My phone provider, SBC, just increased the monthly fee for having an unlisted number from $2.95 to $4.95. This was buried well within the fine print in the 5 odd pages of small type that forms my phone bill.
Isn't that neat? Not only do I have to pay SBC for having a phone, but I also have to pay them protection money so that they don't give out my phone number to anyone else.
No insurance company will sell you health insurance without your SSN. If I'm wrong, please post the names of a few who will. The group (employer) insurance plans I've been on recently all have given me IDs which contain my SSN in them.
It's not just DNA samples or SSNs. Your fingerprints are likely to be on file somewhere too. Some states (Texas, for instance) require you to submit to fingerprinting in order to give you a driver's license. I hate that, but hey, I need to drive.
If you don't ever want to give out your SSN, you might as well emigrate to the North Pole.
I believe it does matter, especially for businesses. If your website is trying to sell something, then content, presentation, etc. all make a big impression on me and influence my purchasing decision. I won't buy from an online store which has just part names without pictures or descriptions, for instance. If two stores have the same pricing but one of them has a better organized website, then guess who gets my sale.
A company's website is its face on the internet, and could be seen by many people who would otherwise never come into contact with the company. Even if the website doesn't have direct sales, professionally done content, organization and layout add to the user experience.
Is the need for speed preventing the use of reliable software design techniques?
No it's the need to keep costs low and time to market pressures that is preventing the use of reliable software design techniques.
If all vendors had a large number of programmers and could select their own timeframe for releases, code would perhaps get more reliable.
But on the other hand, Microsoft does have a large number of programmers, and they pretty much decide their own release schedules. So the above obviously doesn't hold for Microsoft. I guess that's because all their releases add new features, which introduce bugs...
That's true for other vendors and other platforms too, isn't it? If all feature enhancements to say RedHat or SuSE Linux were stopped overnight and all future releases were only bug fixes, then said distro would be 100 percent bug-free at some hypothetical point in the future. But they have to add features to compete and evolve, and alas, said distro will never be bug-free.
The low barriers to software updates also make software a less rigorous practice than hardware design. In hardware design, it takes millions of dollars to tape out a new rev of a chip to fix a bug; not to mention all the bad publicity the vendor gets (Intel fdiv bug, anyone?). Hence rigor in design and validation is much higher for hardware when compared to software.
I am already a member of such a co-operative. I already check out music (and movies!) and return them when I'm done. Anyone in my vicinity is free to join. Here's the URL:
Mandrake's business decisions are sometimes hard to explain. The system I'm typing on used to have Mandrake 6.1, and I decided to upgrade a while ago. Mandrake 9.0 had just been released and was available for FTP. But it wasn't available for purchase on their website yet. I went ahead and installed by FTP anyway, but at that time, I was in the right mood to pay something for an official Mandrake distro in a box. Mandrake's delay in making the boxed CD set available the same time as the FTP download did cost them some. (There were third-party retailers selling CDs of the Mandrake 9.0 distro at the time, but I did just as well with the FTP install.)
Every passenger flying to the US from Europe (or elsewhere) has to go through Customs and Immigration. In the I-94 form which non-US-citizens fill in and hand in at the immigration desk, every foreign national records name, passport number, flight number, address in the US, etc. The INS has a complete record of the foreign nationals who flew into the US on each flight.
The article points out that it's the Homeland Security guys who will be getting this data from the airlines, in addition to the INS who already collect this data. This is just another example of redundancy in bureaucracy.
Btw, before someone flames me, I am aware that most low-end IDE drives can provides several tens of megabytes per second for sequential access. The point of my above post was in dealing with completely random accesses where seek times and rotational speeds matter a lot more than bus bandwidth.
Go to the TPC website and take a look at score reports for the TPC-C benchmark, which is an online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark going back 10 years or so.
Score reports for most mid-end IA-32 quad-processor servers reveal that they are using several four-channel Ultra-160 SCSI RAID controllers, and fifteen hard drives per channel. My professional experience with TPC-C shows that the hard drives' throughput get maxed out way before the SCSI channel bandwidth does, and we're talking 15 drives per SCSI channel. That's why these benchmark results are still obtained with Ultra-160 controllers and drives instead of Ultra-320. The extra bus bandwidth of Ultra-320 SCSI doesn't buy you much because the fastest disks out there cannot churn out data fast enough to max out a Ultra-160 interface.
