I don't think you're looking at the right target market for the G5 ads.
Apple has a lot of customers who do grpahics, publishing, 3D design, etc. who basically need a top-end desktop but who aren't willing to deal with a *nix workstation. These are the same people who would buy a 22" LCD display because they're not just surfing all day; they're doing work. For these people, the temptation to give up on having a Mac and just get a really fast PC running Windows is pretty strong, so if Apple can say that their current high-end machine is faster, that's a big deal.
I don't think these are the same market as the folks who just want a computer that's super easy to use for the "digital hub" consumer apps (iPhoto / iTunes / iMovie), although I'm sure they're happy to have that as a bonus. Somebody who would buy an iBook because it costs $999 is not going to care much about the G5, but that doesn't mean that nobody cares.
That sounds like a manufactured scenario so that they could come up with a really high price.
In the real world of commercial property management, there are building engineers who have lots and lots of replacement light bulbs in a supply room. When a bulb burns out someone fills out a work order, the engineer grabs a bulb and replaces it, and the work order is signed off. Eventually somebody has to reorder spare bulbs.
There's not a purchase order / accounting approval cycle for every light bulb any more than there is for a pen or a paper clip.
>Postfix, on the other hand, suffers from the windows design pardigim. >One big package to do it all.
I guess if you define "one big package" to be modularized like this and "do it all" to mean "be an MTA" then you're right. Are you saying that qmail does less, with more than 36 different executables (which is how many postfix uses), and that that's better?
>Even Wietse doesn't trust his own software. >http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=bugtra q&m=1060186 77502632&w=2
Riiight. So you're saying that when Dan ships a bug fix, all qmail installations are magically updated, and all distributions out there on FTP servers and CDs are updated too. No? That's all that Wietse was lamenting - read the message again. He's saying that you can fix a bug in the current code but you can't make it go away retroactively. He doesn't say he doesn't use or trust his own software.
>Postfix on the other hand is still underdevelopment,
I guess you would prefer an abandoned product? Or are you saying it's not ready for production use yet? IBM released it FIVE YEARS AGO as the IBM Secure Mailer. It does get updated, though. Horrors! Do you use an OS that is "done" too, because not ever being updated is a good thing?
>suffers from a poor design,
According to you. How exactly is the design poor in your opinion? Hint: You can't just say "it's like Windows". What are some specific design choices and examples of why that's bad? Or are you just hand-waving?
>and probably will include the kitchen sink by next year.
Based on what, exactly? Please explain why you think Postfix is adding all sorts of non-MTA features lately, and preferrably show a link to a message by Wietse where he says he's going to do so in the future.
> Just click the "Introducing Linux" link. It brings you to another msn page saying "Red Hat 9.0 is a > boon for those who already use it, but it's too expensive to warrant a switch from Windows." >It's funny to see how far the world's biggest software company will go to bash free software > rather than trying to beat them with better software.
That's a ZDNet article that's syndicated so that MSN can put it in their tech section.
Bash MSN search all you want but that article was written by somebody else. Of course ZDNet is frequently bashed for being MS sycophants but that's a different matter.
I think you're not being specific enough. Cocaine and disco went hand in hand. Ecstasy is associated with electronica. What's needed aren't a bunch of hyped up giggling teenagers who'll dance to anything and think they're having a good time... we need artists who are on hallucinogens and opiates and weed. Stuff that makes you think in strange ways, or out and out delerium.
OTOH, the reality of the mass market is that generic cheesy entertainment is what makes the most money. I'm sure anybody reading this can think of at least 3 great TV shows that got canned due to poor ratings. Can't blame the entertainment industry for that, although people always try to say it's bad marketing or a poor time slot or something. The reality is that the unwashed masses absolutely love to be pandered to, and they don't really care to put in the effort to find the really really amazing stuff.
Dunno how to fix this or if it's possible to fix it. Just stating my POV.
I think you're forgetting about all of the built-in $ variables.
NOTE: I had actually written out a list of them here, and there are about 30 of them, but/. won't let me post it: "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters." Which kinda makes my point in a roundabout way.
I mean, seriously. These are all valid variables in Perl and have specific meanings. But they aren't exactly readable. Some of them (like $| and $_) you probably already know, but the Perl brevity / look-me-so-clever culture leans towards doing more with less code, and maintainability be damned.
