You are mixing a few things up here -- >> we haven't built a plant in 10 years because the public is ignorant. You know why it takes 6 months to shut down a reactor, don't you? It's like a Linux box. There's a ton of critical stuff running, doing critical stuff, and if you just turn it off, you've most likely screwed something or somebody up.
Nope, actually it takes that long because they want the highly active (short half lifed) isotopes to cool off for a while. The half life of the average byproduct is something like what, 45 minutes? The shorter ones are only a few milli-seconds and there are others which have half lives of millions of years. If the hotter isotopes are allowed to decay, then the material being removed from the plant is only a few % as dangerous as it was the second the reactor was stopped.
When you just flip off a nuclear power plant, you'll be lucky if half of the country survives.
Dead wrong here. You turn off a nuclear reactor, and the water runs out of the reaction chamber, the reaction stops, and everything is safe, but distances must be kept.
And only if you're in a big place, like America or Russia. Ukraine is _still_ suffering from the disaster that happened what, more than a quarter century ago? Nuclear power is far to dangerous and expensive to the minor benefits that it allows.
You need to read more about the chernobyl distaster and what was learned from it. It was learned that it is indeed evil to use a breeder reactor because they can NOT be stopped like a light. A typical reactor as used in this country can be. Drain the water and wow, it stopped. Very quickly.
Its sad to know that someone gets screwed up everytime the power goes out and my computer gets shut off. I better buy an UPS quicklike.
People also fear the posibility of nuclear fuel being converted into weapon's grade material, which as they should be told, isn't exactly a feasable plan. For some reason they also have a strange fear of the radiation by products. I wonder why that would be...
Radiation itself is not a problem, how far can an alpha particle travel in air? 10 CM if it is very lucky. Gamma radiation is a lot more pentratable (its just a photon after all). It is the gamma rays which are used in cancer treatments. How far the photon can travel into a material is very dependent upon its energy, and typically isn't more than a few centimeters, but can be as large as a meter or two. That would be the reason for the thickness of nuclear material's casings. The radiation measured in the vicinity of one of these containers is hardly more than that of someone's home.
So what's the dangerous part? The byproducts of the reaction. Mostly the sodium and strontium ones for that matter. They are quite active and easily replace elements in the human body. Strontium replaces calcium and is therefore quite dangerous for people. Strontium is mostly what is causing health problems for persons within the immediate area of chernobyl. Sodium is used by every cell of every living organisim. Radiation sources inside the human body are much more dangerous than those outside. Of course, it is dangerous to be close to a large mass of a highly active radiation source, because of the sheer amount of energy transmitted from the source to the cells of the body.
If you don't know, the nuclear reaction which is used for power uses thermal neutrons to split atoms. The water is not only used to turn turbines, but to sustain the reaction. If the neutrons travel too fast, they merely bounce off of the nucleii of the U238 and cause no splitting of any nucleus. A slower neutron (thermal) will be momentarilly absorbed by the U238 nucleus and cause it to split due to unbalanced nuclear forces (kinda like filling a water baloon too full) and the nucleus will break apart into a bunch of smaller nucleii. Most of these are dangerous, but not for very long because of thier short half lives. The splitting causes more neutrons to be released and perpetuate the reaction. If the water is removed (leaks out) the reaction stops. Its that simple. The control rods (graphite) are used to add more control over the energy of the neutrons.
Breeder reactors on the other hand, are more dangerous. They use a different fuel and do not operate under the safe guard of if the water leaks out the reaction stops. They are called breeder reactions because it starts with one source, I believe some random Uranium isotope called U235, and splits it. Uranium 235 doesn't split under thermal collisions, and requres high energy neutrons. This reaction actually produces weapon's grade plutonium in a small quantity and like I said isn't very safe because of the inability to completely stop the reaction at anytime. I believe there are no active breeder reactors in the world at this time.
A couple years ago in Modern Physics we were required to figure out how long it would take a terroist group of reasonable size (20 or so members) to get enough weapons grade material to make a nuclear bomb without being noticed. Someone guessed a few weeks, while the true answer was a few lifetimes. Not truckloads, but TRAINLOADS of nuclear fuel would need to be refined in a very expensive process to make a weapon.
