I'm not surprised that the average person doesn't remember the rise and fall of New Century Network, but at the very least some of the newspapers involved in this debacle-to-be should -- they're about to make all the same mistakes over again!
Want to check out that official copy of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill, or the Marine Mammal Protection Act? Sorry, buster. You're gonna have to make do with a photocopy.
This is not so terrible a fate. Just ask Sandy Berger.
It's a computer the size of a spiral notebook. What's the point of putting TWO speaker drivers inside the case when the discernible stereo effect will be mild to absent under a normal usage scenario?
Unless you were going for a puerile pun about the "kissing disease", in which case carry on.
Tell people to go get vocational training if they want ASM monkeys.
This is a troll, right? A subtle reversal of the old "tell people to go get vocational training if they want Java monkeys" line?
It should be self-evident that it takes more knowledge, skill, and ingenuity to write a correct program in a low-level language, and have it run sufficiently fast on underpowered hardware, than it is to write a correct program in a high-level language on leading-edge hardware.
I'm pretty sure that XP Media Center Edition was a superset of XP Professional, not XP Home -- which just gives more evidence that having so many different versions and no consistent version identity scheme leads to confusion and misunderstanding.
The central question here is: does the Samsung player conform to the Blu-Ray Profile 1.0 spec as it claims to?
If the answer is no, the device is by definition defective and the manufacturer is obligated to provide restitution.
If the answer is yes, the device cannot be considered defective; it works exactly as it was represented to work. I think it was pretty foolish of the Blu-Ray consortium to allow different tiers of compatibility within a single consumer standard, but they're hardly alone in that.
Now it's true that for most simple two-party exchanges, a simpler format (like comma separated values or YAML or something) would require less characters, and would thus save disk space, transmit faster, etc.
True, but mitigated by at least two factors:
1. It is trivial to design and work with an XML schema that provides equivalent features to simple/dumb interchange formats like CSV and YAML.
2. Compression is HIGHLY effective on XML documents (all that <element> and </element> stuff tokenizes very well). A well-compressed XML doc should not be much larger or harder to work with than the raw data contained within it.
For something as expensive as maglev, tunneling is relatively cheap.
Relatively to the cost of building the trains and rails themselves, yes. It's still frighteningly expensive by objective measures.
A few examples: 1. The Chunnel - about 30 miles long, it took 7 years and 10 billion Pounds to build and has been losing money since it's been in operation 2. Boston's Big Dig - a 3 1/2-mile tunnel project (and other engineering work required to enabled its use) that took 25 years to complete, with a cost overrun of more than 120% 3. New York City's Second Avenue Subway - originally planned in the 1920's, tunnel boring work was delayed by 70 years of insufficient capital, and only recently resumed.
a maglev from Washington to New York via Baltimore and Philadelphia would be just over 200 miles, so a maglev going at 300 mph could easily do that in one hour.
It would also result in enormous metal objects rocketing through the densely populated NJ and PA suburbs at four times the speed of highway traffic. And there are both both practical safety concerns and NIMBY-based political concerns that will prevent that from happening.
For some reason here in the USA public transportation is considered evil.
Americans don't consider public transportation to be evil -- just slower, less convenient, less comfortable, and more expensive than traveling by automobile. And for most places in the country, they're right.
Great example? Detroit, why there are no elevated trains for transportation is insane.
Detroit is a city whose local economy lives (or dies) on the domestic auto industry. It does not surprise me that they would fail to promote mass transit over cars.
Furthermore, elevated train lines have a tendency to turn the avenues they run above into dark, dirty, noisy, unpleasant places to be. When cities tore down many of their elevated lines fifty years ago, reduced ridership resulting from the burgeoning motorist society was only one of the factors in their decision-making.
24-36 hours from NY to LA is something that people would certianly pay for
It would be in improvement over the roughly 60-hour transcontinental Amtrak trip today, but utterly undesirable next to the 6-hour flight times offered by the airline industry. Even if you tack on an extra four hours to allow for check-in, security screening, baggage pick-up, etc, air travel is still more than twice as fast as a bullet train could be.
Have you really set your travel expectations that low? What happened to the dreams of "90 minutes from New York to Paris"?
Would be a fine recommendation -- if one could actually GET any OLPC hardware!
The "Give One, Get One" promotion ended more than a month ago, and there's something like 5,000 of us who paid for our laptops in late 2007 and still won't be receiving them until perhaps March or April, due to the OLPC Foundation's disastrous mishandling of our orders.
So unless you're willing to pay 80% markup on eBay, are an Australian Linux Users' Group member, or are a child in a third-world nation, good luck getting an OLPC laptop.
Is your point that these NEW workstation cards are a farce, or that THESE new workstation cards are a farce?
If the former, you may be interested to learn that the concept of extra-powerful "workstation" graphics accelerators goes back quite a ways -- even back to the days before "workstation" simply meant "high-end PC". Consider the difference between the capabilities of a circa-1990 386/VGA machine, and a contemporary SGI Indigo.