>Now, later in the code, if I see "$foo" in my perl code, >I know immediatly that I'm dealing with a scalar
And this could be any one of: - an integer - a real number - a string - a reference to an array - a reference to a blessed array - a reference to a hash - a reference to a blessed hash - a reference to a scalar - a reference to a blessed scalar
Well thank goodness that $ is there so that it's so easy to tell what type of data the variable holds.
I disagree that regex's are the reason some Perl code is hard to read. I think that when folks contort their code so as to minimize the number of bytes of source code by [a] failing to comment their code [b] failing to use descriptive variable names and [c] using all sorts of magic Perl variables like $_ and $ and $& and $@$%@#$^$&, that's when it gets hard to read. Who the heck knows what all of those stinkin' magic variables do? You have to have the camel handy in order to decipher that.
Re:SMTP should have been replaced long ago
on
Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 2, Funny
> I come to this discussion as an expert
Gee whiz! Better mod this one "+10: Self-Proclaimed Expert" to distinguish it from all the other stuff on/. that's posted by people who forget to point out to us how knowledgeable they are.
Lottery ticket buyer: I have the winning number! Woo hoo! Lottery official: um, yeah, well actually we didn't mean to sell that to you, therefore it's not yours. Give it back.
Monica: here's the dress with the DNA sample on it, that proves he's lying. Bill: I never authorized that DNA sample to be used for those purposes, therefore it's not yours. Give it back.
Bob & Doug McKenzie: Hey, you hoser. There's a rat in my beer. I want a free case or I'll go to the media. Elsinore Brewery rep: we never intended to sell you that rat, therefore we still own the bottle. Give it back.
Panhandler: Hey mister, thanks for that quarter you gave me! It turned out to be a rare one, worth ten thousand dollars! Rich dude: Hey, I didn't know that, therefore it's still mine. Give it back.
SCO Linux customers: Hey, thanks for all that enterprise functionality that IBM and everybody else created and added to Linux for free that you then downloaded for free and then sold us under the GPL. It's great! SCO: What? We didn't know that the software we got for free and then sold you was any good! It's still ours, give it back!
>I cringe every time I hear it. Well then you need to relax. MP3 isn't the antichrist. Yeah, Ogg would be nicer, but it's better to have these guys pushing IPv6 and figuring out what the hurdles are than it would be to sit around saying "gosh we can't launch until we've made sure that we're doing it in the most perfect idealistic way, otherwise/. will get mad at us."
Dear Sir, After reading your recent/. post, I'm sorry to inform you that you've forfeited your rights to bitch about any of the following topics: - Consolidation of ownership of radio stations - Consolidation of news media into the hands of a few powerful corporations - How much talk radio sucks - Consolidation of popular music into a few "blockbuster" boy bands / half-naked babes - How much it sucks that the RIAA controls music distribution - Payola etc.
Sorry you don't love Shoutcast but part of the reason that *most* but not *all* internet radio stations suck is that it still costs a lot to operate one - you have to have a ton of bandwidth.
The exciting thing about IPv6 streaming radio is that there's almost no incremental cost to adding listeners - sorta like radio, but without the spectrum limitation. It completely changes the way that internet radio works. One schmoe with DSL would be able to reach (via multicasting) every single person on the internet, if they wanted to listen. That's huge. Think about what that would do to P2P. No queueing for the same file - everybody downloads it at once from the same stream.
Pervasive multicasting makes some amazing things possible, and really gives the shaft to The Man.
>all that aside this is about theft. downloading mp3s for material you haven't >paid for -is- theft. whether it -should-be- or not is debatable. but under the law, it is. bummer.
No. You've been brainwashed by the RIAA. That's their PR line but it isn't the law.
Taking a physical CD out of a music store without permission is theft. Downloading copyrighted songs without the permission of the copyright owners is copyright infringement. Don't help the RIAA by repeating their propaganda.
They are both illegal, and immoral (despite the rationalizations of "well most music sux anyway so the good stuff should be free" or "I deserve cheaper music therefore I get to set the price at $0 if I feel like it").
Y'know what, I'm so tired of this, I'm going to go buy some music at the Apple iTunes Music Store. Seriously. Right now.
Re:I have said it before and I will say it again..
on
In Pursuit Of A Spammer
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· Score: 4, Informative
Cool! Can I come to your house and exercise my right to kick you in the nuts? Of course, you have the right to block it.