I was recently looking at both IDE and SCSI drive specs on manufacturers' websites. I saw Ultra-160 and Ultra-320 SCSI devices with seek times of 3.5 ms and rotational speeds of 15,000 RPM. But most IDE drive families are still at 7,200 RPM max and have seek times of 8.5 ms or more. The better seek times and rotational speeds are the main reason I would upgrade my storage to SCSI (if the costs were not so high, that is:-). The product reviewed here provides exactly the reverse of the functionality I want. As such, I think it's useful only for specialized applications like putting an IDE CD-RW in a SCSI-only workstation or server.
I am running Mozilla 1.1 on a 500 MHz K6-2 with 256 MB SDRAM. It runs just fine, and I use it for all mainstream browsing and e-mail on Win2K.
I am now connected through a cable modem. When I was on dialup Mozilla 1.1 sucked so badly as to be unusable. I was stuck to IE until I got my cable modem.
People seem to have gone off on tangents about censorship and consumer rights here. When the unedited versions of the same movies are available at say Blockbuster, how is it censorship if Clean Flicks chooses to show audiences a watered-down version?
I wouldn't want to watch watered-down versions of movies, but since there is a company which offers such a thing, I guess there is a good market for it. The main point here is that directorial egos are hurt when people chop off scenes ruthlessly. Typical of the/. crowd to bring up censorship, big brother and the end of the digital world.
DDJ columnist Verity Stob reports her experience with XP here. Check it out -- it's an interesting read. While you are at it, you could also read her dig at Slashdot in this month's column.
It can play DVDs, VCDs, MP3s and audio CDs. It doesn't have any problems with CD-Rs like some players have. It comes with a browser and you can surf the web, read/. and check your mail during those half-time snack breaks you take while watching movies. With a little extra hardware thrown in, it can even play the most hi-tech video games on the planet. Hell, it can even boot Linux!
I strongly recommend that you go in for a system like this.
...
they'd like a color-coding system: for instance, all text/word processor documents are green (or shades of green), perhaps along with an icon to identify exactly what type it is. Executables are red. A directory window full of music might have a blue border around it, but the documents folder has green...
I think what they need is better indexing.
To give a recent example from my own work, I might want to:
Open a document I wrote for occasion X;
Open the updated version I wrote for Y;
Prepare slides for that presentation, for which I need to find all the pictures, which may be scattered around in both the X and Y areas.
So I would need indexing by occasion (which in my case is just Unix directories) and indexing by content-type (images), and to go one step further, indexing by content.
It's ironic that when I'm looking for something I'm likely to find it faster on the web than on my own $HOME.
DDJ had an interesting article on content-indexing engines last month or so.
Anyone know document indexing solutions for average Unix users?
Might be nice to replace PDF as a web-distributable print-quality format, though. I hate PDFs.
Why should latex replace pdfs? In fact, I regularly use latex to create my pdf files! Using either pdflatex or ps2pdf. That way I have the power and functionality of latex and the flexibility of distributing pdfs.
This problem is not specific to Philippines. In India, the government organization VSNL leases out bandwidth to private ISPs. According to their rules, the last time I checked voice over IP was not allowed. AFAIK all major private ISPs lease bandwidth from VSNL so effectively VoIP is banned in India.
This is especially frightening for us in a EU context : how long will we be able to carry
on with the current policy, that is,translating any document in the 3 major languages
(German, French and English) and as many documents as possible in the 11 (as of
now) languages of the EU ?
A consortium of companies and universities have started a new research project for a universal translator. The translator is a tiny intelligent device that you insert into your ear, and voila, you can understand everything that I say, even though I may be talking in an alien tongue.
Now if only I could remember what the project's name was...
In India, the division of the country into states has been made on a linguistic basis; what this means is that if you travel from your home state to another, you won't be able to communicate with the locals. The most popular language in most parts of northern India is Hindi, and though it is considered by some to be a national language, there are areas in the south where people fanatically hate Hindi and have tried to ban its teaching in schools in the past. Including dialects and variants, India has over 800 languages IIRC.