Nuclear energy sources are safe as long as the byproducts are handled in a professional manner, no skimping on casing thickness, and no allowing reactor water out of a controlled environment.
In Minnesota there is a nuclear power plant at Prarie Island, about five miles from Red Wing (south of Minneapolis St. Paul). About 6 years ago when they wanted to expand and add more storage facilities for spent fuel, the public got very involved, most of the people were very poorly educated about what they were protesting about. Most of the arguments ended up being about Three Mile Island and statements like "Radiation is Bad." The administration of the power plant did a poor job educating people about the benifits of nuclear power and the risks. Of course most of the people would not have listened, but they did not even try. Because of the lobbying of clueless people spent fuel from prarie island is taken by train far far away, a practice which is far more dangerous than onsite storage. This is a "Very Bad Thing (TM)". Trains crash far more often than stationary two meter thick steel canisters suddenly split open.
People just need to learn about it and learn why its better than using fossil fuels. benzene tea and coal soot cakes anyone?
Ever think about why there are so many wrappers for the standards?
ASF -- Mpeg4 wrapper which improves streaming support for the format. The data which represents 99% of the file is just Mpeg4 standard.
MOV -- Quicktime -- Pretty much just an MpegX file with a little extra data wrapping it up. Same story as ASF really.
Real -- Pretty much useless.
DivX -- Mpeg4 wrapped in a AVI and called DivX. The codec itself just makes encoding simpler.
the real reason all of these exist is not because M$ thought they would be able to improve anything with ASF or anything like that, its because when they make it propreitary, they FORCE users to use thier player. Using thier player is just like advertising. That is why players are Free (usually) and they all have the same data in a slightly different package.
I might be wrong about the Real Movie thing, but it seems that way. They play really shitty, even if they are already downloaded. Someone needed to smoke more crack when they made that piece of crap.
OpenUT (unreal tournament) isn't actually open source either. The open source portion is the individual system specific drivers, the game specific stuff (Core and Engine) are not open sourced. This is causing much difficulty in the development of OpenUT because there are SERIOUS bugs in the closed source portion (Core and Engine) which are preventing advancement in the open sourced portion.
Semi-open open source projects just don't work, corporations control parts and allow enthuisasts to midify part, without actually changing the game itself. This is not a "Good Thing" and someone needs to realize it.
I worked at Best Buy for a long time, and I left on a bad note. Best Buy sells more revenue in CD's daily than they do for 3/4 of the store. I remember the first day they had CD's. They made money on them then (about $4 each) and they make money on them now. Best Buy loses money on computers (so they can sell service) but the will not lose money on something without a service contract of some sort.
Admins should be making serious recommendations to NOT use outlook. How many brutally simple virii has it been abused by? Far too many to mention. Sometimes, I think software with fewer features is better, it doesn't break at everything...
Definately, however, is ANY type of evidence from NetPD even admissable in court? Nobody was notified that they were being watched, and if I remember right, phones can't be tapped, wouldn't this fall under the same law? No warrant, no arrest, no admissable proof, no case. WTF RIAA, get off the people's backs. the RIAA is worse for the music industry than Napster and they know it.
First, there was a big telephone company who taught the world how to be a monopoly in the technology era. Then, other corporations have been competing for who could be the largest monopoly in the world. Does anyone else see this as a problem? AOL has amassed far too much control of communications in this world. Not only do they own a large percent of cable TV service, they own a piece of every part of the internet.
Red flag! Stop the Monopolys! What was it that allowed AOL to become so large, those damn coasters they send me once a week? Yes, that and name recognition. They don't even offer any good services. They are the McDonalds of the internet and should be treated as such. If McD's decided to buy every national resturaunt chain, would they not be prosecuted for it?
One of the basic rules used against Rockefeller's steel industry years ago is that because of thier size they were able to profit from every part of the production of steel and steel products. The result was that nobody could compete because thier costs for materials were so much greater than that of Rocefeller. If I wanted to start up an ISP, it would cost me a lot of money to get bandwidth, but if I owned the fiber, my costs would be greatly reduced.
Isn't this what we see here? This is no different than AT&T, no different than Rockefeller Stell, and quite different than microsoft. I am still not convinced that microsoft was a TRUE monopoly. They didn't control all of the production of computers, and they definately did not control all the computer markets.