How do you feel about the hundreds of internet worms and script kiddies and failed spam relay attempts that are interfering with the bandwidth you pay for? Is that OK too? Mind if I run an extension cord to the outlet on your patio so I don't have to pay for my own electricity? Of course, you have to right to unplug it, but I'll just come back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. And I'll tunnel under your house and tap into the wiring in your basement where you don't see. But you have the right to spend every waking hour trying to stop me from leeching off the stuff you pay for. I hope you don't waste too much time fighting me, though... I need you to go to work and earn money to pay for the stuff that I'm stealing from you, so that I don't have to go to work myself and earn an honest living. Wow, I love your attitude! Maybe I can hook myself up to your water and gas lines, too.
There's cyber-libertarianism, and then there's advocating total lawlessness. When everybody has a "right" to do whatever they want to anybody, that's the same as nobody having any rights at all.
Have you read this thing? This makes me think of the movies A Beautiful Mind and Dark City, where a raving lunatic covers his walls with all sorts of data and diagrams and schematics and stuff, that to him makes perfect sense... "I've almost figured it out, I'm so close toa breakthrough..." but to a sane person is just crazy talk written down and pasted to the wall.
I guess it's possible that his work makes sense to a duly trained professional but clearly the USPTO isn't qualified to judge that. I suspect that this is no different from a time machine patent that employs precise alignments of bottle caps and pop rocks to work.
This guy is a professional counselor with a MS in Biological Sciences and an MS in Counseling and yet he's coming up with detailed designs for ethical artificial intelligence systems. Have a look at this diagram from his site: http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/fairhaven/Patent_fig1.jpg Yikes.
You should really watch the "making of" stuff that comes with the LotR DVD set. Those landscapes are real, and I was very surprised at how much of the "CGI" stuff was actually just old-school camera tricks (miniatures and perspective optical illusions). Some of the landscapes are composited, and there are some CG monsters, but there are also quite a lot of cases where they're just super short people in hobbit make-up, or 2D composites of 30' tall miniature sets.
BTW, any filmmaker knows that audiences would rather see a bunch of dialogue than battles. Riiight.
If you look at the way data works in a cluster, it's pretty clear that spreading it across a big slow network is a bad idea.
In a DBMS, if all accesses are reads, you basically can just cache the data in every node of the cluster and it's ultra fast. If it's a lot of data, partition it across a large number of machines so that they each cache a subset of the whole database, and direct client hits to the appropriate node.
The problem comes when you change something in an ACID compliant DBMS - you have to write to a transaction log on disk, then change the block in memory and write it to disk, then to the transaction log on disk again saying the transaction was successful. In a cluster it's worse, because you also have to tell all the other caches that something changed. Maybe you just say "invalidate the object with ID xxxx", maybe you tell it to flush all objects of that type, or maybe you send it the new one. You first get a lock on the row in the DB, then you change it (multiple physical disk writes), then you unlock the row and tell all the caches that they're out of sync. Multiply this times several nodes and N transactions/second and all of a sudden you're talking about serious bandwidth. If you can get multicasting going then the bottlneck becomes the write performance of the DB (all nodes still bottleneck on the ability to write transactions to the transaction log on disk), but the database iteself can be partitioned, so you can go really far with this if you implement it correctly, and if your data happens to partition nicely like that.
So, for something like the gene stuff that was mentioned in the article, it's not unreasonable to think that a user might someday have the whole DB on his/her hard disk. But running a clustered RDBMS over DSL with lots of writes and cache management traffic would be uuuugly. I think that's why it hasn't really been done as a general case.
For another example, look at SMP vs NUMA architectures. Inter-CPU bandwidth in SMP is critical because cache coherency has to be maintained; in NUMA performance is uneven depending on where the data is but it's still fast. Some problems need access to the whole data set, and others can be easily partitioned.
I think the scary scenario that MS is trying to avoid is the one in which Linux on Xbox becomes generally available for free, and Xbox developers start to use that as the default development and deployment platform, circumventing Microsoft and their royalty structure. In this scenario, MS loses money on the hardware, and makes nothing on the games. There doesn't need to be a market of end-users who just want to run Linux on the Xbox, because the game buyers would have no idea what their games were based on. They would just buy the games and play them, and MS would make no money. Then if the Xbox started to succeed... ouch for MS.
I'm not predicting that this WILL happen, I'm just pointing out that it COULD happen and that MS would lose big if it did. So I think that's why they are so against Xbox hacking.
>My websites all validate to XHTML 1.0, but they don't work in Netscape 4.
Well, that's your fault then. Netscape 4 shipped in mid 1997, and XHTML became a recommendation in January 2000. Did you honestly expect it to support standards that hadn't been created yet? You might as well say that your Sony Walkman from 1979 has really buggy MP3 support, and don't get you started on how bad its Ogg sound quality is.