Fortunately for us Indians, our British rulers set up a system of English education before they left. The net result is that if you travel to any reasonably civilized city, you'll be able to get around knowing just English.
...could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
That's a gross understatement. Even at $1 per CD for 10K machines that's not a lot of money. And why would you want one CD per computer? You could always use one CD on multiple machines, or better still, install over the network anyway. The costs just don't bear comparison.
Of course I'm trying to imply anything about the Total cost of ownership here.
I used to use Pine at school and Outlook 2000 at home. I exchange email with lots of people who use just pine, mutt or elm on Unix, and so far nobody has complained that they weren't able to read my messages written with Outlook. This article is just FUD./. editors please check what you post to the front page.
Of course the first thing that I configured in Outlook after installation was sending messages in plaintext only.
However I have since stopped using Outlook after a friend sent me a couple of emails with an embedded Javascript virus (the Kak virus -- heard of it anyone?). Now I use ssh to login to my Unix box and use fetchmail and pine!
Have you heard of Sanskrit? Sanskrit is the language of ancient India, the language of the Vedic culture. Current interest in Sanskrit is mostly academic, there are not many Sanskrit-speaking people left in India. I learng Sanskrit for five years in high school and I believe that computer programming languages can learn a lot from it.
The grammar of Sanskrit is very tough to learn since it is very vast and there are a lot of things to remember than in a language like English (somewhat like C++ being more complicated than C). But it's all very very logical and straightforward. The main thing is that there are a lot of forms of the same word. For example, udyanam means garden; udyanasya means "of the garden", udyanat means "from the garden" , and so on. There are several forms of the same noun. Each form has a unique meaning, and each meaning has a unique form. There is absolutely no ambiguity. Same for verbs and adjectives and other language constructs.
One beauty of this uniqueness is the fact that
now the order of the words in the sentence doesn't matter at all. For example, consider that you want to say "I am going to the garden." Aham is I, udyanam is garden, gacchami is going. So I would say, Aham udyanam gacchami. Now I could also say that udyanam gacchami aham or gacchami aham udyanam or any permutation, all of which mean exactly the same thing. Taking this one step further, I could simply say udyanam gacchami since the verb gacchami implies the "I". If it was somebody else who was going to the garden, I would have to say gacchati, and if it were you, I would have to say gacchasi so the verb form implicity determines the subject.
This is just a novice example of the fact that a lot of semantic information is built into the syntax of Sanskrit in a very elegant way that would appeal to purists and compiler designers. I believe that natural language parsing of English and other European languages is much tougher than parsing Sanskrit would be. The downside to adopting Sanskrit would be the vast number of grammar rules and verb and noun forms that have to be learnt.
Professors in the few universities in India where Sanskrit is still being taught strongly advocate the use of Sanskrit for computing. I just know high-school level novice Sanskrit, so if there are Sanskrit gurus among you, speak out with more relevant details.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there any other company with it's perception of viability so closely linked to a single living individual? I'm unaware of any right now.
Yes, Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett's company).
My phone provider, SBC, just increased the monthly fee for having an unlisted number from $2.95 to $4.95. This was buried well within the fine print in the 5 odd pages of small type that forms my phone bill.
Isn't that neat? Not only do I have to pay SBC for having a phone, but I also have to pay them protection money so that they don't give out my phone number to anyone else.
Hail, modern America!
No insurance company will sell you health insurance without your SSN. If I'm wrong, please post the names of a few who will. The group (employer) insurance plans I've been on recently all have given me IDs which contain my SSN in them.
It's not just DNA samples or SSNs. Your fingerprints are likely to be on file somewhere too. Some states (Texas, for instance) require you to submit to fingerprinting in order to give you a driver's license. I hate that, but hey, I need to drive.
If you don't ever want to give out your SSN, you might as well emigrate to the North Pole.
A company's website is its face on the internet, and could be seen by many people who would otherwise never come into contact with the company. Even if the website doesn't have direct sales, professionally done content, organization and layout add to the user experience.
No it's the need to keep costs low and time to market pressures that is preventing the use of reliable software design techniques.
If all vendors had a large number of programmers and could select their own timeframe for releases, code would perhaps get more reliable.
