Those are probably not the RFID tags being discussed here. I believe you are talking about anti-theft systems, like those used by Fnac, where the price sticker has an antena and a chip on the back.
What does make sense is to tag items using existing numbering schemes (i.e. UCC, ISBN, SCC-14, etc.), allowing RFID sensors at each step in the supply/demand chain to recognize material quickly and accurately without the need for someone to walk up and scan a barcode.
Except that current RFID tags are not programmable. They come out of the factory with an unique number and that's the only ability they have. Flood them with radio waves, they answer with their unique number. Unless there's some evolution here, RFIDs will just be unique radio identifiers, not airwave barcodes.
I really hope I can ski when I'm 70. I've seen a few skiers that old, but they ski wonderfully... no effort at all. I just have to reach that level before I'm old. I guess the same applies to many radical sports, naturally with the physical effort toned down.
There is a difference between running in a JVM and being able to interoperate with Java classes, just like you cannot automatically use C functions just because your language compiles to the same binary code. Not all of these languages allow you to use System.out.println, or create a JTree object, even if I admit after a second sight that more seem to allow this than I initially thought.
Geez. Why keep on insisting on error? All of them allow System.out.println. Please name one that does not.
But how many of these 165 languages are really integrated with Java, as opposed to merly using the same bytecode representation? I.e. how many of these languages allow you to use Java libraries, and use libraries written in them in Java? Looks way worse then.
How many? All of them. They produce valid bytecode, which must be run inside a Java Runtime Environment, responsible for providing the J2SE libraries. I don't get your point.
I also like the fact that I can code in C#, Smalltalk, Eiffel, ilasm (yeah right;)) or some other language, and if a Visual Basic programmer want to use my classes (s)he can just use them, like they were native classes.. No modifications needed. No wrappers needed.
The multi-language aspect of.NET, much hyped by MS-marketing, is a common characteristic to all bytecode-interpreted languages. Java has its own list of bytecode compilers: 165 of them, by current counts.
I think everyone suffers from the Maslow Hammer syndrome. We all prefer to use the tools we already know. This is not an entirely wrong attitude, since anyone is more proficient with the tools used regularly. The Maslow Hammer syndrome is dangerous only when its threshold is so high it prevents changing to a tool that is much better. This is not the case for either of J2EE/.NET. If I changed to.NET now, I'd take a few months to develop as fast as I do now in Java.
But then again, I am in favour of higher income tax and differential taxation for the higher income bands,
You seem to imply that income tax is more socially fair than sales tax, because you can tax higher income bands higher rates. This is a fallacy. Income tax is unfair, and privileges regular monotonic incomes. If I have spikes of income, followed by valleys of little to no income, I get taxed higher rates than someone who makes the same average income, but monotonically.
Sales taxes, on the other hand, are socially fair. People aren't taxed higher for being rich. They get taxed higher when behaving rich -- by spending. Under a sales tax-only model, I could be filthy rich, but if I lived a spartan life, I'd pay as much tax as a poor old lady. And this is how it should be.
Then don't use PNG. I view the platform portability of the web at a much higher rating than any file format, or any "feature" Microsoft may induce you to use. Much less, when we all know libpng is free for Microsoft to grab and integrate in MSIE. I'd feel entraped working around Microsoft bugs, again.
This DirectX hack is the stupidiest, most dumb, shortsighted advice I've ever seen. You don't want to follow that path. If you need DirectX calls to render images in web pages, one of these days we'll see ourselves writing directinput calls to read Microsoft keyboards.
I'm a web developer. I'm not a Microsoft developer. This was a conscientious option.
P.S. I don't want to offend you personally. Lots of other people make the same mistake, and some of them really should know better.
Reasonably modern?! If I recall correctly, IE4 already has PNG support (minus alpha transparency). IE3 won't fit in the "reasonably modern" category anytime soon.
This is why mating has never worked for me... For every good chick out there, there are 1600 more good ones that just confuse the hell out of me. Yes, I do like the ability to find the one perfect match for me, but I'd prefer if my parents had already made the choice for me, and my perfect girl would already be at home by now.
</irony>
You know, choice is a good thing 9 times out of 10. Generally, you only want to avoid having available choices when in an emergency situation, like when fleeing from a fire, or dispersing a crowd.
With teleworkers you can't just turn around and ask them a question
The case is, with developers, you can't either. Even if they are present, constant interruption drives down productivity like a stone. I estimate I can take ~30min to achieve the same efficiency, after an interruption and a context switch. Worse, some tasks just can't be done if I can't get a two hour of "Don't Bother Me Unless the Building is On Fire" interval.
