If TiVO are actually aggregating their usage data, and selling this to marketeers so they can (for instance) profile which times to show a particular advert, then what is the problem?
This may be great: you may see an advertisement for the product of your dreams when you are actually watching your TV.
Get with it: all companies have a duty to their shareholders to make money. If they are not actually selling your personal details then they are merely trying to run their business.
3) Intel has been made a fool of by AMD. Transmeta (associated with Linus Torvalds fortunately) has their new chips.
While I agree (in some regards) that AMD have been producing better desktop CPUs than Intel recently, they are virtually nowhere in the server market yet.
How you can include Transmeta in the same sentance is laughable... their products are akin to those old useless Cyrix processors of years ago. They hyped their technology to great heights, and them embarrased themselves.
; there's no reason not to trust open source developers; they're much better than the money-hungry programmers hired by coprporations.
So why are "money hungry" programmers any less driven than freebie bedroom programmers?
They are probably more motivated on occasion (money, moolah, ca$h), and may actually have achieved a higher degree of academic excellence to get their high-paying jobs in the first place.
In saying that, I have been guilty of knocking out the odd Friday-afternoon bit of code!
(this is my first thing i wrote for slashdot!)
Congratulations! With a user number like that you must have been lurking for a considerable period of time. Expect the Grammer Nazi at you for that spelling anytime soon;-)
It is also why NASA can succeed in safe, reliable space flight time, and time again, while other space programs are struggling.
If NASA were so great at this, then what the hell happened to the poor people onboard the Space Shuttle Challenger?
The Russians have amazed everyone with their ability to use cheap components and good-enough systems to dramatically lower the price of their launches, and not spend $600 on every nut and bolt.
And another thing: Open source is great, and produces some of the most well written, secure code that is available, anywhere, but I'm not sure we should be trusting this technology to aide in piloting a space vehicle
We're not talking about a few guys hacking out a CD player over a weekend. We're talking about a serious project conducted by serious scientists. It would appear you are being seriously naieve.
Because, that would require forethought, planning, and a willingness to spend more money now to save money later.
It would be like the Gas company asking the Water company if they would like access to the hole they are currently digging up in the middle of a main road to save the effort of them digging it up for their own needs later *sigh*
They were meant to try this in the UK within the last 5 years or so, but it's never happened. This is why ever road and pavement is in such a mess.
Actually, they have been in much more of a mess since we allowed cable companies to dig the entire country up for Cable TV & phones. At least BT never left the place in such a state.
However, its not a case of it not being used yet, its there for fault tolerance. A lot of internet backbone companies (Genuity, UUnet, PSInet, etc.) maintain some duplicate runs in the event of a fiber cut. They want to make sure that if a high traffic run breaks, they have another run that can handle the traffic while they hunt down the break and patch it
Actually, I beg to differ.
If you maintain a fault tolerant line, then that line is generally up and running between two routers which are exchanging sync info. Otherwise when your main line went down it would take a disproportionate amount of time to set up a link on a backup line.
Some fiber may be held for this purpose, but the vast majority just hasn't been connected up to anything yet.
Unfortunately even to this day I find loads of sys admins crawling all over their DMZ-level servers with Telnet. I have to physically shout at some of them to start using ess-sh (casually avoids infringing trademark *grin*)
They knew it was wrong, why else would they hack into a open mail relay; why would they hide their identify?
They did not "hack into" a mail relay. They used the services of a badly-configured machine on the public internet. If they used an automated program to logon on their behalf, then they never even saw the "warning" message you had put in your SMTP server banner.... uhh you did *put* a warning message in your server banner, didn't you?!
Sorry SuperLad, your comments are (adopts Sean Connory voice) "sheriously flawed":
ISPs have no legal obligation to help you find a spammer's real name/address. They don't benefit from helping you at all, so why would they cooperate?
If ISPs don't help you track down the source of spam, then they will quickly find themselves on either MAPS or ORBS.
I recently helped a huge Asian ISP get to grips with their Spam problem, and they were serious enough to devote significant time and energy to implementing my recommendations. They also listened when I explained how their "standing in the wider internet community" would suffer if they did not demonstrate their willingness to stop the spammers abusing their network bandwith.