A more valid complaint would be that it sucks at rendering HTML 4.0 Transitional (which it does).
>Seems like there's no businesses -- certainly not incorporated ones >-- want to hire experts in free software like Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL and Mozilla
Gee, do you think that has something to do with the fact that the experts give their knowledge away for free on newsgroups? Enterprise s/w vendors guard their docs like crazy... you have to PAY to send people to training before you're allowed to get a manual and/or CD on how the app works, and you have to PAY an annual maintenance fee for the right to call tech support (and only the people who have already been to training get to call)! Meanwhile you can jump on a newsgroup and some Linux dude will solve your problems for free. Handy, but not exactly good if you're trying to start a Linux / Apache support business.
I like your argument. Where did the billions that WorldCom "lost" go? Well, that's just the cost of paying for all the employees, especially the CEO. It's not a ripoff, really. That's just how much it costs.
Or, you could write some documentation. It's not that hard but for some reason developers avoid it like the plague.
I keep reading these open source project managers bitching about how hard it is to answer all the emails from users and potential developers. Then you look at their project and see this:
FAQ: (under construction)
Documentation: (under construction) and if you're really lucky they bothered to archive the developer mailing list, which is just about the least efficient way to document the project. (Yes, let's make every developer read all of our conversations ever, including all of the arguments we had and all of the things we decided to do differently later.)
It's not that hard; I've done it. You take a day or two and STOP CODING (oh no!) and write some actual words, document APIs, and lo and behold, you realize that you're also white-box testing your code because you were forced to explain what some code does ("hmm, that actually doesn't make any sense" / "oh crap that won't work in this case").
All of a sudden you can just point people at the docs and add stuff when new questions arise. Sometimes the answers are best expressed as a FAQ, sometimes as part of API docs ("oops, I didn't explain what these constants actually meant"), sometimes as end-user documetnation. But IT'S WORTH IT.
As for the common self-delusion, "we'll write the documentation after we're done with the code", all I can say is, read any process book there is. You're doing it backwards if you start with implementation and then back into writing down what the system does and how it's designed. Those things come first, THEN you write the code that does it. Otherwise you redesign the product dozens of times as you go, each time slapping yourself on the head and saying "oh crap I forgot it has to do this too" or "argh, I need this value from here but the API doesn't allow that". If you write it all down (which first requires that you *think* about it in detail) then you won't forget your good ideas, you can jump all over the place, you can write test harnesses that make sure the code does what the docs say, and you can point newbies at the docs and say "OK cool you can get started on the email notification part, we haven't touched that yet."
He came to my former employer and gave a LoudCloud pitch and I must say he is a good presenter. That ain't the same as being a technowizard (for that, look to Jamie Zawinski) but it's worth something. He actually understands the technical stuff he's talking about and can explain it to MBA types. That has a lot of value.
As far as struggling to stay in the spotlight, hey that's what being a CEO is all about.
What did you expect? Alan Cox? He's the internet boom poster boy, for cryin' out loud.
"Score: 3, Insightful"? Christ. You haven't got a clue what he and "his team" accomplished.
Read and learn: http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/andreesen. html
Yeah, he and his team were only responsible for stupid stuff like: - inline images (Mosaic) - clickable links (Mosaic) - the Back button (Mosaic) - progressive display of images as they download (Netscape Navigator 0.9) - SSL (Netscape Navigator 1.0) - tables (Netscape Navigator 1.1) - cookies (Netscape Navigator 1.1) - JavaScript (Netscape Navigator 2.0) The web would be much better without all that stuff, right? It'd look just like Gopher, and there'd be no web applications. No Amazon, no eBay, no e-commerce at all. Just client-server apps, X11, and Citrix. Awesome!
BTW, just because some people abuse a technology doesn't mean it was a bad idea. I guess you'd say email is a bad idea because there's spam, and images are a bad idea because there are banner ads. If so then by all means JavaScript is a bad idea. Never mind the fact that it significantly improves the usability and performance of forms with client-side validation, which is what it was originally designed for.
Yes, they added some ugly hacks (frames, FONT, downloadable fonts) and misfeatures (blink) but on the whole, they drove browser innovation in a good direction. Only when MS leapfrogged them with IE 4 (little more than a Navigator clone) and then "cut off their air supply" with IIS did Navigator stop being the most innovative browser.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you're looking at the right target market for the G5 ads.