M$ does servers... Yeah Right! If I was forced to administer a winNT server, I would just pull the plug, it'd work better that way.
Oh, yeah, AOL will have a monopoly in the webbrowser market if the DOJ has thier way. Wasn't that what this whole thing started with?
trying to build a business on the backs of artists and copyright owners
Who did this? the RIAA or napster. These silly boundarys. Then is RIAA justified in stealing from artists because the RIAA actually makes money off of it?
It is truly the pot calling the kettle black. the RIAA seems to be the most greedy corupt orginization from all of these precedings. Good thing the only music I buy now is not produced by anyone under an RIAA label. I think its about time to boycot paying for the RIAA to get fatter pockets and start paying for the music I want, when I want it. If they had singles for sale via mp3 download from artists sites, I would gladly pay up. There's nothing wrong with that, is there? If they are not going to offer a service at a reasonable cost to the consumer, the consumer goes somewhere else. It has something to do with economics or something silly like that. Maybe the RIAA is in a position not to care about thier customers, but last few times a company did that half as badly, DOJ kicked thier ass around the block a few times.
In light that video cards have undergone a greater revolution in power and performance in the past two years than they did in the 15 before that, its good to see someone steping up and taking advantage of advances in hardware.
Nothing pisses me off more to see a windowing system highly dependent upon old school hardware techniques, when the majority of people are running something slightly more powerfull than my 2meg ATI mach64 I had until I bought a V3. (damn good card!)
I would compare it to software being written with 386 optimizations (or MMX) and completely ignoring all the new CPU instructions that would improve the speed of the software greatly.
There are always going to be a few people laging behind the crowd with thier hardware, they are called those with limited funds. But, why optimize everything to run well on thier machines and not take advantage of better hw if available.
I am convinced that the software development cycle is usually not taught correctly. Not nearly enough importance is placed on the idea of throwing what you have away when your feature set far excedes the features of the system it was engineered for. There is no reason to completely scratch everything, but much needs to be completely redesigned with the "new shit" (tm) that has come to light.
If we don't do that now, we'll be stuck with the same historic problems microsoft and others suffer from by having too much hacked together code to start over, yet too much hacked together code to continue adding features.
Slashdot needs to allow me to use ispell on my comments...
Absolutely, I've been studying software design for sometime, I'm thinking about getting a masters in SD.
Anyhow, every author always says eventually the feature set is far bloated from the original feature set for the code. At that time, its probally a good idea to redesign from scratch with the new feature set in mind. It takes alot more time than just hacking new features into already broken source, but at least it would be good for the customer.
Of course its expensive. Even the linux kernel developers might want to consider such a strategy for the next development series of kernels. Call it 3.1 and make it from scratch. Yes, its clean well written code, but getting difficult to maintain.
I had a long talk with my old man on this a few days ago. What we came up with is that like you said, the breakup of M$ is bad for the entire software industry. In reality, many software companys have millions of dollars invested into software which only runs on windows (maybe macos, too, but who uses macs...) Years of development went into these applications. The USG may think it is helping these companys by breaking up M$, but they are in reality getting fucked. Thier stock has fallen in value, so they may need to downsize thier company, the platform they have developed software for appears to be vaporizing right before thier eyes. It'd be really scary to be in thier shoes.
What I'm curious about is after this "open sourcing" will someone actually know enough about how windows works to write a competing operating system that is fully compatable with M$ windows. That's all the industry needs, M$ doesn't need to be split up, just someone needs to know enough about how windows works to produce a competing product.
Of course, if they are stuck using the dumb design descisions m$ made, thier OS will probally not be any better. WTF is up with the registry, that is the most retarded thing I have ever heard of. Modifying the registry of a non-booting system takes forever, and even after its been dumped to a text file, the system usually doesn't have enough ram to use edit on the dumb thing. Windows is retarded.
At first thought, this sounds more like something you can do with a palm that is kinda cool. Maybe just another buzzword which will sell more products. Thinking twice, this sounds more like something that will have much more powerful use in the near future than it does at this time. Everyone I know with a palm absolutely hates having to use lame duck software with limited functionality to download something as simple as the address book from the little guy. More flexible options are always a "good thing" (TM).
