Sorry, but I really can't put much stock in your theory that CS can't be taught well. I don't think it can be taught well easily, but I know it can be taught well.
Here at Univ. I've been sorely dissapointed with the instruction, but I've seen a couple good teachers. Back in HS, I took the advanced placement compsci course.
It was interesting: me and 12 others studied C++ and algorithms and data structures for a year. Very useful. Anyway, back to the point: 13 students. 13 of those (yes, 100%) took the A.P. test and got college credit for the course.
I have been in maybe two or three courses at the university level (let alone compsci) that didnt have an attrition rate of maybe 25%. Note that my high school teacher, with a harder topic to teach, managed to lose nobody.
I have no idea what he did differently, but he was far, far more successful than any other CS teacher I've had. The kids actually understood it.
Anyway, my point is that CS can be taught very well indeed, but that teachers that can do it are very very rare. I don't know how or why, but that's what has to be figured out: how to teach it. Not what sort of people intuitively 'get it'.
As the saying goes: "Women who seek equality with men lack ambition".:)
Let women do what they want, seriously.
If women are so deficient that they need support groups to survive the industry, they don't belong there. I'm not trying to berate women: I don't think this is the case, but the fact that there are these women in CS clubs all over the place makes it seem like someone is saying it is so.
On a note that's much more important, how about attracting more women to MY 'world of computing'?
In general, there are many things you can do. Pooling, caching, etc. can help in many situations. But what situation are you in?
Are you writing a web app where you have to hold session data across TCP connections?
Are you writing an app that will have sustained connections (more than one request per connection?)?
These different situations require different strategies.
DB reads more common or writes? How big's the difference?
What kind of system is your target? Can you trade memory for speed (caching)?
Take a look at SEDA http://seda.sourceforge.net. While you probably won't be rewriting your app to use this framework, many of the strategies may be useful and applicable to your app.
Also, just note the difference between efficient and scalable: some designs will take longer than others on short loads, but many of those make tradeoffs that are only noticable under high stress. Consider what tradeoffs you've made so far: some may be good or bad, and more may need to be made.
All this was said without knowledge of what you app is other than a DB app. I am not an expert, but I doubt an expert could say all that much with that little information.
I admit I was a bit (bit? Whatever... understatements are fun) negative in my original post.
I mean to say that many people (not necessarily a majority, but more than 5) here on slashdot bash people for being stupid, for not knowing this or that random command.
I just think it's in poor taste to flame the author of this article for not getting things to work. Or for not searching hard enough. Or for not having spare computers for internet access.
I just mean to point out that the aforementioned part of the population writes these flames far too much.
I apologize for ripping on the various distros so much; I meant only to illustrate that there isn't a distro out there that has a stated and executed goal of making a distribution that is genuinely good and that works well, for the average user (Say, the author).
Slackware provides nothing. Perfect for me, but not our average user. Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, etc. all provide many useful tools, but they are too fragile. Debian has some things better, some worse.
The reason I mention debian is important: the optimal distribution for the average user doesn't provide 10000 packages, like Debian does.
It provides a few packages, maybe a couple hundred, that have been reviewed, checked, and polished. That don't crash. That are well documented. That do the job. Why not include the best 2 products for a task, that have been looked over first and polished to perfection, rather than just shoving in many others that halfway do the job?
I think the author is presenting an exaggerated view, because of her perspective. That's OK: it's a relatively average user's perspective. I just get annoyed when her exaggerations are flamed by slashdotters that exaggerate as much in the other direction. Nothing personal, but seriously folks, think before you insult.
You are so full of shit it's coming out your ears.
"She runs windows 95, and thinks she is average?"
What's so un-average about windows 95? You think average is upgrading every new release? Plopping down a hundred dollars MS tax every other year? That standard for you?
On the shrieking geeks thing, well... It's dead on: the screaming pricks that make up slashdot deserve that.
Root problems? Root may not be able to, but an example: a file is set immutable, by something or other. Say the installer does it to protect dumb users or whatever. Who cares why it gets set that way. Now Joe Student comes along after his very first linux install, and is expected to know chattr -i to be able to access the file that some widget says he's having problems with?
And then you insult her: she wrote an honest critique of her experiances. Maybe she doesn't know the solutions; she shouldn't have to. At the least she is clearly an intelligent person that can write a hell of a lot better than you, and because she insults your favorite OS you go off the big one? Gimme a fscking break.
If people would at the least be polite and helpful, rather than insulting and condescending, everthing would be a lot better. Not to mention just writing software that isn't horribly, horribly broken.