Replication. None of the replication options for Postrgres are particularly pleasant, especially when compared to the support that's built into MySQL.
I worked at a company that came up with a rather elegant hack for Postgres replication, back in the 6.3 days. The source code was patched so that each query that was executed on the master server was logged to a file, and periodically those files were rotated, copied to the slave server(s), and executed as SQL scripts.
The state of the slaves was often several minutes behind the master, and large object datatypes were unsupported, but it worked well for our needs at the time.
You seem to be using a different definition of 'database schema' than I'm familiar with.
The SQL concept of schema is perhaps more similar to namespace than anything else. What does version control have to do with anything -- and under what circumstances would you NOT need to rely on your data remaining intact and your database not getting corrupted in order for the system to behave correctly?
You need a Wiki? Odd are that it supports MySQL and can be made to work with Postgres. Need a content management system? Odds are that it was written for MySQL and might work with Postgres.
AFAIK there are no features which MySQL has that could not be replicated using PostgreSQL. Any code -- I'm assuming a PHP platform here -- that assumes the database is MySQL should be easily adaptible to use PostgreSQL, even if it requires a translation layer to be written and a search-and-replace to convert PHP-native mysql_real_*() functions with properly abstracted equivalents.
Postgres is the better system but it lacks the depth of support that MySQL does. Sort of like BSD vs Windows.
And that's why most websites run on Windows servers -- there's just so many more MSCE certificate-holders than competent *nix admins!
SQL standard explicitly specifies that writing to the database under READ UNCOMMITTED isolation is not allowed.
Sure, but since when have RDBMS software developer-vendors ever cared about fastidious adherence to the SQL standards?
If an RDBMS wants to offer an optional non-standard-compliant mode, allowing the developer-integrator to sacrifice some integrity for performance, I'm all for it. Just keep the default configuration as close to the standards as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
In defense of XML, the parsing problem is handled.
Mostly -- the debate over object-oriented parsing vs. stream-oriented parsing continues on, and always will until hardware resources become infinite.
XML, like all good approaches, handles mechanism, not policy.
A Truly Good approach will not allow policy to go un-handled.
Compositing window managers such as Compiz (X11) and Aero DWM (Windows Vista) apply 3D effects to entire windows. That's not gaming, is it?
/useful/.
No, it's not.
But neither is it
I'm not surprised that the average person doesn't remember the rise and fall of New Century Network, but at the very least some of the newspapers involved in this debacle-to-be should -- they're about to make all the same mistakes over again!
Want to check out that official copy of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill, or the Marine Mammal Protection Act? Sorry, buster. You're gonna have to make do with a photocopy.
This is not so terrible a fate. Just ask Sandy Berger.
Why would NVIDIA waste expensive chip real estate for stream processors if they weren't useful for 99.9% of the applications running on these chips?)
3D acceleration itself is not useful for 99.9% of the applications running on these chips, if we include computing activities that are not gaming.
better speakers (LOL Airbook has mono)
It's a computer the size of a spiral notebook. What's the point of putting TWO speaker drivers inside the case when the discernible stereo effect will be mild to absent under a normal usage scenario?
Unless you were going for a puerile pun about the "kissing disease", in which case carry on.
Tell people to go get vocational training if they want ASM monkeys.
This is a troll, right? A subtle reversal of the old "tell people to go get vocational training if they want Java monkeys" line?
It should be self-evident that it takes more knowledge, skill, and ingenuity to write a correct program in a low-level language, and have it run sufficiently fast on underpowered hardware, than it is to write a correct program in a high-level language on leading-edge hardware.
I'm pretty sure that XP Media Center Edition was a superset of XP Professional, not XP Home -- which just gives more evidence that having so many different versions and no consistent version identity scheme leads to confusion and misunderstanding.
The central question here is: does the Samsung player conform to the Blu-Ray Profile 1.0 spec as it claims to?
If the answer is no, the device is by definition defective and the manufacturer is obligated to provide restitution.
If the answer is yes, the device cannot be considered defective; it works exactly as it was represented to work. I think it was pretty foolish of the Blu-Ray consortium to allow different tiers of compatibility within a single consumer standard, but they're hardly alone in that.
At the bottom of the linked page I saw "Page 1 of 25" and I gave up.
I used an 8-core CPU to read the article and was able to get through it in just a little more time than a 3-page article would take.
Guess what guys? We've run out of GHz (mainly a power/heat problem). Start writing parallel programs.
Or better yet, go back and clean out all the useless crap that's been gradually added to software in the past few decades.
Didn't you post almost exactly the same sentiment just nine minutes previous? Talk about rehashing old bits...
Now it's true that for most simple two-party exchanges, a simpler format (like comma separated values or YAML or something) would require less characters, and would thus save disk space, transmit faster, etc.
True, but mitigated by at least two factors:
1. It is trivial to design and work with an XML schema that provides equivalent features to simple/dumb interchange formats like CSV and YAML.
2. Compression is HIGHLY effective on XML documents (all that <element> and </element> stuff tokenizes very well). A well-compressed XML doc should not be much larger or harder to work with than the raw data contained within it.