Apple has a lot of customers who do grpahics, publishing, 3D design, etc. who basically need a top-end desktop but who aren't willing to deal with a *nix workstation. These are the same people who would buy a 22" LCD display because they're not just surfing all day; they're doing work. For these people, the temptation to give up on having a Mac and just get a really fast PC running Windows is pretty strong, so if Apple can say that their current high-end machine is faster, that's a big deal.
I don't think these are the same market as the folks who just want a computer that's super easy to use for the "digital hub" consumer apps (iPhoto / iTunes / iMovie), although I'm sure they're happy to have that as a bonus. Somebody who would buy an iBook because it costs $999 is not going to care much about the G5, but that doesn't mean that nobody cares.
That sounds like a manufactured scenario so that they could come up with a really high price.
In the real world of commercial property management, there are building engineers who have lots and lots of replacement light bulbs in a supply room. When a bulb burns out someone fills out a work order, the engineer grabs a bulb and replaces it, and the work order is signed off. Eventually somebody has to reorder spare bulbs.
There's not a purchase order / accounting approval cycle for every light bulb any more than there is for a pen or a paper clip.
>Postfix, on the other hand, suffers from the windows design pardigim.
a q&m=1060186 77502632&w=2
>One big package to do it all.
I guess if you define "one big package" to be modularized like this and "do it all" to mean "be an MTA" then you're right. Are you saying that qmail does less, with more than 36 different executables (which is how many postfix uses), and that that's better?
>Even Wietse doesn't trust his own software.
>http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=bugtr
Riiight. So you're saying that when Dan ships a bug fix, all qmail installations are magically updated, and all distributions out there on FTP servers and CDs are updated too. No? That's all that Wietse was lamenting - read the message again. He's saying that you can fix a bug in the current code but you can't make it go away retroactively. He doesn't say he doesn't use or trust his own software.
>Postfix on the other hand is still underdevelopment,
I guess you would prefer an abandoned product? Or are you saying it's not ready for production use yet? IBM released it FIVE YEARS AGO as the IBM Secure Mailer. It does get updated, though. Horrors! Do you use an OS that is "done" too, because not ever being updated is a good thing?
>suffers from a poor design,
According to you. How exactly is the design poor in your opinion? Hint: You can't just say "it's like Windows". What are some specific design choices and examples of why that's bad? Or are you just hand-waving?
>and probably will include the kitchen sink by next year.
Based on what, exactly? Please explain why you think Postfix is adding all sorts of non-MTA features lately, and preferrably show a link to a message by Wietse where he says he's going to do so in the future.
> Just click the "Introducing Linux" link. It brings you to another msn page saying "Red Hat 9.0 is a
> boon for those who already use it, but it's too expensive to warrant a switch from Windows."
>It's funny to see how far the world's biggest software company will go to bash free software
> rather than trying to beat them with better software.
That's a ZDNet article that's syndicated so that MSN can put it in their tech section.
Bash MSN search all you want but that article was written by somebody else. Of course ZDNet is frequently bashed for being MS sycophants but that's a different matter.
I think you're not being specific enough. Cocaine and disco went hand in hand. Ecstasy is associated with electronica. What's needed aren't a bunch of hyped up giggling teenagers who'll dance to anything and think they're having a good time... we need artists who are on hallucinogens and opiates and weed. Stuff that makes you think in strange ways, or out and out delerium.
OTOH, the reality of the mass market is that generic cheesy entertainment is what makes the most money. I'm sure anybody reading this can think of at least 3 great TV shows that got canned due to poor ratings. Can't blame the entertainment industry for that, although people always try to say it's bad marketing or a poor time slot or something. The reality is that the unwashed masses absolutely love to be pandered to, and they don't really care to put in the effort to find the really really amazing stuff.
Dunno how to fix this or if it's possible to fix it. Just stating my POV.
I think you're forgetting about all of the built-in $ variables.
/. won't let me post it:
NOTE: I had actually written out a list of them here, and there are about 30 of them, but
"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
Which kinda makes my point in a roundabout way.
I mean, seriously. These are all valid variables in Perl and have specific meanings. But they aren't exactly readable. Some of them (like $| and $_) you probably already know, but the Perl brevity / look-me-so-clever culture leans towards doing more with less code, and maintainability be damned.
>Now, later in the code, if I see "$foo" in my perl code,
>I know immediatly that I'm dealing with a scalar
And this could be any one of:
- an integer
- a real number
- a string
- a reference to an array
- a reference to a blessed array
- a reference to a hash
- a reference to a blessed hash
- a reference to a scalar
- a reference to a blessed scalar
Well thank goodness that $ is there so that it's so easy to tell what type of data the variable holds.