Whatever. I'm tired of reading posts by pricks that can't take one whiff of honest criticism. Go smoke another with Ellen.
I use it every day. I don't have Windows installed on any of my systems. I *still* think it sucks.
Why do so many people think that it's always the users problem? Bah, it's so stupid I won't even argue this one.
The thing is, why hasn't anyone tried to make a *good* distribution yet? We have Debian "we have ten thousand pounds of shitty, buggy, out of date software, but hell, that's a lot, so its good". There's slackware (my favorite) which just has this "you had better know how to do everything because I aint helping you" attitude. Mandrake is as broken as the above. RH is as broken as the above.
Most niches have decent software in them. There are some genuinely good word processors for Linux. Ditto for web browsers, email clients, etc. Why package 45 shitty ones in a distro?
And on the topic of hardware support, I'll just paint an analogy: BeOS. BeOS supported almost no hardware. It has worse support than any other OS I've used, in terms of quantity. But what it *does* support, it supports perfectly. Swap video cards? You won't get any messages. The new one will just work, same resolution, same bit depth (assuming they both were supported, but that's not avoidable). THIS is what support should be: when it works, it should *work*.
When I installed my HP722C a while back, I had to manually write a magicfilter print filter because no existing system supported it at the time. Unacceptable.
And people like you come along and make jackass comments like "You're not l33t enough to move to Linux, because you're still running Windows 95! Only Win2Kers are cool enough to join my OS!". Asshole. Shut the fuck up.
(apologies for the US-centric nature of this post)
We live in the best place in world. Sure, there's some dumb copyright laws, some dumb surveillance laws, some dumb drug laws ad nauseum, but as of right now (forgoing the orwellian near future, for a moment), there is simply no better place to be.
You live in a country with an incredibly good road system. You can get *anywhere* in the continental US by road. You can't get more than 15 miles away from a road in the continetal US.
You have running water. Reliably. You have indoor plumbing. You have readily available food. You have electricity. You live in a place that has as many cars as families, because cars and gas are just that damned cheap here.
You have the best military in the world. You don't have to fear for your life walking down the street (well, in some places, you do, but it's safer here than much of the rest of the world).
This is a nation in which *anyone* can get a job. Not necessarily a good job, or the job they want, but you can land a job that'll pay well enough for you to eat every day.
I can drink the water anywhere in this nation without fear. Some places it looks a little brown, or have hard water, etc., but you can drink it without *dying*.
You have incredible medical care. I know many places have better systems for covering payment, and it's free in many places, but there's very few places in US where you can't get immediate medical care.
It's simply that, the particular set of advantages you get by being an American and living here on American soil is almost impossible to get anywhere else. Many places have worthwhile tradeoffs, but you can't get all the above just about anywhere else.
I realize that many of the above comments don't apply to everywhere in the world, and I apologize to the denizens of any nation that may be that much better, but I think that most of them apply somewhere.
And I hate our government as much as the next guy; more probably. I think we've made some very, very bad decisions, but I see every day how much worse it could be, and I'm happy for what we have.
"Thomas edison worked on the problem of designing a filament for an electric light bulb for nearly two years. An issastant once asked him how he could keep trying after failing so many times. Edison didn't understand the question. In his mind, he hadn't failed at all. He is supposed to have replied, "What failure? I know thousands of things that do not work."
From http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991222/mcconne l_02.htm
Insult him for being stupid. Insult him for using cheap rockets. But don't insult the man for trying. Don't knock him because he hasn't succeeded. Don't berate him for not being the best.
You may hate him for statements he makes, but at least he tries. Most people I know haven't the spine to do anything requiring half the courage as what he's trying. I may not respect him for what he chooses to attempt, but I respect his courage, and that he does attempt it.
XML isn't intended for web pages. That's what you missed:
It's biggest use right now is data interchange. Moving bits between one magic widget and another. And for that, HTML sucks. It just can't represent arbitrary data. Programming languages (C++, Java) are for instructions, not data.
XML fits in perfectly where it's at use-wise. Tim Bray is talking about programming for it: The available interfaces are very counter-intuitive, and that's what Bray's getting at.
I think it'll be good for us. When the Ruskies got sputnik up there, it really riled us up. A lot of people stepped up and said, "I can do better than that!". "I'll see your satelite and raise you the Moon," they said.
So Europe wants to go to the moon? Good for them. They can have second place, and if it motivates us a bit, we'll see Mars, astroid mining, and the Space Hilton long before I'm visiting the Lunar Beni Hana.