On the other hand, ISPs do not have an obligation to help you find a spammers name and address: that is sensitive info you do not divulge about anyone except in a court of law (in pretty much any country). They do however usually have an obligation to find it themselves, and deal with it (by cutting the spammers account for instance).
It's like reporting to an abuse@isp account that you have been hacked from one of their IP addresses... they will not tell you the details of their investigation, just that they are "dealing with it".
And in a forum that stands up and beats it's chest for personal privacy: you are advocating a commercial entity supplies you with the names and addresses of it's customers?!! Pleaze.....
Re:Hey, that should give the Hollywood guys a brea
on
Silicon LED
·
· Score: 3
If someone gets going a transparent cube with lots of transparent chips blinking very fast in different colors... well, all I can say is they will get a lot of free coverage in the next major films.
It's already been done in Blakes 7 (spectacular BBC TV sci-fi series from the 80s).
Computer was called Orac, and had a spectacularly cheesy pseudo-computer-generated voice!
To quote: Orac was described by its creator, Ensor, as being beyond a simple computer but rather being a brain, a genius.
Sounds just like b1ll Gates describing Win2K;-)
Re:Next barrier in sight!
on
Silicon LED
·
· Score: 1
Hey! Come on! They say this kind of stuff every time! Ok, they have to come up with something new to acchive that "next, impossible" result. But they always do!
I remember when 56K modems came out and we were told they would virtually rip a hole in the space-time continuum. Suddenly we've got 2mb ASDL sockets in the wall, that can do simultaneous voice & data. What da f????
In summary, I agree entirely with you. It only looks impossible now. Tonight some bright spark will have a dream about how it can be bettered.
Re:This could be the breakthrough we need.
on
Silicon LED
·
· Score: 2
Display technology just keeps advancing at such a pace it reminds me of moore's law in the microprocessor world. First it was LEPs and now this.
No, if display technology kept up with Moore's law, we would all have sub £100 29" flat-panel monitors on our desks!
An amazing percentage of computer systems still use extremely old-tech monitors (maybe 99%?) I don't actually know anywhere (outside of dealing rooms or comms rooms) where people order modern-tech monitors rather than some so-big-it's-got-gravity cream-coloured monitor!
I also apologise for over use of the "-" char today... I don't know what's come over me.
Anything that gets Sega doing its great software, instead of its ridiculous hardware is a good idea.
Hopefully they won`t be working with MS, so it`ll be MS vs sony/sega/namco/etc.
Well considering Sega already worked with MS to provide a copy of WinCE for the dreamcast, this hardly seems a solid viewpoint.
As to the Dreamcast being "ridiculous" hardware, what the hell was "ridiculous" about stuffing half of an arcade machine in a $200 games console, so you could port all your top-end arcade games straight to the home for minimal cost? No developer ever stated the Dreamcast was difficult to develop for. The problem was Sega had no idea about marketing it, so no-one got to know how good it was. And we know what happens when the inferior tech gets all the marketing dollars: the inferior tech wins.
If it's "ridiculous" hardware you are after, then take a look at the innards of the Sega Saturn, or more to the point the PS2 with it's crazed innards.
And thats before we get onto the racist and sexist overtones that most japanese video games (and anime) seem to exhibit. What parent would allow their kids to play NAMCOs 'F-zero kamakazi' for example with its relentless portrayal of racially 'superior' Japanese bombing US ships at perl harbor ?
Can someone please mod this down to flamebait before the war breaks out again? This has to be one of the most idiotic statements I've ever read in this forum.
There is a whole wide world outside your door. Different people hold different values and they have every right to do so. The Japanese bombing Pearl harbour was not Hitler murdering an entire race. It was a tragedy. I do not see what it has do with "racially superior" Japanese video games.
Jeez: you wound me up so much I replied to your drivel.:(
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that Windows 2000 Server only supports 4 CPUs and 4GB RAM, and even Advanced Server only supports 8 CPU's and 8GB ram. (You'd have to shell out big $$$$ for Datacenter to get the 64GB RAM support that 2.4 has).
I don't think the issue is how many processors you support, or how much memory can be addressed... it's much more than that.
Where are the enterprise-level apps?
I would agree than Win2K DC edition is hardly enterprise-class either!