I disagree that regex's are the reason some Perl code is hard to read. I think that when folks contort their code so as to minimize the number of bytes of source code by [a] failing to comment their code [b] failing to use descriptive variable names and [c] using all sorts of magic Perl variables like $_ and $ and $& and $@$%@#$^$&, that's when it gets hard to read. Who the heck knows what all of those stinkin' magic variables do? You have to have the camel handy in order to decipher that.
> I come to this discussion as an expert
/. that's posted by people who forget to point out to us how knowledgeable they are.
Gee whiz! Better mod this one "+10: Self-Proclaimed Expert" to distinguish it from all the other stuff on
Lottery ticket buyer: I have the winning number! Woo hoo!
Lottery official: um, yeah, well actually we didn't mean to sell that to you, therefore it's not yours. Give it back.
Monica: here's the dress with the DNA sample on it, that proves he's lying.
Bill: I never authorized that DNA sample to be used for those purposes, therefore it's not yours. Give it back.
Bob & Doug McKenzie: Hey, you hoser. There's a rat in my beer. I want a free case or I'll go to the media.
Elsinore Brewery rep: we never intended to sell you that rat, therefore we still own the bottle. Give it back.
Panhandler: Hey mister, thanks for that quarter you gave me! It turned out to be a rare one, worth ten thousand dollars!
Rich dude: Hey, I didn't know that, therefore it's still mine. Give it back.
SCO Linux customers: Hey, thanks for all that enterprise functionality that IBM and everybody else created and added to Linux for free that you then downloaded for free and then sold us under the GPL. It's great!
SCO: What? We didn't know that the software we got for free and then sold you was any good! It's still ours, give it back!
>I cringe every time I hear it. /. will get mad at us."
Well then you need to relax. MP3 isn't the antichrist. Yeah, Ogg would be nicer, but it's better to have these guys pushing IPv6 and figuring out what the hurdles are than it would be to sit around saying "gosh we can't launch until we've made sure that we're doing it in the most perfect idealistic way, otherwise
Dear Sir, /. post, I'm sorry to inform you that you've forfeited your rights to bitch about any of the following topics:
After reading your recent
- Consolidation of ownership of radio stations
- Consolidation of news media into the hands of a few powerful corporations
- How much talk radio sucks
- Consolidation of popular music into a few "blockbuster" boy bands / half-naked babes
- How much it sucks that the RIAA controls music distribution
- Payola
etc.
Sorry you don't love Shoutcast but part of the reason that *most* but not *all* internet radio stations suck is that it still costs a lot to operate one - you have to have a ton of bandwidth.
The exciting thing about IPv6 streaming radio is that there's almost no incremental cost to adding listeners - sorta like radio, but without the spectrum limitation. It completely changes the way that internet radio works. One schmoe with DSL would be able to reach (via multicasting) every single person on the internet, if they wanted to listen. That's huge. Think about what that would do to P2P. No queueing for the same file - everybody downloads it at once from the same stream.
Pervasive multicasting makes some amazing things possible, and really gives the shaft to The Man.
>all that aside this is about theft. downloading mp3s for material you haven't
>paid for -is- theft. whether it -should-be- or not is debatable. but under the law, it is. bummer.
No. You've been brainwashed by the RIAA. That's their PR line but it isn't the law.
Taking a physical CD out of a music store without permission is theft. Downloading copyrighted songs without the permission of the copyright owners is copyright infringement. Don't help the RIAA by repeating their propaganda.
They are both illegal, and immoral (despite the rationalizations of "well most music sux anyway so the good stuff should be free" or "I deserve cheaper music therefore I get to set the price at $0 if I feel like it").
Y'know what, I'm so tired of this, I'm going to go buy some music at the Apple iTunes Music Store. Seriously. Right now.
Cool! Can I come to your house and exercise my right to kick you in the nuts? Of course, you have the right to block it.
How do you feel about the hundreds of internet worms and script kiddies and failed spam relay attempts that are interfering with the bandwidth you pay for? Is that OK too? Mind if I run an extension cord to the outlet on your patio so I don't have to pay for my own electricity? Of course, you have to right to unplug it, but I'll just come back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. And I'll tunnel under your house and tap into the wiring in your basement where you don't see. But you have the right to spend every waking hour trying to stop me from leeching off the stuff you pay for. I hope you don't waste too much time fighting me, though... I need you to go to work and earn money to pay for the stuff that I'm stealing from you, so that I don't have to go to work myself and earn an honest living. Wow, I love your attitude! Maybe I can hook myself up to your water and gas lines, too.