Alas, 90% of the managers can't even imagine how can someone concentrate so much on a task, let alone understand the need for peace and quiet. I don't say this with a negative contour. It's that management involves mostly human interaction, while development involves mostly mental modelling. It's different, and it takes some effort to see the other side.
My point was, since there is no need for these devices to be connected to the internet, why not give them one of the addresses from the address space reserved for internal networks.
This is a rather limiting view, quite common. The fact that you don't know of any application doesn't mean that there isn't one, or that one isn't bound to appear once you lift the private-network hack provided by NAT.
As a simple example, off the top of my head, difficult to work out with NAT, consider having the quality staff read SNMP MIBs on production-floor robots, for sporadic inquiries on quality parameters. Right now, you'll need to VPN into the private network (difficult for a variety of mobile devices), whereas with real point-to-point communication you could just read in the MIB results -- possibly encrypting the data when it leaves the production-floor network, a work for a good firewall.
There's no reason why these devices should have externally-visible IP addresses (and a lot of good reasons why they shouldn't). if you think about it. Imagine what would happen if you could hack into the welding robots on Ford's assembly lines, or GE's, or "War Games" the AISC., DoD, etc.
No, what you meant to say probably was: There's no reason why these devices should be directly connected to the internet, with no firewall. Packet filtering has nothing to do with NAT. You may think of NAT as a subset of general packet filtering. While packet filtering is essential for network security, NAT isn't and it's just a hack to avoid the IP allocation hurdles.
Load average comes from/proc/loadavg, so it's calculated by the kernel. I'd be suprised to see distributions finetuning the kernel to change stuff like this, but since I haven't laid hand on RH systems in a while, I can't refute your statement.
I've seen the behaviour I've described across SuSE, Debian and Gentoo systems. Servers with many network connections, and lots of disk I/O show high load averages and unnallocated CPU time.
What is your system load? If it's less than 1, you've got processor power to spare. If it's more than one, you could add more processors IF you think that site response is too slow.
This is not true. System load is the average number of blocked processes. They may be blocked waiting for processor time, but they may also be blocked waiting for a lot of other stuff. So, the 100% usage system load depends on what are you doing with the server. You can have a system keep a load average of 20 and yet show unallocated CPU time (My IMAP server has this behaviour). You can have a system with load average of 1.5 and have no spare CPU cycles (if you're number crunching, for example).
My best advice is: use vmstat. vmstat 10 will give you readings on all the stuff you need to know: mem, disk and cpu usage.
Advertisements are intrusive no matter what form they take. Just because they use less bits and/or are smaller on the page doesn't change the fact that they are unwanted.
You know, there's a perfectly nice way of getting rid of ads, without being a lame hitchiker:
Pay up, and put your wallet where your browser is.
The dotcom bubble bursted quite some time ago, did you notice? There are no free rides anymore.
Threading: If you live in Windows land, or in some comercial Unix (namely Solaris), the use of pthreads is surely a speed boost. Beware of module thread safety (mod_php and mod_perl don't support threaded MPMs).
Better support for non-Unix platforms: Just for foreigners (win32 people). Apache 2 is considerably faster on windows, than the version 1 counterpart, due to the threading MPM and the new Apache Portable Runtime.
Filtering: Filtering allows for fun new stuff, like processing a page with mod_php, then SSI and mod_deflate in the end.
Code cleanup: The new Apache is supposedly better designed, easier to maintain and extend, so upgrading is encouraged to avoid having to maintain the old codebase.
It's quite good, at least for Apache + mod_php. Despite the warnings up at php.net (which seem to be gone now), mod_php works right out of the box with any recent apache, provided you don't use threaded worker models. It makes sense, since handling the fact that mod_php instances would be sharing memory space requires changes to the current codebase. Just stick with the old prefork MPM. I have this setup handling a fairly large site for the last several months, without a glitch.
mod_perl is supposed to be unstable, but this may be as much a myth as with PHP.
Sorting 5000 messages, for the right Imap server, is a snap. I sysadmin Portugalmail, an email provider with 200k accounts. The backend is IMAP based, and it copes easily with the 25 thousand daily users.
POP is a braindead protocol. All it can do is give you the messages in order of arrival, which is by all means insufficient. Recent versions have the ability of giving you the headers for perusal, but then you can't pick a message without retrieving the others from the queue. Worse yet, you can't delete a message without downloading it. It's a pain even on cable connection as I am now, and gets unusable if you are stuck with a slow analog connection, like a 9600bps GSM.