Who knows, soon we might have palm sized devices that are more powerful than a simple address book holder/pager. The need to run apache on such a device, probally none, the need to be able to access it as if it were just another computer, perfect. I could lay on the beach "working" all day and when I go home in the evening and set the little guy into his little sheath, my data could be automagicly RCS checkin'd on my computer. I just need to learn how to actually write anything with that dumb plastic pen...
and CGI, and JSP, and servlets) have the limitation that they can only produce output.
You must be kidding... Java Servlets are much more powerful than you are giving credit. You are making them out to be slow and poor for text output. Java isn't a bad language for character operations. One must be careful when coding if they want superior speed, but that is the case for all CGI and CGI workalike options. I can write really damn slow perl if I want, but it is possible to be fast. Before you critique the options, you probally should make sure to have sufficent knowledge of the choices. Java Servlets remain loaded into memory once they are accessed once. There is no passing of go, they are already running. Everything is done in threads, so there is no overhead of starting up a seperate process to deal with it. PHP3 is not a choice for speed reasons or even for functionality reasons, its just quick and easy to write.
My college uses a php3 webmail application, and at peak times of day it has around 1000-1200 active sessions. This translates to only about 1 hundred requests per minute. I have never seen performance as poor as this php3 server, except for maybe the.ps web server posted a while back.
Definitions: Art: That which there exists only one copy of in the world. Produced by an Artist. Commodity: That which there are millions alike throughout the world and each is in no way unique. Which category does music fall into when it is sold on CD's? In concert? Exactly, music is Art in concert, but a commodity on CD.///...///
Anyone remember all the slaughter of good software design movements microsoft has made? About 20 years ago it was learned that having distinct stratification of complexity in the OS and software was best. Have a solid low-level engine which doesn't really do much, just deal with hardware (or the OS in user-space software) and then build the complexity on top.
Microsoft's approaches are kinda like, well, mcgyver. Duct tape it and if it holds, leave it alone. In the end, this duct taping procedure will catch up (blue screens anyone) and when it does, the work involved in fixing it for real is astronomical. Ever wonder why everything is so messed up on the windows platform? In order to increase the rate of production, they cut as many corners as possible and hope it works.
The point? Microsoft products use propriety document formats for two reasons, its better for their pockets, and it allows them to produce new versions at a faster rate. Need one new feature in word, just add one rule to the word document format. The problem? Not a soul understands it because it is so hacked together. Coming up with a entirely new document format would lose all of the complexity they have developed one hack at a time and would cause a severe lapse in the release cycle for word/excel/office/whatever. It seems microsoft trys to have entirely new releases for all thier products every few years, or as often as possible in some cases.
so is that why win98 suffers from nearly all of the bugs of win95? Yup, they were never fixed, even though MS knew they existed. Its too much work to rewrite a troublesome section of code, just leave it and hope that catching some error case is enough, even though the problem lies elsewhere.
Serves them right to get busted for screwing over thier customers.
Never understimate the difference it makes when a piece of software is re-engineerd for its current feature set instead of just patching it along.
Will they change the code? Probally, but if they don't its not easy to catch them. GPL is powerfull and its a good license for software better for a customer than after the fact binary only licenses but that's a different discussion. The problem with current GPL is that closed source companys practically have to turn themselves in to be caught in violation.
It seems to be the general trend that violators are given a very light beating, not even close to compensating the OSS author for the work he/she did for a company they don't even work for. Another problem with OSS code is that its generally pretty well written and easy code to read. Definately tempting to see how someone else solved a problem...
Re:Chess is inherently solvable
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Solving Chess?
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· Score: 1
Proof of chess being solvable because it is finite would be interesting. I think it is unsolvable, and here is the reasoning. If you were to play chess with me there is a posibility that the game would be able to go on indefinately.
This variable length factor to the game makes solving it much more difficult. If it were setup so that there would be a limit of 20 moves and at the end the winner is declared by some set rule of scoring, then it would probally be a solvable game, but because we can take an unbounded number of moves, I do not believe this to be possible, or at least not a trivial enough task to be solvable by a computer.
Brute force crack an encryption scheme with undefined key length, you might get lucky, but there are enough possibilities that you couldn't get a method to crack it everytime.
