You seem to assume that CSS can only be used with XHTML, and that "HTML" means "font tags aplenty". This is not so. CSS can be used in conjunction with any version of the HTML or XHTML markup languages.
The only real differences between XHTML and the non-X versions of HTML that came before it are:
1. DTD declarations are mandatory. Or if not mandatory, strongly encouraged. Sort of.
2. Case is no longer insensitive, except usually implementations of it still are.
3. Non-pairing tags have to close themselves with a trailing slash.
4. Attributes have to take the form of name/value pairs.
5. There's a bunch of tags that are deprecated, but you can still use them because no browser authors will ever remove support for them or even refuse to render a page if it doesn't validate against the DTD.
It is stupid to re-create, on the fly, essentially identical information
Yes, and that is why any dynamic website with moire than about 10 visitors per day needs a server-side caching mechanism.
That way, the first person to request a page with dynamic content that never changes gets it pulled fresh from the database. Then for the next hour, the other 99 people get an essentially-flat-HTML version, served from cache.
squid would most likely be the Slash-bot's package of choice, but there are plenty of them out there.
That's because it's been *years* since they've been in the technological lead.
Has Nintendo EVER been in the technical lead?
The PSP is technically far superior to any Nintendo portable including the DS. Nintendo's ARM processors don't even have the power to natively decode MP3.
The Gamecube is a much weaker machine than the Xbox or the PS2, if you go by their respective spec sheets.
Ditto the N64 when compared to the PSX or Saturn.
A lot was said about the "Mode 7" hardware rotation and scaling of the SNES, but its CPU clock was half of that of the Genesis. Sega used this "blast processing" advantage to just do graphics effects in software.
The NES had weak graphics capabilities compared to the Sega Master System.
And, most tellingly, the original GameBoy was an underpowered piece of crap compared to the Lynx, the Game Gear, and the TurboXpress. 2-bit grayscale? You've got to be kidding me. And yet, because they had the best games and the best battery life, they dominated the market.
However, nothing really stopped them from having two piconets for 14 total controllers...
Nothing but cost. It's so rare for more than, say, four people to gather around a since screen, that Sony came to the conclusion that seven simultaneous players was enough.
Networking is the future of multiplayer console gaming, anyway.
a 4200rpm Drive? Give me a Break; it is almost 3 generations old in technology.
Older doesn't always mean obsolete. If you have a system that requires a lot of steady sequential reading from a disk (like an MP3 player, f'rexample?) it would be foolish to use a 10000rpm spindle--the advantages from faster random access are nil, and the power and size costs are greater. 5400 or 4200 will stream your data just fine.
How is this innovative or cutting edge, when the technology [...] was top of line 5 years ago?
Maybe you haven't caught any of the Mac mini marketing hype, but they're not hyping this model as innovative or cutting edge. They're selling it based on its affordability, and you have to expect that an entry-level computer isn't going to have the costliest components in it.
Tiger isn't' even a real 64bit OS, and should be
Says you. There's no practical benefit to rewriting the graphical APIs as 64-bit code, at least not at this time. I think history will show that Microsoft wasted their time rewriting all theirs, when they could have been fixing bugs or adding new features.
if Microsoft can take a tri-core G5 based CPU and put it a Video Game Console (Xbox360) at 3+GHz
The 360's CPU is PowerPC-based, but I haven't heard anything that said it was G5-based.
Microsoft's chip design has to be something that can be fabricated for $200, give or take, and while it may have a terrific clock speed I'm not expecting it to have a lot of the more advanced CPU design features, like out-of-order instruction execution.
The problem is that historically, cars have had real mechanical transmissions that were easy to fall back on if the Power Whatever system failed
Actually, that's not the problem. The problem is that we're now starting to see more and more cars using "drive-by-wire" technologies. The gas pedal is no longer a lever controlling an engine aperture directly; it's a rheostat feeding a variable voltage to a computer, which then decides how to adjust the aperture.
If that computer gets into an irrecoverable state of badness somehow, you could be SCREWWWWWED.
...racks and racks of laptops! No need to by expensive low-power servers, just pump money into high-end laptops that already run low on power.
1. That also means paying a ~$300 premium per unit, for an LCD screen/keyboard/trackpad/etc. that you never intend to use.
2. Notebook drives are generally 2.5" platter, low capacity, slow spindle, small cache, MTBF as low as the market will tolerate IDE devices. About as far from a suitable replacement for a big fast reliable SCSI disk array as you can get.
The real problem is the MS marketing dept, which opted to not confuse Grandma and make accounts Admin by default.