I hope they go there; it'll light a fire under our ass to get back into the swing of things.
I considered this too. I don't think it's that much of a danger.
1) Anyone mining it to bring back to earth will have a vested interest in keeping prices high, so they won't sell enough to flood a market (... DeBeers diamands, eh?).
2) At the per-pound cost of thousands of USD to move something from Earth to orbit, that makes a trillion dollars in space worth how much?! It takes a lot of metals to build a space station, and lifting them is the biggest cost incurred. The materials may never get to Earth to flood the markets.
Don't be so sure. The thing is, asteroids are valuable.
Check out this page and read some of the value of asteroids.
There are around one million asteroids with diameters of 1km. On average, it'll contain (among other metals), 30 million tons of nickel (for example, picked randomly).
According to metalprices.com, the market price for nickel per metric tonne is $8950 USD on the London Metal Exchange as of 2/28/2003. A little math suggests that the value of one of our average asteroids purely for the nickel would be $268 billion. According to the first page, the platinum contained would be worth more than $150 billion. Not to mention the cobalt, iron, etc in an asteroid.
So what will it cost to mine? $100 billion? $200 billion? $300 billion can go far, and you're still far less than the current market value of just ONE ASTEROID. Of course, there's dangers of flooding the market, but you can manipulate the market (DeBeers diamonds, anyone?).
As for the moon, you have helium-3, which is damned good for fusion.
It's definately worth mining in space. The asteroids are worth an incredible fortune, and the moon is a great place to put a base.
I hope we do try. If we try, we'll do it. Only time will tell if it was worth it, but we must make the first step. We'll never get there or get the tech to get there if we don't try.
I, for one, think differences in technology and history are interesting. My favorite example of this is Ben Bova's novel, The Kinsman Saga (one of many in the same universe), which was written before the moon landing and has a different "future history" of the space race and the cold war. Very interesting perspective.
Technological differences are not usually as interesting, but they don't annoy me much either.
Less than that. I can't give you any numbers, but/.'s history has stories on fusion. Basically, we've long since gotten past the point of getting more energy out than we put in. We just can't sustain it for more than about 2 minutes, yet.
There could be advantages of common formats, but pretty much every game which doesn't use a standard format has a free converted to convert from standard formats.
The problem with using a common format is that games work in different ways. Consider this: If we were talking about making maps interoperable, that'd be impossible: You could never share between a portals-based game (like Descent) with a BSP-tree based game like Quake, because they organize data in a fundamentally different manner.
You can't make a format common and still allow the coders any flexibility.
With say, images, it's different: it's an image, there is only so much you can do with it, but even now many of the things that an ingenius programmer (... Carmack, Romero, Sweeney... ) *could* do with an engine have yet to be conceived of: the possibilities for a full 3D interactive environment is a lot greater than for the simple things that have already been standardized.
The instant you try to use it like this: sure it is valid under the letter of the law, however, it's clearly a wrong and misguided law, and arguably unconstitutional.
You'd probably win in court with this: this would be bad because it sets a precedent that the DMCA is valid, which it is not. Be better than they are and don't fsck over the rest of us.
I see your point, and agree with you; in fact, I use links myself as I post this.
But I never said you were stealing from them: WHat I did say was that you were abusing the intent of their services.
The "spirit" of what they offer is information in exchange for ad impressions. They are trying to offer a service in exchange for you viewing ads.
You may not be stealing from them, but you can't deny that 1) they intend for viewers of their information to also view the ads and 2) that you are abusing it when you violate their intentions.
And it may not cost them money, but it's money they aren't making, and if they are not making any money, how do you propose they stay in business?
I think it'd be great to be able to use these perl moduls w/o putting them out of business, and I'd love to do so, but seriously, how do you propose to have this occur?
Maybe they can't dictate what you use to access their content, but they can dictate whether you get the content or not. Seriously: If they are getting no ad impressions, then they are getting no money. Poof, your not getting the service any more.
I don't know what the answer is, but seriously, abusing the intent of their services (which *IS* to generate ad revenue, after all) shall do little but get them to change or remove those services.
Oh, and kudos for them for not just up and suing CPAN (which they have little grounds for, but we all know that proof is worth less than a cat fart in the U.S. legal system).
This isn't necessarily directed at you or your ISP, but just an observation about many ISPs.
Your argument is that having multiple machines correlates strongly with high bandwidth usage. I am not going to debate this.
My problem starts when you try to say users shouldn't be using that much bandwidth. When you say that P2P burns bandwidth like popcorn, and you can't support those users.