Seems like every french guy's name is Jean-Pierre, dunno why. It claims to have USB support? Where is the USB controller hidden? Is that a seperate product which will interface with the credit card? Are all of the components seperate from the credit card? They seem un-realisticly large for fitting on a object I put in my wallet.
So, then is the credit card only 2-4 MBytes of data storge? That's pretty usefull in itself, but then everywhere you go you need the actual guts of it to be available.
Unsolvable? Too many moves? Does it matter how many possible moves there are? The vast majority of them are completely useless moves, and taken into context of the game, only a few moves are possible for any given turn. This would seem to suggest that even though there are nearly infinite possible moves, there is a small set of them which would be even possible to make.
Its kinda like on the first move of the game, there are only 20 possible moves, this isn't a number of moves I'm afraid of dealing with.
Re:how to determine the perfect game of chess
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Solving Chess?
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· Score: 1
Sounds kinda like a genetic algorithim to me. WHat needs to be found is a quick way to rank different moves inorder to get the computer to actually think ahead several moves like a real player could do.
Dood, furbys don't learn words from you. If you believe that I'll sell you some ocean front property in iowa.
Do you see massive storage devices on them? Processors strong enough to handle speach processing, let alone figure out context for it? I think not.
Furbys come knowing a SET number of words, and over time and after playing with them for more time, they "learn" new words be simply loading that word into thier vocaburlary.
Don't underestimate how utterly stupid computers are.
this wouldn't work. ATM really doesn't allow for the reading of packets. Just sending them on down the pipe. Any reading would make them prohibitavely slow for internet backbone usage. Even some medium ISP's have ATM coming in to their network.
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You know why it takes 6 months to shut down a reactor, don't you? It's like a Linux box. There's a ton of critical stuff running, doing critical stuff, and if you just turn it off, you've most likely screwed something or somebody up.
Nope, actually it takes that long because they want the highly active (short half lifed) isotopes to cool off for a while. The half life of the average byproduct is something like what, 45 minutes? The shorter ones are only a few milli-seconds and there are others which have half lives of millions of years. If the hotter isotopes are allowed to decay, then the material being removed from the plant is only a few % as dangerous as it was the second the reactor was stopped.
When you just flip off a nuclear power plant, you'll be lucky if half of the country survives.
Dead wrong here. You turn off a nuclear reactor, and the water runs out of the reaction chamber, the reaction stops, and everything is safe, but distances must be kept.
And only if you're in a big place, like America or Russia. Ukraine is _still_ suffering from the disaster that happened what, more than a quarter century ago? Nuclear power is far to dangerous and expensive to the minor benefits that it allows.
You need to read more about the chernobyl distaster and what was learned from it. It was learned that it is indeed evil to use a breeder reactor because they can NOT be stopped like a light. A typical reactor as used in this country can be. Drain the water and wow, it stopped. Very quickly.
Its sad to know that someone gets screwed up everytime the power goes out and my computer gets shut off. I better buy an UPS quicklike.
Radiation itself is not a problem, how far can an alpha particle travel in air? 10 CM if it is very lucky. Gamma radiation is a lot more pentratable (its just a photon after all). It is the gamma rays which are used in cancer treatments. How far the photon can travel into a material is very dependent upon its energy, and typically isn't more than a few centimeters, but can be as large as a meter or two. That would be the reason for the thickness of nuclear material's casings. The radiation measured in the vicinity of one of these containers is hardly more than that of someone's home.
So what's the dangerous part? The byproducts of the reaction. Mostly the sodium and strontium ones for that matter. They are quite active and easily replace elements in the human body. Strontium replaces calcium and is therefore quite dangerous for people. Strontium is mostly what is causing health problems for persons within the immediate area of chernobyl. Sodium is used by every cell of every living organisim. Radiation sources inside the human body are much more dangerous than those outside. Of course, it is dangerous to be close to a large mass of a highly active radiation source, because of the sheer amount of energy transmitted from the source to the cells of the body.
