 7.2% in the third quarter, the highest single-quarter growth rate since 1982. Business investment grew at 11%, the fastest rate since the bubble popped in 2000. Your conception of "today's market" is actually a reflection of "yesterday's market". Smart companies are spending money today.
NFS is no more a "unix feature" than samba is. (If I don't have NFS on my box is it no longer "unix"? If I do have NFS (as my Windows XP box does) does that make it more unix-y?)) It was a "Sun feature" and other OSes added support as "a kludgy addon to play nice with SunOS". Samba is just an implementation of CIFS that attempts to interoperate with the largest CIFS provider...just as early NFS implementations concerned themselves with playing nicely with Sun's NFS.
I don't see anything in there saying "in the past 20 or 30 years...make sure you wait so you don't have egg on your face."
I agree that in the field of science waiting is prudent but I have never understood where the Committee gets the legal backing for doing it the way they do. In my mind the greatest effect is in the Literature field, which has become a de facto lifetime achievement award when that seems to have been very far from what Nobel intended.
Apple is claiming first 64 bit DESKTOP
The Alpha 21264 desktop systems have been around for almost a decade now. Same for Sun's Ultra desktops.
Who said the library has to be dynamically loaded? I know this is kinda of a big secret that maybe I'm not supposed to be sharing but it is possible to statically link against a library.
should they pump money into research for circumstances that in all likelihood will never occur?
You sound just like my relatives who play the lottery. Do you play the lottery? Or do you acknowledge that when you look at the prize values, the probability of winning, the potential cost, and the probability of losing that the expected returns are such that your finite fiscal resources are better off spent elsewhere?
Any analysis that focuses only on price is misguided. There are a number of ways the human race could go extinct. Should we spend money to protect against all of them?
The cost of distribution is zero.
Really? When did bandwidth become free?
Why would it put them on the filesystem instead of on a partition of its own? I thought you could already configure Oracle to do this?
Near as I can tell, the game's been around for 12 years. If it hasn't reached any kind of meaningful critical mass (which, depending on the author could just be "it works for me") by now then I don't think future language choice is going to have any substantial effect.
Why wouldn't the compressed file system on the CD just be expanded onto a ram disk once at boot? Besides, the kinds of uses the parent post mentioned all are single-app installations. Point-of-sale apps get loaded once and (under normal conditions) never exit or get tabbed-out.
Who gets to write a revoke key?
To protect our liberties, spam control should be decentralized -- as close to the last mile as possible.
It is. I'm the one deciding whether or not to use this service.
Those are examples of the system not working at intended. But I'm sure it made you feel better to write it.
A few years ago when I was working for a defense contractor a memo went out saying that UPS had just been qualified to courier classified documents. Up to that point I believe USPS was the only option, but I may be wrong on that point.
I know that it is possible to get review copies before the normal publication date. I'm referring to reviews that go:
"5 stars: When this book comes out in 2 years it will be awesome because Harry Potter rules!!!"
or
"5 stars: Id has never made a bad game, Doom 3 is going to rock."
Amazon edits the reviews in ways that some might object to.
Amazon limits reviews to 1000 words. 1000 words isn't really that much for some reviews.
Amazon lets people review books that they clearly haven't read (because they aren't even available yet).
And maybe you aren't entirely comfortable with the fact that when you submit a review to Amazon "you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media."
When was the last time you had the ECU in your car "crash"?
If you live in California & travel to Oregon to visity aunty Jill, you pay Oregan sales tax while there.
Technically you don't usually have to pay sales tax when in a state you don't reside in. You can get a form from the state in question and get the taxes refunded. But the state in which you do reside generally expects you to pay a "use" tax even on things you bought outside of the state.