Nice timing. I am just retrieving the 5345th message from my ISP inbox, which contains a password recovery code. I couldn't care less for the other 5344 messages in there (one year spam collection). Yay! 20min overhead.
It does not classify as little overhead. I could get the message in 2s using IMAP, but nooooo! That'd qualify as Good Service(tm).
Slashdot Mirror
RFID tags are much smaller. You'll find some pictures here:, 00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52343
I really hope I can ski when I'm 70. I've seen a few skiers that old, but they ski wonderfully... no effort at all. I just have to reach that level before I'm old. I guess the same applies to many radical sports, naturally with the physical effort toned down.
I think everyone suffers from the Maslow Hammer syndrome. We all prefer to use the tools we already know. This is not an entirely wrong attitude, since anyone is more proficient with the tools used regularly. The Maslow Hammer syndrome is dangerous only when its threshold is so high it prevents changing to a tool that is much better. This is not the case for either of J2EE/.NET. If I changed to .NET now, I'd take a few months to develop as fast as I do now in Java.
Sales taxes, on the other hand, are socially fair. People aren't taxed higher for being rich. They get taxed higher when behaving rich -- by spending. Under a sales tax-only model, I could be filthy rich, but if I lived a spartan life, I'd pay as much tax as a poor old lady. And this is how it should be.
I've been reliably using ReiserFS on high-load mail servers for two years. No self-induced glitches here.
Then don't use PNG. I view the platform portability of the web at a much higher rating than any file format, or any "feature" Microsoft may induce you to use. Much less, when we all know libpng is free for Microsoft to grab and integrate in MSIE. I'd feel entraped working around Microsoft bugs, again.
I'm a web developer. I'm not a Microsoft developer. This was a conscientious option.
P.S. I don't want to offend you personally. Lots of other people make the same mistake, and some of them really should know better.
Reasonably modern?! If I recall correctly, IE4 already has PNG support (minus alpha transparency). IE3 won't fit in the "reasonably modern" category anytime soon.
This is why mating has never worked for me... For every good chick out there, there are 1600 more good ones that just confuse the hell out of me. Yes, I do like the ability to find the one perfect match for me, but I'd prefer if my parents had already made the choice for me, and my perfect girl would already be at home by now.
</irony>
You know, choice is a good thing 9 times out of 10. Generally, you only want to avoid having available choices when in an emergency situation, like when fleeing from a fire, or dispersing a crowd.
Alas, 90% of the managers can't even imagine how can someone concentrate so much on a task, let alone understand the need for peace and quiet. I don't say this with a negative contour. It's that management involves mostly human interaction, while development involves mostly mental modelling. It's different, and it takes some effort to see the other side.
As a simple example, off the top of my head, difficult to work out with NAT, consider having the quality staff read SNMP MIBs on production-floor robots, for sporadic inquiries on quality parameters. Right now, you'll need to VPN into the private network (difficult for a variety of mobile devices), whereas with real point-to-point communication you could just read in the MIB results -- possibly encrypting the data when it leaves the production-floor network, a work for a good firewall.
I've seen the behaviour I've described across SuSE, Debian and Gentoo systems. Servers with many network connections, and lots of disk I/O show high load averages and unnallocated CPU time.
My best advice is: use vmstat. vmstat 10 will give you readings on all the stuff you need to know: mem, disk and cpu usage.
Pay up, and put your wallet where your browser is.
The dotcom bubble bursted quite some time ago, did you notice? There are no free rides anymore.
mod_perl is supposed to be unstable, but this may be as much a myth as with PHP.
POP is a braindead protocol. All it can do is give you the messages in order of arrival, which is by all means insufficient. Recent versions have the ability of giving you the headers for perusal, but then you can't pick a message without retrieving the others from the queue. Worse yet, you can't delete a message without downloading it. It's a pain even on cable connection as I am now, and gets unusable if you are stuck with a slow analog connection, like a 9600bps GSM.
Nice timing. I am just retrieving the 5345th message from my ISP inbox, which contains a password recovery code. I couldn't care less for the other 5344 messages in there (one year spam collection). Yay! 20min overhead.
It does not classify as little overhead. I could get the message in 2s using IMAP, but nooooo! That'd qualify as Good Service(tm).
No tweaking is needed. There are a handfull of scripts which will translate the database dumps, and create sequencing for you, among other things.
See here:
They're just not special types, but a reasonable use of sequences and default values.