But on the other hand, Microsoft does have a large number of programmers, and they pretty much decide their own release schedules. So the above obviously doesn't hold for Microsoft. I guess that's because all their releases add new features, which introduce bugs...
That's true for other vendors and other platforms too, isn't it? If all feature enhancements to say RedHat or SuSE Linux were stopped overnight and all future releases were only bug fixes, then said distro would be 100 percent bug-free at some hypothetical point in the future. But they have to add features to compete and evolve, and alas, said distro will never be bug-free.
The low barriers to software updates also make software a less rigorous practice than hardware design. In hardware design, it takes millions of dollars to tape out a new rev of a chip to fix a bug; not to mention all the bad publicity the vendor gets (Intel fdiv bug, anyone?). Hence rigor in design and validation is much higher for hardware when compared to software.
I did too. I had to reinstall everything and during the reinstall, decided to go with ext2. Disabled my HDD's write cache for good measure.
I am already a member of such a co-operative. I already check out music (and movies!) and return them when I'm done. Anyone in my vicinity is free to join. Here's the URL:
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/library/default.htm
Mandrake's business decisions are sometimes hard to explain. The system I'm typing on used to have Mandrake 6.1, and I decided to upgrade a while ago. Mandrake 9.0 had just been released and was available for FTP. But it wasn't available for purchase on their website yet. I went ahead and installed by FTP anyway, but at that time, I was in the right mood to pay something for an official Mandrake distro in a box. Mandrake's delay in making the boxed CD set available the same time as the FTP download did cost them some. (There were third-party retailers selling CDs of the Mandrake 9.0 distro at the time, but I did just as well with the FTP install.)
Every passenger flying to the US from Europe (or elsewhere) has to go through Customs and Immigration. In the I-94 form which non-US-citizens fill in and hand in at the immigration desk, every foreign national records name, passport number, flight number, address in the US, etc. The INS has a complete record of the foreign nationals who flew into the US on each flight.
The article points out that it's the Homeland Security guys who will be getting this data from the airlines, in addition to the INS who already collect this data. This is just another example of redundancy in bureaucracy.
Btw, before someone flames me, I am aware that most low-end IDE drives can provides several tens of megabytes per second for sequential access. The point of my above post was in dealing with completely random accesses where seek times and rotational speeds matter a lot more than bus bandwidth.
Go to the TPC website and take a look at score reports for the TPC-C benchmark, which is an online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark going back 10 years or so.
Score reports for most mid-end IA-32 quad-processor servers reveal that they are using several four-channel Ultra-160 SCSI RAID controllers, and fifteen hard drives per channel. My professional experience with TPC-C shows that the hard drives' throughput get maxed out way before the SCSI channel bandwidth does, and we're talking 15 drives per SCSI channel. That's why these benchmark results are still obtained with Ultra-160 controllers and drives instead of Ultra-320. The extra bus bandwidth of Ultra-320 SCSI doesn't buy you much because the fastest disks out there cannot churn out data fast enough to max out a Ultra-160 interface.
I was recently looking at both IDE and SCSI drive specs on manufacturers' websites. I saw Ultra-160 and Ultra-320 SCSI devices with seek times of 3.5 ms and rotational speeds of 15,000 RPM. But most IDE drive families are still at 7,200 RPM max and have seek times of 8.5 ms or more. The better seek times and rotational speeds are the main reason I would upgrade my storage to SCSI (if the costs were not so high, that is :-). The product reviewed here provides exactly the reverse of the functionality I want. As such, I think it's useful only for specialized applications like putting an IDE CD-RW in a SCSI-only workstation or server.
To qualify the phrase fast computer:
I am running Mozilla 1.1 on a 500 MHz K6-2 with 256 MB SDRAM. It runs just fine, and I use it for all mainstream browsing and e-mail on Win2K.
I am now connected through a cable modem. When I was on dialup Mozilla 1.1 sucked so badly as to be unusable. I was stuck to IE until I got my cable modem.
Swatantryam does not mean 'spiritual' freedom. It just means free as in speech. And soujanyam means free as in beer.
I wouldn't want to watch watered-down versions of movies, but since there is a company which offers such a thing, I guess there is a good market for it. The main point here is that directorial egos are hurt when people chop off scenes ruthlessly. Typical of the /. crowd to bring up censorship, big brother and the end of the digital world.