On an important note, there are NO Enterprise-class systems which do not use proprietry hardware: it's the only way companies can guarantee resiliancy and uptime. The intersting point is this: how the hell does Linux achieve this when it's at it's best running on Intel-based kit? I realise it's been ported to pretty much everything, but that's not the same thing as being resilient on every platform it has been ported to!
Wow. with the number of businesses already using Linux, that's a rather interesting statement. (3 years for an enterprise-ready kernel)
An enterprise-ready kernel implies one suitable for running banking systems & very large database systems on. It would also imply a featureset much like Digital Tru64 or Solaris, with failover clustering etc.
With the best will in the world, I'm not sure Linux is currently at this stage, and I do not think it will be for a few years either.
Many businesses deloying Linux as web servers, firewalls, or file servers does not make Linux an enterprise-class platform.
I hope for the sake of anyone using Linux with an MWave card that the drivers are of a superior quality to the buggy/bloated/disgraceful drivers produced for Windows.
One would hope Linux developers were generally more switched on to writing decent code, although it may just be the underlying hardware to blame!.
In saying that, top marks to Big Blue for doing the right thing.
I was wondering, why get one of these new fangled 'set top mini box PCs', when you could buy one of these old-fashioned 'normal PCs' at half the price?
If you go look at the pictures, you will realise this device is hardly larger than the CD drive!
Any "normal" PC is a large clunky beast in comparison. This thing looks smaller than a Dreamcast.
Thanks to the fact that most of the mobile phone companies are now huge multinationals, I can expect my one little device to work in over 100 countries. I am with Vodafone, the British mobile company that is the largest in the world, with the majority of the European, Asian and American market.
Hang on, I'm a Vodaphone customer. Tell me why it cost 300 quid for one month in Hong Kong on my Vodaphone? Roaming charges!
Mobile phone companies charge an absolute fortune for the priviledge of using a mobile phone to call your base country from abroad. The only way to get "reasonable" costs is to use a calling card number while your phone is on a roaming provider.
I agree the mobile is a great way to make international calls from wherever in the world you happen to be, but it ain't anything like as cheap as using local internet access in the local country will ever be.
The major telecoms players (AT&T, BT, etc) have been aware for some time that the Internet threatens their lucrative international revenues, and took the approach that they should get in on the act rather than mount significant opposition.
But: if everyone and their dog actually starts using these services from home, then the telcos may actually try and start throwing their weight about.
Has anyone actually read their DSL (or for that matter standard phone line) Terms and Conditions to see if this sort of thing is covered? I for one don't even know where the T&Cs for my phone line are!
e.g.
This phone line is provided... blah... must not be used to circumvent carrier trunk switches... blah
I never though I would say this, but is there a Telco Lawyer in the house?!
Academics have spent years devising the correct way to design software:
1. Research the problem.
2. Design the software.
3. Implement the software, according to the design.
4. Test software, adjust design if necessary, return to 3.
Not wishing to be unfair, this disregard for the rules of programming really manifests itself in the poor performance of twm.
I have to take some issue with your methodology: Design is the single most important factor of the product, and the lifecycle should reflect that the design should only be modified during the coding process.
If we take point 4 in your article to mean the actual system test of the product, then we should not be modifying the design at this stage. If the design has not held, then you have to start compromising the development in order to now make the software perform the task it was allegedly designed to do.
Software has been struggling for years to take some ideas from manufacturing industry, and it has still not achieved it. Honda can design a car, and then procede to end-manufacture without a single change being made to the original design: they went through the due process required to test the design before committing to the actual manufacturing (i.e. development) process.
This is why most software projects run massively over budget, and a large percentage are eventually abandoned because the original design work was worthless.
With all due respect to academia (I went to Uni myself, and it never done me any harm:-), they are capable of having a naive view of the business world, where 99% of software is destined to be developed and delivered.
If something is broke, code it yourself...you gain valuble experience with everything you do and it makes you feel great once you're done
Unfortunately it's such a big job writing a half-decent piece of software that if you try and write it alone, you'll still be struggling 2 years later on version 0.1 *grin*
Worthy statement though, and I agree the insight and experience you gain is well worth trying it out in the first place. If nothing else it teaches you that useful applications are big & complex and you don't try and write them yourself!
Slashdot Mirror
If TiVO are actually aggregating their usage data, and selling this to marketeers so they can (for instance) profile which times to show a particular advert, then what is the problem?