There's cyber-libertarianism, and then there's advocating total lawlessness. When everybody has a "right" to do whatever they want to anybody, that's the same as nobody having any rights at all.
No, simulating artificial intelligence means that after 50 years this project will have a bunch of dead-ends and no working prototypes. :)
Have you read this thing? This makes me think of the movies A Beautiful Mind and Dark City, where a raving lunatic covers his walls with all sorts of data and diagrams and schematics and stuff, that to him makes perfect sense... "I've almost figured it out, I'm so close toa breakthrough..." but to a sane person is just crazy talk written down and pasted to the wall.
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I guess it's possible that his work makes sense to a duly trained professional but clearly the USPTO isn't qualified to judge that. I suspect that this is no different from a time machine patent that employs precise alignments of bottle caps and pop rocks to work.
This guy is a professional counselor with a MS in Biological Sciences and an MS in Counseling and yet he's coming up with detailed designs for ethical artificial intelligence systems. Have a look at this diagram from his site:
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/fairhaven/Patent_fig
Yikes.
Have a look at this (Aki Ross nude) for an idea of where 3D cinema will be going pretty soon.
You should really watch the "making of" stuff that comes with the LotR DVD set. Those landscapes are real, and I was very surprised at how much of the "CGI" stuff was actually just old-school camera tricks (miniatures and perspective optical illusions). Some of the landscapes are composited, and there are some CG monsters, but there are also quite a lot of cases where they're just super short people in hobbit make-up, or 2D composites of 30' tall miniature sets.
BTW, any filmmaker knows that audiences would rather see a bunch of dialogue than battles. Riiight.
If you look at the way data works in a cluster, it's pretty clear that spreading it across a big slow network is a bad idea.
In a DBMS, if all accesses are reads, you basically can just cache the data in every node of the cluster and it's ultra fast. If it's a lot of data, partition it across a large number of machines so that they each cache a subset of the whole database, and direct client hits to the appropriate node.
The problem comes when you change something in an ACID compliant DBMS - you have to write to a transaction log on disk, then change the block in memory and write it to disk, then to the transaction log on disk again saying the transaction was successful. In a cluster it's worse, because you also have to tell all the other caches that something changed. Maybe you just say "invalidate the object with ID xxxx", maybe you tell it to flush all objects of that type, or maybe you send it the new one. You first get a lock on the row in the DB, then you change it (multiple physical disk writes), then you unlock the row and tell all the caches that they're out of sync.
Multiply this times several nodes and N transactions/second and all of a sudden you're talking about serious bandwidth. If you can get multicasting going then the bottlneck becomes the write performance of the DB (all nodes still bottleneck on the ability to write transactions to the transaction log on disk), but the database iteself can be partitioned, so you can go really far with this if you implement it correctly, and if your data happens to partition nicely like that.
So, for something like the gene stuff that was mentioned in the article, it's not unreasonable to think that a user might someday have the whole DB on his/her hard disk. But running a clustered RDBMS over DSL with lots of writes and cache management traffic would be uuuugly. I think that's why it hasn't really been done as a general case.
For another example, look at SMP vs NUMA architectures. Inter-CPU bandwidth in SMP is critical because cache coherency has to be maintained; in NUMA performance is uneven depending on where the data is but it's still fast. Some problems need access to the whole data set, and others can be easily partitioned.
I think the scary scenario that MS is trying to avoid is the one in which Linux on Xbox becomes generally available for free, and Xbox developers start to use that as the default development and deployment platform, circumventing Microsoft and their royalty structure. In this scenario, MS loses money on the hardware, and makes nothing on the games. There doesn't need to be a market of end-users who just want to run Linux on the Xbox, because the game buyers would have no idea what their games were based on. They would just buy the games and play them, and MS would make no money. Then if the Xbox started to succeed... ouch for MS.
I'm not predicting that this WILL happen, I'm just pointing out that it COULD happen and that MS would lose big if it did. So I think that's why they are so against Xbox hacking.
>My websites all validate to XHTML 1.0, but they don't work in Netscape 4.
Well, that's your fault then. Netscape 4 shipped in mid 1997, and XHTML became a recommendation in January 2000. Did you honestly expect it to support standards that hadn't been created yet? You might as well say that your Sony Walkman from 1979 has really buggy MP3 support, and don't get you started on how bad its Ogg sound quality is.