If you don't know, the nuclear reaction which is used for power uses thermal neutrons to split atoms. The water is not only used to turn turbines, but to sustain the reaction. If the neutrons travel too fast, they merely bounce off of the nucleii of the U238 and cause no splitting of any nucleus. A slower neutron (thermal) will be momentarilly absorbed by the U238 nucleus and cause it to split due to unbalanced nuclear forces (kinda like filling a water baloon too full) and the nucleus will break apart into a bunch of smaller nucleii. Most of these are dangerous, but not for very long because of thier short half lives. The splitting causes more neutrons to be released and perpetuate the reaction. If the water is removed (leaks out) the reaction stops. Its that simple. The control rods (graphite) are used to add more control over the energy of the neutrons.
Breeder reactors on the other hand, are more dangerous. They use a different fuel and do not operate under the safe guard of if the water leaks out the reaction stops. They are called breeder reactions because it starts with one source, I believe some random Uranium isotope called U235, and splits it. Uranium 235 doesn't split under thermal collisions, and requres high energy neutrons. This reaction actually produces weapon's grade plutonium in a small quantity and like I said isn't very safe because of the inability to completely stop the reaction at anytime. I believe there are no active breeder reactors in the world at this time.
A couple years ago in Modern Physics we were required to figure out how long it would take a terroist group of reasonable size (20 or so members) to get enough weapons grade material to make a nuclear bomb without being noticed. Someone guessed a few weeks, while the true answer was a few lifetimes. Not truckloads, but TRAINLOADS of nuclear fuel would need to be refined in a very expensive process to make a weapon.
Nuclear energy sources are safe as long as the byproducts are handled in a professional manner, no skimping on casing thickness, and no allowing reactor water out of a controlled environment.
In Minnesota there is a nuclear power plant at Prarie Island, about five miles from Red Wing (south of Minneapolis St. Paul). About 6 years ago when they wanted to expand and add more storage facilities for spent fuel, the public got very involved, most of the people were very poorly educated about what they were protesting about. Most of the arguments ended up being about Three Mile Island and statements like "Radiation is Bad." The administration of the power plant did a poor job educating people about the benifits of nuclear power and the risks. Of course most of the people would not have listened, but they did not even try. Because of the lobbying of clueless people spent fuel from prarie island is taken by train far far away, a practice which is far more dangerous than onsite storage. This is a "Very Bad Thing (TM)". Trains crash far more often than stationary two meter thick steel canisters suddenly split open.
People just need to learn about it and learn why its better than using fossil fuels. benzene tea and coal soot cakes anyone?
ASF -- Mpeg4 wrapper which improves streaming support for the format. The data which represents 99% of the file is just Mpeg4 standard.
MOV -- Quicktime -- Pretty much just an MpegX file with a little extra data wrapping it up. Same story as ASF really.
Real -- Pretty much useless.
DivX -- Mpeg4 wrapped in a AVI and called DivX. The codec itself just makes encoding simpler.
the real reason all of these exist is not because M$ thought they would be able to improve anything with ASF or anything like that, its because when they make it propreitary, they FORCE users to use thier player. Using thier player is just like advertising. That is why players are Free (usually) and they all have the same data in a slightly different package.
I might be wrong about the Real Movie thing, but it seems that way. They play really shitty, even if they are already downloaded. Someone needed to smoke more crack when they made that piece of crap.
Semi-open open source projects just don't work, corporations control parts and allow enthuisasts to midify part, without actually changing the game itself. This is not a "Good Thing" and someone needs to realize it.
MCI sold that to cable and wireless about 5 years ago. Cable and Wireless was originally from Britton BTW hehe
I worked at Best Buy for a long time, and I left on a bad note. Best Buy sells more revenue in CD's daily than they do for 3/4 of the store. I remember the first day they had CD's. They made money on them then (about $4 each) and they make money on them now. Best Buy loses money on computers (so they can sell service) but the will not lose money on something without a service contract of some sort.
Admins should be making serious recommendations to NOT use outlook. How many brutally simple virii has it been abused by? Far too many to mention. Sometimes, I think software with fewer features is better, it doesn't break at everything...
Definately, however, is ANY type of evidence from NetPD even admissable in court? Nobody was notified that they were being watched, and if I remember right, phones can't be tapped, wouldn't this fall under the same law? No warrant, no arrest, no admissable proof, no case. WTF RIAA, get off the people's backs. the RIAA is worse for the music industry than Napster and they know it.
