Agreed! Is there any way whatsoever of turning off the damn change-of-focus? Not just when starting windows - for example, I'll load up an application and while I'm waiting for it, I'll click start to load another and be halfway through my maze of menus only for them to disappear just as I get to the right icon, to be replaced by a sodding 'loading' banner....
What exactly do Sun SPARCs offer that intel-based Linux workstations don't? We've got a lab full of Ultra SPARCs at the University where I work, but despite their cost I don't seem to experience any kind of particular speed difference in using them (together with Solaris 8) and with a P450 running Red Hat. The specifications (i.e. processor speed, memory) seem pretty similar to that of intel PCs - what exactly is in a SPARC that justifies its price?
How do Napster make money?
on
Napster Wars
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· Score: 1
OK - I'm stupid, but how exactly are Napster making money with what they are doing? It can't all be coming from banner ads and miscellaneous cookies on their site. Can it?
Fair comment; I must admit, I'm not familiar with exactly what can and cannot be downloaded at the moment, although I read that there are places where you can download "The Phantom Menace" at pretty good quality. The point I was trying to make was that to the average person in the street, copying a load of C64 games isn't/wasn't regarded as a serious crime - if a crime at all. But when the average person hears that people are downloading movies and the like, then they can relate to this a lot more, and will likely be quite upset that people are watching for free what they are paying for. The Y2K anology was the first thing that came into my head, and probably wasn't the best example I could have used. I agree that the problem would have been a lot worse without action, but when you see how little the impact was in countries such as Italy - who spent virtually nothing on fixing y2k issues - then maybe the y2k wasn't all that serious after all. This contradicts what your (admittedly informed) opinion on the problem was. Although I agree with you completely about it improving infrastructures, it shows that even after something happens, peoples interpretations about its seriousness tend to differ markedly.
No matter what anyone writes, no one really knows what the internet will be like in future; when I see postings like this, I always think back to the Year 2000 problem. There were warnings of disaster from respected software engineerings and analysts, and yet when rollover occured, very little happened - at least in life critical systems. It's certainly true that the internet is becoming increasingly policed; what's more interesting is what effect increasingly higher bandwidths will have on this. At the moment, piracy is limited to applications of maybe a few hundered megabytes, but what happens when we all have DSL or whatever? I can imagine being able to download the latest movies within days of their release, and in some cases maybe before they are released. Multi-CD software will be available to download, as will hours of porn footage. When the impact of this *really* hits the corporate and consumer consciousness then we're going to see a *lot* more regulation coming into play. At the moment it seems that most advocates of internet privacy just want to stop people from downloading a couple of MP3s - what are they going to say when people are able to download entire discographys, or movies like Titanic? Well, just my $.02 worth.
One way of increasing the reliability of software is to use n-version programming, whereby you implement several versions of the software, written by different people, and then create a voter system that constantly compares the data of each program and forwards the consensus one. Even if none of the programs agree, the voter 'knows' that something is amiss and can alert the pilot/engineer/whatever. I'm doing my PhD on this, and I know that NASA has implemented quite a few n-version systems, as well as the more tried and trusted multiple-redundant hardware. I heard somewhere that the space shuttle code costs the equivalent of $100,000 a line (feel free to tell me I'm wrong if you know the 'true' figure) so it might be worth considering. Certainly a number of prominent academics reckon that you can get a 45:1 improvement in a software system by implementing 3 channels as opposed to a single good system. Blah, anyway, that's my $.02 worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly because it isn't a joke?
It works. Try it.
Agreed!
Is there any way whatsoever of turning off the damn change-of-focus? Not just when starting windows - for example, I'll load up an application and while I'm waiting for it, I'll click start to load another and be halfway through my maze of menus only for them to disappear just as I get to the right icon, to be replaced by a sodding 'loading' banner....
What exactly do Sun SPARCs offer that intel-based Linux workstations don't? We've got a lab full of Ultra SPARCs at the University where I work, but despite their cost I don't seem to experience any kind of particular speed difference in using them (together with Solaris 8) and with a P450 running Red Hat. The specifications (i.e. processor speed, memory) seem pretty similar to that of intel PCs - what exactly is in a SPARC that justifies its price?
OK - I'm stupid, but how exactly are Napster making money with what they are doing? It can't all be coming from banner ads and miscellaneous cookies on their site. Can it?
Fair comment; I must admit, I'm not familiar with exactly what can and cannot be downloaded at the moment, although I read that there are places where you can download "The Phantom Menace" at pretty good quality. The point I was trying to make was that to the average person in the street, copying a load of C64 games isn't/wasn't regarded as a serious crime - if a crime at all. But when the average person hears that people are downloading movies and the like, then they can relate to this a lot more, and will likely be quite upset that people are watching for free what they are paying for.
The Y2K anology was the first thing that came into my head, and probably wasn't the best example I could have used. I agree that the problem would have been a lot worse without action, but when you see how little the impact was in countries such as Italy - who spent virtually nothing on fixing y2k issues - then maybe the y2k wasn't all that serious after all. This contradicts what your (admittedly informed) opinion on the problem was. Although I agree with you completely about it improving infrastructures, it shows that even after something happens, peoples interpretations about its seriousness tend to differ markedly.
No matter what anyone writes, no one really knows what the internet will be like in future; when I see postings like this, I always think back to the Year 2000 problem. There were warnings of disaster from respected software engineerings and analysts, and yet when rollover occured, very little happened - at least in life critical systems. It's certainly true that the internet is becoming increasingly policed; what's more interesting is what effect increasingly higher bandwidths will have on this. At the moment, piracy is limited to applications of maybe a few hundered megabytes, but what happens when we all have DSL or whatever? I can imagine being able to download the latest movies within days of their release, and in some cases maybe before they are released. Multi-CD software will be available to download, as will hours of porn footage. When the impact of this *really* hits the corporate and consumer consciousness then we're going to see a *lot* more regulation coming into play. At the moment it seems that most advocates of internet privacy just want to stop people from downloading a couple of MP3s - what are they going to say when people are able to download entire discographys, or movies like Titanic?
Well, just my $.02 worth.
Argh! It mentions multiple versions in the first paragraph, doesn't it! *bangs head against wall*
That'll teach me to read articles in advance!
Sorry!
One way of increasing the reliability of software is to use n-version programming, whereby you implement several versions of the software, written by different people, and then create a voter system that constantly compares the data of each program and forwards the consensus one. Even if none of the programs agree, the voter 'knows' that something is amiss and can alert the pilot/engineer/whatever. I'm doing my PhD on this, and I know that NASA has implemented quite a few n-version systems, as well as the more tried and trusted multiple-redundant hardware. I heard somewhere that the space shuttle code costs the equivalent of $100,000 a line (feel free to tell me I'm wrong if you know the 'true' figure) so it might be worth considering. Certainly a number of prominent academics reckon that you can get a 45:1 improvement in a software system by implementing 3 channels as opposed to a single good system. Blah, anyway, that's my $.02 worth.