For something as expensive as maglev, tunneling is relatively cheap.
Relatively to the cost of building the trains and rails themselves, yes. It's still frighteningly expensive by objective measures.
A few examples:
1. The Chunnel - about 30 miles long, it took 7 years and 10 billion Pounds to build and has been losing money since it's been in operation
2. Boston's Big Dig - a 3 1/2-mile tunnel project (and other engineering work required to enabled its use) that took 25 years to complete, with a cost overrun of more than 120%
3. New York City's Second Avenue Subway - originally planned in the 1920's, tunnel boring work was delayed by 70 years of insufficient capital, and only recently resumed.
The roadmap shows the integration with a popular web framework, tentatively to be named Pherlthuby on Phails, scheduled for late 2009.
a maglev from Washington to New York via Baltimore and Philadelphia would be just over 200 miles, so a maglev going at 300 mph could easily do that in one hour.
It would also result in enormous metal objects rocketing through the densely populated NJ and PA suburbs at four times the speed of highway traffic. And there are both both practical safety concerns and NIMBY-based political concerns that will prevent that from happening.
For some reason here in the USA public transportation is considered evil.
Americans don't consider public transportation to be evil -- just slower, less convenient, less comfortable, and more expensive than traveling by automobile. And for most places in the country, they're right.
Great example? Detroit, why there are no elevated trains for transportation is insane.
Detroit is a city whose local economy lives (or dies) on the domestic auto industry. It does not surprise me that they would fail to promote mass transit over cars.
Furthermore, elevated train lines have a tendency to turn the avenues they run above into dark, dirty, noisy, unpleasant places to be. When cities tore down many of their elevated lines fifty years ago, reduced ridership resulting from the burgeoning motorist society was only one of the factors in their decision-making.
24-36 hours from NY to LA is something that people would certianly pay for
It would be in improvement over the roughly 60-hour transcontinental Amtrak trip today, but utterly undesirable next to the 6-hour flight times offered by the airline industry. Even if you tack on an extra four hours to allow for check-in, security screening, baggage pick-up, etc, air travel is still more than twice as fast as a bullet train could be.
Have you really set your travel expectations that low? What happened to the dreams of "90 minutes from New York to Paris"?
Get a few OLPC and 4G SD cards, then ....
Would be a fine recommendation -- if one could actually GET any OLPC hardware!
The "Give One, Get One" promotion ended more than a month ago, and there's something like 5,000 of us who paid for our laptops in late 2007 and still won't be receiving them until perhaps March or April, due to the OLPC Foundation's disastrous mishandling of our orders.
So unless you're willing to pay 80% markup on eBay, are an Australian Linux Users' Group member, or are a child in a third-world nation, good luck getting an OLPC laptop.
These new "workstation" cards are a farce.
Is your point that these NEW workstation cards are a farce, or that THESE new workstation cards are a farce?
If the former, you may be interested to learn that the concept of extra-powerful "workstation" graphics accelerators goes back quite a ways -- even back to the days before "workstation" simply meant "high-end PC". Consider the difference between the capabilities of a circa-1990 386/VGA machine, and a contemporary SGI Indigo.
That GameBoy still operates (after a fashion) today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBeTXPaewMo
Replication. None of the replication options for Postrgres are particularly pleasant, especially when compared to the support that's built into MySQL.
I worked at a company that came up with a rather elegant hack for Postgres replication, back in the 6.3 days. The source code was patched so that each query that was executed on the master server was logged to a file, and periodically those files were rotated, copied to the slave server(s), and executed as SQL scripts.
The state of the slaves was often several minutes behind the master, and large object datatypes were unsupported, but it worked well for our needs at the time.
You seem to be using a different definition of 'database schema' than I'm familiar with.
The SQL concept of schema is perhaps more similar to namespace than anything else. What does version control have to do with anything -- and under what circumstances would you NOT need to rely on your data remaining intact and your database not getting corrupted in order for the system to behave correctly?
You need a Wiki? Odd are that it supports MySQL and can be made to work with Postgres. Need a content management system? Odds are that it was written for MySQL and might work with Postgres.
AFAIK there are no features which MySQL has that could not be replicated using PostgreSQL. Any code -- I'm assuming a PHP platform here -- that assumes the database is MySQL should be easily adaptible to use PostgreSQL, even if it requires a translation layer to be written and a search-and-replace to convert PHP-native mysql_real_*() functions with properly abstracted equivalents.
Postgres is the better system but it lacks the depth of support that MySQL does. Sort of like BSD vs Windows.
And that's why most websites run on Windows servers -- there's just so many more MSCE certificate-holders than competent *nix admins!
SQL standard explicitly specifies that writing to the database under READ UNCOMMITTED isolation is not allowed.
Sure, but since when have RDBMS software developer-vendors ever cared about fastidious adherence to the SQL standards?
If an RDBMS wants to offer an optional non-standard-compliant mode, allowing the developer-integrator to sacrifice some integrity for performance, I'm all for it. Just keep the default configuration as close to the standards as possible.