Why would Grandma be confused by having a non-Admin account? Because she wouldn't be able to install most of her programs, and in the case of some particularly egregious software packages she wouldn't even be able to RUN them from restricted userspace.
The Windows OS has pretty decent access controls, but if the software that runs on it isn't designed to work well with them...
Longhorn will make accounts limited by default, and in addition when logged in as admin it will drop priviledges of all apps that don't need admin priviledges (like IE), which is pretty cool.
Yes, the next version of Windows will fix all the problems. All hail the next version.
For the students it's, 'holy shit, they're practically giving away our SSN's, I don't want my bank-account suddenly emptied'
I'd be surprised if there are many high school students who think that way.
Go up to any teenager you know and ask them what their Social Security number is. Of those that actually know what theirs is, I'd wager that more will out and tell it to you than ask why you want to know.
They get home at 3, and have maybe an hour or two of homework to do sometimes, then they stay up until 1-2 AM.
Yeah, I wish.
When I was 15, I had at least 3 hours of homework per night, plus I worked 20 hours a week at an after-school job. And I'm sure I was far from the exception.
Students who demonstrate intelligence beyond their years or insight into problems which the teacher cannot comprehend are VERY threatening to the teacher.
But what does that have to do with the story?
A good part of intelligence is having common sense. Breaking into a computer system and appropriating sensistive information from it, and then expecting to be THANKED for doing so, shows a distinct lack of common sense.
In that week i managed to "learn" or as i like to call it, play the system and procure an 85% in the course(Canadian University).
"Play the system" seems to be an appropriate term, since your behavior doesn't show to me that you were actually interested in LEARNING anything from that course.
Hey, at least you didn't waste much of the teacher's or other students' time while you were taking your shortcuts.
With the newer xbox 360 coming out, expect older xboxes to take a price dive around the holidays.
Yep. I'm expecting to spend $60 or $70 on a used Xbox in early 2006, and with GentooX and MythTV on it my digital playback needs will be covered.
That being said, though, the Xbox is only suitable as a home theater frontend. It has no Video In or MPEG encoder, so for PVR-like functionality you'll still need a separate backend server in the other room, or at least a reliable source for TV torrents.
No, when Disney initially panicked over the expiry of copyright on Mickey Mouse, remember how the courts struck down an extension.
No, I don't remember that.
I remember how the courts said "Yes, you can have an extension this time, and possibly more extensions after that, so long as copyright EVENTUALLY expires."
Sure, that exiration date may not come until after the end of the universe, but as long as it's technically not PERPETUAL the courts said it's OK.
Those aren't your father's IBM 970s. How much they bear in relation to the 64bit PPCs shipping in Macs I think remains to be seen.
I have yet to see anything, other than the PowerPC moniker and a general idea of clock speed, that would suggest that the Xbox 360's 3-core CPU will resemble the PPC 970's that Apple is using in their modern desktop PCs in any way.
For all we know, the architecture used in the 360 could simply be a version of the PPC 601's that were in the 1995 "G2" Macs, only running at 3.2GHz instead of 75MHz.
Funny you should mention SpinRite, as I was thinking while reading the story submission that Bradfitz is acting a lot like Steve Gibson here -- raising a big stink about something which is behaving within the bounds of the technical specifications, even if maybe it is a bad idea.
Given the heavily collaborative nature of computer engineering, I tend to take any alarms raised by one person while no one else in the community seems concerned with a few grains of rock salt.
"A computer on every desk and in every home" - 1977
This wasn't exactly a visionary statement anymore by 1977, what with the Apple (I AND II), the Commodore PET, and the Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 all on the market by then...
Man. If I were you, I wouldn't be citing Friendster as an example of the scalability of MySQL. Few of the sites I visit regularly have had a worse record of database availability.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the benifit on their side for the public to register to read articles online?
It gives the site a better understanding of its audience, not only in terms of size but also in terms of demographics and behaviors.
And that, in turn, makes the site a more attractive buy for advertisers, which allows the NYT to charge more for ad inventory.
You seem to assume that CSS can only be used with XHTML, and that "HTML" means "font tags aplenty". This is not so. CSS can be used in conjunction with any version of the HTML or XHTML markup languages.
The only real differences between XHTML and the non-X versions of HTML that came before it are:
1. DTD declarations are mandatory. Or if not mandatory, strongly encouraged. Sort of.
2. Case is no longer insensitive, except usually implementations of it still are.
3. Non-pairing tags have to close themselves with a trailing slash.
4. Attributes have to take the form of name/value pairs.
5. There's a bunch of tags that are deprecated, but you can still use them because no browser authors will ever remove support for them or even refuse to render a page if it doesn't validate against the DTD.