Here's the thing: I pay for *unlimited* bandwidth. I should be able to saturate my 768/128 pipe 24/7 and no one should be able to complain. That's what my ISP advertised.
Now, if the ISP can't afford to provide unlimited (and they advertised that they would), then they should fix the advertising. Don't cap my bandwidth usage, I pay for unlimited.
I understand that you guys can't afford to allow unlimited access: stop advertising it, then.
Organic fruits cost what, (out of my ass guess) 99 cents per pound? Versus, say, 50 cents per pound of not-so-organicly grown fruits.
Those numbers aren't based on anything, but they're in the range of produce, with the same margin quoted be the author of the top level thread (dirty ram for $59, and clean ram for $129).
Now look at these numbers: If it costs me 50 cents more (even if it is twice as much), I'll hardly notice over the course of this one transaction. If I track it over several months, I may notice a significant difference, but most people don't track things that granularly.
My point is this: a 50% markup on clean fruits and stuff is feasible, because it's 50% of a MUCH smaller number. People don't notice that half a dollar as much, because it is not an all-at-once purchase (that is, you may notice if you were to buy $50 worth, but who does that?).
I may go with organic if its 3 dollars versus 4 dollars. But I won't buy clean computer hardware at that same margin: a $300 video card is $400 for no performance bonus? No way.
The information and "clean" versions would be nice, but I think, this considered, it won't work.
It can be inferred from your post that you support space exploration.
I submit that this promotes space exploration by making it sound better for the ordinary people. It becomes more accessible because the teacher is just a regular person, not a specially trained astronaut.
With normal people (hey, millionaires and teachers!) going into space, we begin to see that outer space is out there and people can go there. With the interest that this could help drum up (which would be an improvement over current views, no matter how small of one), it could help restore confidence in NASA.
Also, for those that say the U.S. should focus on local issues first, I'd like to say this: firstly, they are already working on them. Maybe this money could help it a bit, but we ARE working on fixing local problems. Second, I think that it's important to achieve things. Not just to be the first to put a man on the moon, just to beat the Russians, but to advance science. If we don't do it, someone else will, and the intelligent people who want to do it will leave. America is losing a lot of great minds because the government is not encouraging, or even discouraging, their research.
If we get enough support for NASA to try for Mars, we'll make it. If we go for Mars, we will succeed: every other time we've said "we *WILL* do this", we do. Imagine what it'll mean if we do get to Mars! The technology that would spur, there would be massive repurcussions, and the results would be amazing.
In addition to what other posters have said, it takes time.
2 years ago the pendulum had swung so far into the other extreme that a ten year old could get multimillion dollar funding for a modern art made of dog poop 3d scanning through the mail startup.
Now we're on the other end: People have seen so much stupidity and crap and dying dot coms with no business plan that we're at the end where we'll need a lot more to get things through.
In time, the averages will work out. But that doesn't help you much now, does it?
Carmen may be an exception worth studying, but wormholes theoretically allow the speed of light to be effectively (but not really) passed by moving through a different kind of space. I don't recall what the currently trendy explanation is (out of universe different dimension, whatever), but it can't be broken.
And besides, if your pipe is a 14.4 modem, it's going to be slow. Like I said, you can cache stuff, look ahead, render quickly, but there's a limit to how fast things can be. It's finite. Sorry.
No, I haven't used it. But there are simple facts, like the speed of light. The thing is this: data can only be transferred so fast.
If I have a 56k connection, than the fastest I can transfer is 56k (I know there are other considerations, but that's not important). It's that simple.
There are some things that can be done to speed it up: cache things. Render things faster, but they are all stopgap measures. I don't care what it says, the fact is that you only get so much speed. Any more just is not there.
It's like saying my car gets infinite miles per gallon. I can improve things, but I still need some fuel no matter what I do.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but I really can't put much stock in your theory that CS can't be taught well. I don't think it can be taught well easily, but I know it can be taught well.
Here at Univ. I've been sorely dissapointed with the instruction, but I've seen a couple good teachers. Back in HS, I took the advanced placement compsci course.
It was interesting: me and 12 others studied C++ and algorithms and data structures for a year. Very useful. Anyway, back to the point: 13 students. 13 of those (yes, 100%) took the A.P. test and got college credit for the course.
I have been in maybe two or three courses at the university level (let alone compsci) that didnt have an attrition rate of maybe 25%. Note that my high school teacher, with a harder topic to teach, managed to lose nobody.
I have no idea what he did differently, but he was far, far more successful than any other CS teacher I've had. The kids actually understood it.