Red flag! Stop the Monopolys! What was it that allowed AOL to become so large, those damn coasters they send me once a week? Yes, that and name recognition. They don't even offer any good services. They are the McDonalds of the internet and should be treated as such. If McD's decided to buy every national resturaunt chain, would they not be prosecuted for it?
One of the basic rules used against Rockefeller's steel industry years ago is that because of thier size they were able to profit from every part of the production of steel and steel products. The result was that nobody could compete because thier costs for materials were so much greater than that of Rocefeller. If I wanted to start up an ISP, it would cost me a lot of money to get bandwidth, but if I owned the fiber, my costs would be greatly reduced.
Isn't this what we see here? This is no different than AT&T, no different than Rockefeller Stell, and quite different than microsoft. I am still not convinced that microsoft was a TRUE monopoly. They didn't control all of the production of computers, and they definately did not control all the computer markets.
M$ does servers ... Yeah Right! If I was forced to administer a winNT server, I would just pull the plug, it'd work better that way.
Oh, yeah, AOL will have a monopoly in the webbrowser market if the DOJ has thier way. Wasn't that what this whole thing started with?
Who did this? the RIAA or napster. These silly boundarys. Then is RIAA justified in stealing from artists because the RIAA actually makes money off of it?
It is truly the pot calling the kettle black. the RIAA seems to be the most greedy corupt orginization from all of these precedings. Good thing the only music I buy now is not produced by anyone under an RIAA label. I think its about time to boycot paying for the RIAA to get fatter pockets and start paying for the music I want, when I want it. If they had singles for sale via mp3 download from artists sites, I would gladly pay up. There's nothing wrong with that, is there? If they are not going to offer a service at a reasonable cost to the consumer, the consumer goes somewhere else. It has something to do with economics or something silly like that. Maybe the RIAA is in a position not to care about thier customers, but last few times a company did that half as badly, DOJ kicked thier ass around the block a few times.
Nothing pisses me off more to see a windowing system highly dependent upon old school hardware techniques, when the majority of people are running something slightly more powerfull than my 2meg ATI mach64 I had until I bought a V3. (damn good card!)
I would compare it to software being written with 386 optimizations (or MMX) and completely ignoring all the new CPU instructions that would improve the speed of the software greatly.
There are always going to be a few people laging behind the crowd with thier hardware, they are called those with limited funds. But, why optimize everything to run well on thier machines and not take advantage of better hw if available.
I am convinced that the software development cycle is usually not taught correctly. Not nearly enough importance is placed on the idea of throwing what you have away when your feature set far excedes the features of the system it was engineered for. There is no reason to completely scratch everything, but much needs to be completely redesigned with the "new shit" (tm) that has come to light.
If we don't do that now, we'll be stuck with the same historic problems microsoft and others suffer from by having too much hacked together code to start over, yet too much hacked together code to continue adding features.
Slashdot needs to allow me to use ispell on my comments...
Reputable OEM's do this too. After working computer repair for a while I started noticing k6-2 350's in k6-2 400 system.
Anyhow, every author always says eventually the feature set is far bloated from the original feature set for the code. At that time, its probally a good idea to redesign from scratch with the new feature set in mind. It takes alot more time than just hacking new features into already broken source, but at least it would be good for the customer.
Of course its expensive. Even the linux kernel developers might want to consider such a strategy for the next development series of kernels. Call it 3.1 and make it from scratch. Yes, its clean well written code, but getting difficult to maintain.
What I'm curious about is after this "open sourcing" will someone actually know enough about how windows works to write a competing operating system that is fully compatable with M$ windows. That's all the industry needs, M$ doesn't need to be split up, just someone needs to know enough about how windows works to produce a competing product.
Of course, if they are stuck using the dumb design descisions m$ made, thier OS will probally not be any better. WTF is up with the registry, that is the most retarded thing I have ever heard of. Modifying the registry of a non-booting system takes forever, and even after its been dumped to a text file, the system usually doesn't have enough ram to use edit on the dumb thing. Windows is retarded.
Of course this is only my 2 cents.