It is stupid to re-create, on the fly, essentially identical information
Yes, and that is why any dynamic website with moire than about 10 visitors per day needs a server-side caching mechanism.
That way, the first person to request a page with dynamic content that never changes gets it pulled fresh from the database. Then for the next hour, the other 99 people get an essentially-flat-HTML version, served from cache.
squid would most likely be the Slash-bot's package of choice, but there are plenty of them out there.
That's because it's been *years* since they've been in the technological lead.
Has Nintendo EVER been in the technical lead?
The PSP is technically far superior to any Nintendo portable including the DS. Nintendo's ARM processors don't even have the power to natively decode MP3.
The Gamecube is a much weaker machine than the Xbox or the PS2, if you go by their respective spec sheets.
Ditto the N64 when compared to the PSX or Saturn.
A lot was said about the "Mode 7" hardware rotation and scaling of the SNES, but its CPU clock was half of that of the Genesis. Sega used this "blast processing" advantage to just do graphics effects in software.
The NES had weak graphics capabilities compared to the Sega Master System.
And, most tellingly, the original GameBoy was an underpowered piece of crap compared to the Lynx, the Game Gear, and the TurboXpress. 2-bit grayscale? You've got to be kidding me. And yet, because they had the best games and the best battery life, they dominated the market.
However, nothing really stopped them from having two piconets for 14 total controllers...
Nothing but cost. It's so rare for more than, say, four people to gather around a since screen, that Sony came to the conclusion that seven simultaneous players was enough.
Networking is the future of multiplayer console gaming, anyway.
a 4200rpm Drive? Give me a Break; it is almost 3 generations old in technology.
Older doesn't always mean obsolete. If you have a system that requires a lot of steady sequential reading from a disk (like an MP3 player, f'rexample?) it would be foolish to use a 10000rpm spindle--the advantages from faster random access are nil, and the power and size costs are greater. 5400 or 4200 will stream your data just fine.
How is this innovative or cutting edge, when the technology [...] was top of line 5 years ago?
Maybe you haven't caught any of the Mac mini marketing hype, but they're not hyping this model as innovative or cutting edge. They're selling it based on its affordability, and you have to expect that an entry-level computer isn't going to have the costliest components in it.
Tiger isn't' even a real 64bit OS, and should be
Says you. There's no practical benefit to rewriting the graphical APIs as 64-bit code, at least not at this time. I think history will show that Microsoft wasted their time rewriting all theirs, when they could have been fixing bugs or adding new features.
if Microsoft can take a tri-core G5 based CPU and put it a Video Game Console (Xbox360) at 3+GHz
The 360's CPU is PowerPC-based, but I haven't heard anything that said it was G5-based.
Microsoft's chip design has to be something that can be fabricated for $200, give or take, and while it may have a terrific clock speed I'm not expecting it to have a lot of the more advanced CPU design features, like out-of-order instruction execution.
Software updates and fixes shouldn't be necessary for any software.
And yet, software (and hardware) "bugs" have existed since the dawn of programming.
Did Ada Lovelace get the memo? NO BUGS ALLOWED!!! PUNISHABLE BY FINES OR JAIL!!!
It's been well known for a long time that parking a computer-equipped car [...] under a high-voltage powerline [...]
Well reported, perhaps, but "well known" suggests that the allegation is actually true, which I won't believe without empirical proof.
The problem is that historically, cars have had real mechanical transmissions that were easy to fall back on if the Power Whatever system failed
Actually, that's not the problem. The problem is that we're now starting to see more and more cars using "drive-by-wire" technologies. The gas pedal is no longer a lever controlling an engine aperture directly; it's a rheostat feeding a variable voltage to a computer, which then decides how to adjust the aperture.
If that computer gets into an irrecoverable state of badness somehow, you could be SCREWWWWWED.
...racks and racks of laptops! No need to by expensive low-power servers, just pump money into high-end laptops that already run low on power.
1. That also means paying a ~$300 premium per unit, for an LCD screen/keyboard/trackpad/etc. that you never intend to use.
2. Notebook drives are generally 2.5" platter, low capacity, slow spindle, small cache, MTBF as low as the market will tolerate IDE devices. About as far from a suitable replacement for a big fast reliable SCSI disk array as you can get.
The real problem is the MS marketing dept, which opted to not confuse Grandma and make accounts Admin by default.
Why would Grandma be confused by having a non-Admin account? Because she wouldn't be able to install most of her programs, and in the case of some particularly egregious software packages she wouldn't even be able to RUN them from restricted userspace.