This may be great: you may see an advertisement for the product of your dreams when you are actually watching your TV.
Get with it: all companies have a duty to their shareholders to make money. If they are not actually selling your personal details then they are merely trying to run their business.
3) Intel has been made a fool of by AMD. Transmeta (associated with Linus Torvalds fortunately) has their new chips.
... their products are akin to those old useless Cyrix processors of years ago. They hyped their technology to great heights, and them embarrased themselves.
While I agree (in some regards) that AMD have been producing better desktop CPUs than Intel recently, they are virtually nowhere in the server market yet.
How you can include Transmeta in the same sentance is laughable
; there's no reason not to trust open source developers; they're much better than the money-hungry programmers hired by coprporations.
;-)
So why are "money hungry" programmers any less driven than freebie bedroom programmers?
They are probably more motivated on occasion (money, moolah, ca$h), and may actually have achieved a higher degree of academic excellence to get their high-paying jobs in the first place.
In saying that, I have been guilty of knocking out the odd Friday-afternoon bit of code!
(this is my first thing i wrote for slashdot!)
Congratulations! With a user number like that you must have been lurking for a considerable period of time. Expect the Grammer Nazi at you for that spelling anytime soon
It is also why NASA can succeed in safe, reliable space flight time, and time again, while other space programs are struggling.
If NASA were so great at this, then what the hell happened to the poor people onboard the Space Shuttle Challenger?
The Russians have amazed everyone with their ability to use cheap components and good-enough systems to dramatically lower the price of their launches, and not spend $600 on every nut and bolt.
And another thing:
Open source is great, and produces some of the most well written, secure code that is available, anywhere, but I'm not sure we should be trusting this technology to aide in piloting a space vehicle
We're not talking about a few guys hacking out a CD player over a weekend. We're talking about a serious project conducted by serious scientists. It would appear you are being seriously naieve.
I was quite intrigued by the mention of this phibre
Sounds like you have been Smokin' some and listening manto too y hip-hop records! And I take it this stuff is desribed as phat pipes.
Because, that would require forethought, planning, and a willingness to spend more money now to save money later.
It would be like the Gas company asking the Water company if they would like access to the hole they are currently digging up in the middle of a main road to save the effort of them digging it up for their own needs later *sigh*
They were meant to try this in the UK within the last 5 years or so, but it's never happened. This is why ever road and pavement is in such a mess.
Actually, they have been in much more of a mess since we allowed cable companies to dig the entire country up for Cable TV & phones. At least BT never left the place in such a state.
However, its not a case of it not being used yet, its there for fault tolerance. A lot of internet backbone companies (Genuity, UUnet, PSInet, etc.) maintain some duplicate runs in the event of a fiber cut. They want to make sure that if a high traffic run breaks, they have another run that can handle the traffic while they hunt down the break and patch it
Actually, I beg to differ.
If you maintain a fault tolerant line, then that line is generally up and running between two routers which are exchanging sync info. Otherwise when your main line went down it would take a disproportionate amount of time to set up a link on a backup line.
Some fiber may be held for this purpose, but the vast majority just hasn't been connected up to anything yet.
Do you reckon this is what God used to wire heaven?
I would imagine the Great One has some pretty massive bandwidth requirements for sending all His priests E-mail (ecclesiastic-mail).
*grin*
Do you know any sysadmins who don't use it??
Unfortunately even to this day I find loads of sys admins crawling all over their DMZ-level servers with Telnet. I have to physically shout at some of them to start using ess-sh (casually avoids infringing trademark *grin*)
It's so easy to write your Granny could do it.
Firms can hire vaguely technical people to write ASP that could never get their head round PERL or PHP.
Disclaimer: I'm not judging ASP, I'm pointing out why some people use it.
They knew it was wrong, why else would they hack into a open mail relay; why would they hide their identify?
.... uhh you did *put* a warning message in your server banner, didn't you?!
They did not "hack into" a mail relay. They used the services of a badly-configured machine on the public internet. If they used an automated program to logon on their behalf, then they never even saw the "warning" message you had put in your SMTP server banner
Sorry SuperLad, your comments are (adopts Sean Connory voice) "sheriously flawed":
... they will not tell you the details of their investigation, just that they are "dealing with it".
.....
ISPs have no legal obligation to help you find a spammer's real name/address. They don't benefit from helping you at all, so why would they cooperate?