Who knows, soon we might have palm sized devices that are more powerful than a simple address book holder/pager. The need to run apache on such a device, probally none, the need to be able to access it as if it were just another computer, perfect. I could lay on the beach "working" all day and when I go home in the evening and set the little guy into his little sheath, my data could be automagicly RCS checkin'd on my computer. I just need to learn how to actually write anything with that dumb plastic pen...
You must be kidding... Java Servlets are much more powerful than you are giving credit. You are making them out to be slow and poor for text output. Java isn't a bad language for character operations. One must be careful when coding if they want superior speed, but that is the case for all CGI and CGI workalike options. I can write really damn slow perl if I want, but it is possible to be fast. Before you critique the options, you probally should make sure to have sufficent knowledge of the choices. Java Servlets remain loaded into memory once they are accessed once. There is no passing of go, they are already running. Everything is done in threads, so there is no overhead of starting up a seperate process to deal with it. PHP3 is not a choice for speed reasons or even for functionality reasons, its just quick and easy to write.
My college uses a php3 webmail application, and at peak times of day it has around 1000-1200 active sessions. This translates to only about 1 hundred requests per minute. I have never seen performance as poor as this php3 server, except for maybe the .ps web server posted a while back.
Definitions: Art: That which there exists only one copy of in the world. Produced by an Artist. Commodity: That which there are millions alike throughout the world and each is in no way unique. Which category does music fall into when it is sold on CD's? In concert? Exactly, music is Art in concert, but a commodity on CD. ///...///
Microsoft's approaches are kinda like, well, mcgyver. Duct tape it and if it holds, leave it alone. In the end, this duct taping procedure will catch up (blue screens anyone) and when it does, the work involved in fixing it for real is astronomical. Ever wonder why everything is so messed up on the windows platform? In order to increase the rate of production, they cut as many corners as possible and hope it works.
The point? Microsoft products use propriety document formats for two reasons, its better for their pockets, and it allows them to produce new versions at a faster rate. Need one new feature in word, just add one rule to the word document format. The problem? Not a soul understands it because it is so hacked together. Coming up with a entirely new document format would lose all of the complexity they have developed one hack at a time and would cause a severe lapse in the release cycle for word/excel/office/whatever. It seems microsoft trys to have entirely new releases for all thier products every few years, or as often as possible in some cases.
so is that why win98 suffers from nearly all of the bugs of win95? Yup, they were never fixed, even though MS knew they existed. Its too much work to rewrite a troublesome section of code, just leave it and hope that catching some error case is enough, even though the problem lies elsewhere.
Serves them right to get busted for screwing over thier customers.
Never understimate the difference it makes when a piece of software is re-engineerd for its current feature set instead of just patching it along.
It seems to be the general trend that violators are given a very light beating, not even close to compensating the OSS author for the work he/she did for a company they don't even work for. Another problem with OSS code is that its generally pretty well written and easy code to read. Definately tempting to see how someone else solved a problem...
This variable length factor to the game makes solving it much more difficult. If it were setup so that there would be a limit of 20 moves and at the end the winner is declared by some set rule of scoring, then it would probally be a solvable game, but because we can take an unbounded number of moves, I do not believe this to be possible, or at least not a trivial enough task to be solvable by a computer.
Brute force crack an encryption scheme with undefined key length, you might get lucky, but there are enough possibilities that you couldn't get a method to crack it everytime.
So, then is the credit card only 2-4 MBytes of data storge? That's pretty usefull in itself, but then everywhere you go you need the actual guts of it to be available.
Its kinda like on the first move of the game, there are only 20 possible moves, this isn't a number of moves I'm afraid of dealing with.
Sounds kinda like a genetic algorithim to me. WHat needs to be found is a quick way to rank different moves inorder to get the computer to actually think ahead several moves like a real player could do.
Do you see massive storage devices on them? Processors strong enough to handle speach processing, let alone figure out context for it? I think not.
Furbys come knowing a SET number of words, and over time and after playing with them for more time, they "learn" new words be simply loading that word into thier vocaburlary.
Don't underestimate how utterly stupid computers are.
this wouldn't work. ATM really doesn't allow for the reading of packets. Just sending them on down the pipe. Any reading would make them prohibitavely slow for internet backbone usage. Even some medium ISP's have ATM coming in to their network.