The Windows OS has pretty decent access controls, but if the software that runs on it isn't designed to work well with them...
Longhorn will make accounts limited by default, and in addition when logged in as admin it will drop priviledges of all apps that don't need admin priviledges (like IE), which is pretty cool.
Yes, the next version of Windows will fix all the problems. All hail the next version.
Basically the whole machine from the monitor down was filled with powdered horse-shit.
So it was running MS-DOS, I take it?
> the coke ate away at the circuitry
Thank god that it doesn't do the same to your teeth and stomache.
If your teeth and stomach are made of metal, then yes, maybe you should be concerned about drinking Coke.
For the students it's, 'holy shit, they're practically giving away our SSN's, I don't want my bank-account suddenly emptied'
I'd be surprised if there are many high school students who think that way.
Go up to any teenager you know and ask them what their Social Security number is. Of those that actually know what theirs is, I'd wager that more will out and tell it to you than ask why you want to know.
They get home at 3, and have maybe an hour or two of homework to do sometimes, then they stay up until 1-2 AM.
Yeah, I wish.
When I was 15, I had at least 3 hours of homework per night, plus I worked 20 hours a week at an after-school job. And I'm sure I was far from the exception.
Students who demonstrate intelligence beyond their years or insight into problems which the teacher cannot comprehend are VERY threatening to the teacher.
But what does that have to do with the story?
A good part of intelligence is having common sense. Breaking into a computer system and appropriating sensistive information from it, and then expecting to be THANKED for doing so, shows a distinct lack of common sense.
In that week i managed to "learn" or as i like to call it, play the system and procure an 85% in the course(Canadian University).
"Play the system" seems to be an appropriate term, since your behavior doesn't show to me that you were actually interested in LEARNING anything from that course.
Hey, at least you didn't waste much of the teacher's or other students' time while you were taking your shortcuts.
it actually just spread more FUD about Windows MCE being better and easier.
Is it really FUD if it's the truth?
For "n00bs" at least, XP Media Center Edition really IS better and easier than trying to roll your own Linux PVR.
And remember, MOST CONSUMERS are "n00bs". They can't all be L33T SUPAR USARS LIEK YUO!!!
With the newer xbox 360 coming out, expect older xboxes to take a price dive around the holidays.
Yep. I'm expecting to spend $60 or $70 on a used Xbox in early 2006, and with GentooX and MythTV on it my digital playback needs will be covered.
That being said, though, the Xbox is only suitable as a home theater frontend. It has no Video In or MPEG encoder, so for PVR-like functionality you'll still need a separate backend server in the other room, or at least a reliable source for TV torrents.
No, when Disney initially panicked over the expiry of copyright on Mickey Mouse, remember how the courts struck down an extension.
No, I don't remember that.
I remember how the courts said "Yes, you can have an extension this time, and possibly more extensions after that, so long as copyright EVENTUALLY expires."
Sure, that exiration date may not come until after the end of the universe, but as long as it's technically not PERPETUAL the courts said it's OK.
First the PS(/)2, now the 360... what's with gaming consoles being named after older IBM hardware?
If the Nintendo's next console ends up being branded the "Nintendo AS400", I'm gonna VARY OFF and not come back.
Those aren't your father's IBM 970s. How much they bear in relation to the 64bit PPCs shipping in Macs I think remains to be seen.
I have yet to see anything, other than the PowerPC moniker and a general idea of clock speed, that would suggest that the Xbox 360's 3-core CPU will resemble the PPC 970's that Apple is using in their modern desktop PCs in any way.
For all we know, the architecture used in the 360 could simply be a version of the PPC 601's that were in the 1995 "G2" Macs, only running at 3.2GHz instead of 75MHz.
Funny you should mention SpinRite, as I was thinking while reading the story submission that Bradfitz is acting a lot like Steve Gibson here -- raising a big stink about something which is behaving within the bounds of the technical specifications, even if maybe it is a bad idea.
Given the heavily collaborative nature of computer engineering, I tend to take any alarms raised by one person while no one else in the community seems concerned with a few grains of rock salt.
what about an apple phone then?
Or how about a bananaphone? I can hear it ringing already...
"A computer on every desk and in every home" - 1977
This wasn't exactly a visionary statement anymore by 1977, what with the Apple (I AND II), the Commodore PET, and the Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 all on the market by then...
Man. If I were you, I wouldn't be citing Friendster as an example of the scalability of MySQL. Few of the sites I visit regularly have had a worse record of database availability.