DDJ columnist Verity Stob reports her experience with XP here. Check it out -- it's an interesting read. While you are at it, you could also read her dig at Slashdot in this month's column.
It can play DVDs, VCDs, MP3s and audio CDs. It doesn't have any problems with CD-Rs like some players have. It comes with a browser and you can surf the web, read /. and check your mail during those half-time snack breaks you take while watching movies. With a little extra hardware thrown in, it can even play the most hi-tech video games on the planet. Hell, it can even boot Linux!
I strongly recommend that you go in for a system like this.
Regards,
Iyer
I think what they need is better indexing.
To give a recent example from my own work, I might want to:
So I would need indexing by occasion (which in my case is just Unix directories) and indexing by content-type (images), and to go one step further, indexing by content.
It's ironic that when I'm looking for something I'm likely to find it faster on the web than on my own $HOME.
DDJ had an interesting article on content-indexing engines last month or so.
Anyone know document indexing solutions for average Unix users?
Why should latex replace pdfs? In fact, I regularly use latex to create my pdf files! Using either pdflatex or ps2pdf. That way I have the power and functionality of latex and the flexibility of distributing pdfs.
This problem is not specific to Philippines. In India, the government organization VSNL leases out bandwidth to private ISPs. According to their rules, the last time I checked voice over IP was not allowed. AFAIK all major private ISPs lease bandwidth from VSNL so effectively VoIP is banned in India.
Really? I don't see why this is always the case. Can't I design a 32-bit EPIC processor? Or am I missing something here?
A consortium of companies and universities have started a new research project for a universal translator. The translator is a tiny intelligent device that you insert into your ear, and voila, you can understand everything that I say, even though I may be talking in an alien tongue.
Now if only I could remember what the project's name was...
Fortunately for us Indians, our British rulers set up a system of English education before they left. The net result is that if you travel to any reasonably civilized city, you'll be able to get around knowing just English.
That's a gross understatement. Even at $1 per CD for 10K machines that's not a lot of money. And why would you want one CD per computer? You could always use one CD on multiple machines, or better still, install over the network anyway. The costs just don't bear comparison.
Of course I'm trying to imply anything about the Total cost of ownership here.
Of course the first thing that I configured in Outlook after installation was sending messages in plaintext only.
However I have since stopped using Outlook after a friend sent me a couple of emails with an embedded Javascript virus (the Kak virus -- heard of it anyone?). Now I use ssh to login to my Unix box and use fetchmail and pine!
The grammar of Sanskrit is very tough to learn since it is very vast and there are a lot of things to remember than in a language like English (somewhat like C++ being more complicated than C). But it's all very very logical and straightforward. The main thing is that there are a lot of forms of the same word. For example, udyanam means garden; udyanasya means "of the garden", udyanat means "from the garden" , and so on. There are several forms of the same noun. Each form has a unique meaning, and each meaning has a unique form. There is absolutely no ambiguity. Same for verbs and adjectives and other language constructs.
One beauty of this uniqueness is the fact that now the order of the words in the sentence doesn't matter at all. For example, consider that you want to say "I am going to the garden." Aham is I, udyanam is garden, gacchami is going. So I would say, Aham udyanam gacchami. Now I could also say that udyanam gacchami aham or gacchami aham udyanam or any permutation, all of which mean exactly the same thing. Taking this one step further, I could simply say udyanam gacchami since the verb gacchami implies the "I". If it was somebody else who was going to the garden, I would have to say gacchati, and if it were you, I would have to say gacchasi so the verb form implicity determines the subject.
This is just a novice example of the fact that a lot of semantic information is built into the syntax of Sanskrit in a very elegant way that would appeal to purists and compiler designers. I believe that natural language parsing of English and other European languages is much tougher than parsing Sanskrit would be. The downside to adopting Sanskrit would be the vast number of grammar rules and verb and noun forms that have to be learnt.
Professors in the few universities in India where Sanskrit is still being taught strongly advocate the use of Sanskrit for computing. I just know high-school level novice Sanskrit, so if there are Sanskrit gurus among you, speak out with more relevant details.
Anoop Iyer