If ISPs don't help you track down the source of spam, then they will quickly find themselves on either MAPS or ORBS.
I recently helped a huge Asian ISP get to grips with their Spam problem, and they were serious enough to devote significant time and energy to implementing my recommendations. They also listened when I explained how their "standing in the wider internet community" would suffer if they did not demonstrate their willingness to stop the spammers abusing their network bandwith.
On the other hand, ISPs do not have an obligation to help you find a spammers name and address: that is sensitive info you do not divulge about anyone except in a court of law (in pretty much any country). They do however usually have an obligation to find it themselves, and deal with it (by cutting the spammers account for instance).
It's like reporting to an abuse@isp account that you have been hacked from one of their IP addresses
And in a forum that stands up and beats it's chest for personal privacy: you are advocating a commercial entity supplies you with the names and addresses of it's customers?!! Pleaze
If someone gets going a transparent cube with lots of transparent chips blinking very fast in different colors... well, all I can say is they will get a lot of free coverage in the next major films.
;-)
It's already been done in Blakes 7 (spectacular BBC TV sci-fi series from the 80s).
Computer was called Orac, and had a spectacularly cheesy pseudo-computer-generated voice!
To quote:
Orac was described by its creator, Ensor, as being beyond a simple computer but rather being a brain, a genius.
Sounds just like b1ll Gates describing Win2K
Hey! Come on! They say this kind of stuff every time! Ok, they have to come up with something new to acchive that "next, impossible" result. But they always do!
I remember when 56K modems came out and we were told they would virtually rip a hole in the space-time continuum. Suddenly we've got 2mb ASDL sockets in the wall, that can do simultaneous voice & data. What da f????
In summary, I agree entirely with you. It only looks impossible now. Tonight some bright spark will have a dream about how it can be bettered.
Display technology just keeps advancing at such a pace it reminds me of moore's law in the microprocessor world. First it was LEPs and now this.
... I don't know what's come over me.
No, if display technology kept up with Moore's law, we would all have sub £100 29" flat-panel monitors on our desks!
An amazing percentage of computer systems still use extremely old-tech monitors (maybe 99%?) I don't actually know anywhere (outside of dealing rooms or comms rooms) where people order modern-tech monitors rather than some so-big-it's-got-gravity cream-coloured monitor!
I also apologise for over use of the "-" char today
Anything that gets Sega doing its great software, instead of its ridiculous hardware is a good idea. Hopefully they won`t be working with MS, so it`ll be MS vs sony/sega/namco/etc.
Well considering Sega already worked with MS to provide a copy of WinCE for the dreamcast, this hardly seems a solid viewpoint.
As to the Dreamcast being "ridiculous" hardware, what the hell was "ridiculous" about stuffing half of an arcade machine in a $200 games console, so you could port all your top-end arcade games straight to the home for minimal cost? No developer ever stated the Dreamcast was difficult to develop for. The problem was Sega had no idea about marketing it, so no-one got to know how good it was. And we know what happens when the inferior tech gets all the marketing dollars: the inferior tech wins.
If it's "ridiculous" hardware you are after, then take a look at the innards of the Sega Saturn, or more to the point the PS2 with it's crazed innards.
And thats before we get onto the racist and sexist overtones that most japanese video games (and anime) seem to exhibit. What parent would allow their kids to play NAMCOs 'F-zero kamakazi' for example with its relentless portrayal of racially 'superior' Japanese bombing US ships at perl harbor ?
:(
Can someone please mod this down to flamebait before the war breaks out again? This has to be one of the most idiotic statements I've ever read in this forum.
There is a whole wide world outside your door. Different people hold different values and they have every right to do so. The Japanese bombing Pearl harbour was not Hitler murdering an entire race. It was a tragedy. I do not see what it has do with "racially superior" Japanese video games.
Jeez: you wound me up so much I replied to your drivel.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that Windows 2000 Server only supports 4 CPUs and 4GB RAM, and even Advanced Server only supports 8 CPU's and 8GB ram. (You'd have to shell out big $$$$ for Datacenter to get the 64GB RAM support that 2.4 has).
... it's much more than that.
I don't think the issue is how many processors you support, or how much memory can be addressed
Where are the enterprise-level apps?
I would agree than Win2K DC edition is hardly enterprise-class either!