A more valid complaint would be that it sucks at rendering HTML 4.0 Transitional (which it does).
>Seems like there's no businesses -- certainly not incorporated ones
>-- want to hire experts in free software like Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL and Mozilla
Gee, do you think that has something to do with the fact that the experts give their knowledge away for free on newsgroups? Enterprise s/w vendors guard their docs like crazy... you have to PAY to send people to training before you're allowed to get a manual and/or CD on how the app works, and you have to PAY an annual maintenance fee for the right to call tech support (and only the people who have already been to training get to call)! Meanwhile you can jump on a newsgroup and some Linux dude will solve your problems for free. Handy, but not exactly good if you're trying to start a Linux / Apache support business.
I like your argument. Where did the billions that WorldCom "lost" go? Well, that's just the cost of paying for all the employees, especially the CEO. It's not a ripoff, really. That's just how much it costs.
Or, you could write some documentation. It's not that hard but for some reason developers avoid it like the plague.
I keep reading these open source project managers bitching about how hard it is to answer all the emails from users and potential developers. Then you look at their project and see this:
FAQ: (under construction)
Documentation: (under construction)
and if you're really lucky they bothered to archive the developer mailing list, which is just about the least efficient way to document the project. (Yes, let's make every developer read all of our conversations ever, including all of the arguments we had and all of the things we decided to do differently later.)
It's not that hard; I've done it. You take a day or two and STOP CODING (oh no!) and write some actual words, document APIs, and lo and behold, you realize that you're also white-box testing your code because you were forced to explain what some code does ("hmm, that actually doesn't make any sense" / "oh crap that won't work in this case").
All of a sudden you can just point people at the docs and add stuff when new questions arise. Sometimes the answers are best expressed as a FAQ, sometimes as part of API docs ("oops, I didn't explain what these constants actually meant"), sometimes as end-user documetnation. But IT'S WORTH IT.
As for the common self-delusion, "we'll write the documentation after we're done with the code", all I can say is, read any process book there is. You're doing it backwards if you start with implementation and then back into writing down what the system does and how it's designed. Those things come first, THEN you write the code that does it. Otherwise you redesign the product dozens of times as you go, each time slapping yourself on the head and saying "oh crap I forgot it has to do this too" or "argh, I need this value from here but the API doesn't allow that". If you write it all down (which first requires that you *think* about it in detail) then you won't forget your good ideas, you can jump all over the place, you can write test harnesses that make sure the code does what the docs say, and you can point newbies at the docs and say "OK cool you can get started on the email notification part, we haven't touched that yet."
He came to my former employer and gave a LoudCloud pitch and I must say he is a good presenter. That ain't the same as being a technowizard (for that, look to Jamie Zawinski) but it's worth something. He actually understands the technical stuff he's talking about and can explain it to MBA types. That has a lot of value.
As far as struggling to stay in the spotlight, hey that's what being a CEO is all about.
What did you expect? Alan Cox? He's the internet boom poster boy, for cryin' out loud.
"Score: 3, Insightful"? Christ. You haven't got a clue what he and "his team" accomplished.
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Read and learn:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/andreesen
Yeah, he and his team were only responsible for stupid stuff like:
- inline images (Mosaic)
- clickable links (Mosaic)
- the Back button (Mosaic)
- progressive display of images as they download (Netscape Navigator 0.9)
- SSL (Netscape Navigator 1.0)
- tables (Netscape Navigator 1.1)
- cookies (Netscape Navigator 1.1)
- JavaScript (Netscape Navigator 2.0)
The web would be much better without all that stuff, right? It'd look just like Gopher, and there'd be no web applications. No Amazon, no eBay, no e-commerce at all. Just client-server apps, X11, and Citrix. Awesome!
BTW, just because some people abuse a technology doesn't mean it was a bad idea. I guess you'd say email is a bad idea because there's spam, and images are a bad idea because there are banner ads. If so then by all means JavaScript is a bad idea. Never mind the fact that it significantly improves the usability and performance of forms with client-side validation, which is what it was originally designed for.
Yes, they added some ugly hacks (frames, FONT, downloadable fonts) and misfeatures (blink) but on the whole, they drove browser innovation in a good direction. Only when MS leapfrogged them with IE 4 (little more than a Navigator clone) and then "cut off their air supply" with IIS did Navigator stop being the most innovative browser.