On an important note, there are NO Enterprise-class systems which do not use proprietry hardware: it's the only way companies can guarantee resiliancy and uptime. The intersting point is this: how the hell does Linux achieve this when it's at it's best running on Intel-based kit? I realise it's been ported to pretty much everything, but that's not the same thing as being resilient on every platform it has been ported to!
Wow. with the number of businesses already using Linux, that's a rather interesting statement. (3 years for an enterprise-ready kernel)
An enterprise-ready kernel implies one suitable for running banking systems & very large database systems on. It would also imply a featureset much like Digital Tru64 or Solaris, with failover clustering etc.
With the best will in the world, I'm not sure Linux is currently at this stage, and I do not think it will be for a few years either.
Many businesses deloying Linux as web servers, firewalls, or file servers does not make Linux an enterprise-class platform.
I hope for the sake of anyone using Linux with an MWave card that the drivers are of a superior quality to the buggy/bloated/disgraceful drivers produced for Windows.
One would hope Linux developers were generally more switched on to writing decent code, although it may just be the underlying hardware to blame!.
In saying that, top marks to Big Blue for doing the right thing.
I was wondering, why get one of these new fangled 'set top mini box PCs', when you could buy one of these old-fashioned 'normal PCs' at half the price?
If you go look at the pictures, you will realise this device is hardly larger than the CD drive!
Any "normal" PC is a large clunky beast in comparison. This thing looks smaller than a Dreamcast.
Thanks to the fact that most of the mobile phone companies are now huge multinationals, I can expect my one little device to work in over 100 countries. I am with Vodafone, the British mobile company that is the largest in the world, with the majority of the European, Asian and American market.
Hang on, I'm a Vodaphone customer. Tell me why it cost 300 quid for one month in Hong Kong on my Vodaphone? Roaming charges!
Mobile phone companies charge an absolute fortune for the priviledge of using a mobile phone to call your base country from abroad. The only way to get "reasonable" costs is to use a calling card number while your phone is on a roaming provider.
I agree the mobile is a great way to make international calls from wherever in the world you happen to be, but it ain't anything like as cheap as using local internet access in the local country will ever be.
The major telecoms players (AT&T, BT, etc) have been aware for some time that the Internet threatens their lucrative international revenues, and took the approach that they should get in on the act rather than mount significant opposition.
... blah ... must not be used to circumvent carrier trunk switches ... blah
But: if everyone and their dog actually starts using these services from home, then the telcos may actually try and start throwing their weight about.
Has anyone actually read their DSL (or for that matter standard phone line) Terms and Conditions to see if this sort of thing is covered? I for one don't even know where the T&Cs for my phone line are!
e.g. This phone line is provided
I never though I would say this, but is there a Telco Lawyer in the house?!
Academics have spent years devising the correct way to design software:
:-), they are capable of having a naive view of the business world, where 99% of software is destined to be developed and delivered.
1. Research the problem.
2. Design the software.
3. Implement the software, according to the design.
4. Test software, adjust design if necessary, return to 3.
Not wishing to be unfair, this disregard for the rules of programming really manifests itself in the poor performance of twm.
I have to take some issue with your methodology:
Design is the single most important factor of the product, and the lifecycle should reflect that the design should only be modified during the coding process.
If we take point 4 in your article to mean the actual system test of the product, then we should not be modifying the design at this stage. If the design has not held, then you have to start compromising the development in order to now make the software perform the task it was allegedly designed to do.
Software has been struggling for years to take some ideas from manufacturing industry, and it has still not achieved it. Honda can design a car, and then procede to end-manufacture without a single change being made to the original design: they went through the due process required to test the design before committing to the actual manufacturing (i.e. development) process.
This is why most software projects run massively over budget, and a large percentage are eventually abandoned because the original design work was worthless.
With all due respect to academia (I went to Uni myself, and it never done me any harm
If something is broke, code it yourself...you gain valuble experience with everything you do and it makes you feel great once you're done
Unfortunately it's such a big job writing a half-decent piece of software that if you try and write it alone, you'll still be struggling 2 years later on version 0.1 *grin*
Worthy statement though, and I agree the insight and experience you gain is well worth trying it out in the first place. If nothing else it teaches you that useful applications are big & complex and you don't try and write them yourself!