Anyway, my point is that CS can be taught very well indeed, but that teachers that can do it are very very rare. I don't know how or why, but that's what has to be figured out: how to teach it. Not what sort of people intuitively 'get it'.
As the saying goes: "Women who seek equality with men lack ambition". :)
Let women do what they want, seriously.
If women are so deficient that they need support groups to survive the industry, they don't belong there. I'm not trying to berate women: I don't think this is the case, but the fact that there are these women in CS clubs all over the place makes it seem like someone is saying it is so.
On a note that's much more important, how about attracting more women to MY 'world of computing'?
In general, there are many things you can do. Pooling, caching, etc. can help in many situations. But what situation are you in?
Are you writing a web app where you have to hold session data across TCP connections?
Are you writing an app that will have sustained connections (more than one request per connection?)?
These different situations require different strategies.
DB reads more common or writes? How big's the difference?
What kind of system is your target? Can you trade memory for speed (caching)?
Take a look at SEDA http://seda.sourceforge.net. While you probably won't be rewriting your app to use this framework, many of the strategies may be useful and applicable to your app.
Also, just note the difference between efficient and scalable: some designs will take longer than others on short loads, but many of those make tradeoffs that are only noticable under high stress. Consider what tradeoffs you've made so far: some may be good or bad, and more may need to be made.
All this was said without knowledge of what you app is other than a DB app. I am not an expert, but I doubt an expert could say all that much with that little information.
I'd like to clarify a few things a bit.
I admit I was a bit (bit? Whatever... understatements are fun) negative in my original post.
I mean to say that many people (not necessarily a majority, but more than 5) here on slashdot bash people for being stupid, for not knowing this or that random command.
I just think it's in poor taste to flame the author of this article for not getting things to work. Or for not searching hard enough. Or for not having spare computers for internet access.
I just mean to point out that the aforementioned part of the population writes these flames far too much.
I apologize for ripping on the various distros so much; I meant only to illustrate that there isn't a distro out there that has a stated and executed goal of making a distribution that is genuinely good and that works well, for the average user (Say, the author).
Slackware provides nothing. Perfect for me, but not our average user. Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, etc. all provide many useful tools, but they are too fragile. Debian has some things better, some worse.
The reason I mention debian is important: the optimal distribution for the average user doesn't provide 10000 packages, like Debian does.
It provides a few packages, maybe a couple hundred, that have been reviewed, checked, and polished. That don't crash. That are well documented. That do the job. Why not include the best 2 products for a task, that have been looked over first and polished to perfection, rather than just shoving in many others that halfway do the job?
I think the author is presenting an exaggerated view, because of her perspective. That's OK: it's a relatively average user's perspective. I just get annoyed when her exaggerations are flamed by slashdotters that exaggerate as much in the other direction. Nothing personal, but seriously folks, think before you insult.
You are so full of shit it's coming out your ears.
"She runs windows 95, and thinks she is average?"
What's so un-average about windows 95? You think average is upgrading every new release? Plopping down a hundred dollars MS tax every other year? That standard for you?
On the shrieking geeks thing, well... It's dead on: the screaming pricks that make up slashdot deserve that.
Root problems? Root may not be able to, but an example: a file is set immutable, by something or other. Say the installer does it to protect dumb users or whatever. Who cares why it gets set that way. Now Joe Student comes along after his very first linux install, and is expected to know chattr -i to be able to access the file that some widget says he's having problems with?
And then you insult her: she wrote an honest critique of her experiances. Maybe she doesn't know the solutions; she shouldn't have to. At the least she is clearly an intelligent person that can write a hell of a lot better than you, and because she insults your favorite OS you go off the big one? Gimme a fscking break.
If people would at the least be polite and helpful, rather than insulting and condescending, everthing would be a lot better. Not to mention just writing software that isn't horribly, horribly broken.
Whatever. I'm tired of reading posts by pricks that can't take one whiff of honest criticism. Go smoke another with Ellen.
Your attitude is why Linux sucks so much.
I use it every day. I don't have Windows installed on any of my systems. I *still* think it sucks.
Why do so many people think that it's always the users problem? Bah, it's so stupid I won't even argue this one.
The thing is, why hasn't anyone tried to make a *good* distribution yet? We have Debian "we have ten thousand pounds of shitty, buggy, out of date software, but hell, that's a lot, so its good". There's slackware (my favorite) which just has this "you had better know how to do everything because I aint helping you" attitude. Mandrake is as broken as the above. RH is as broken as the above.
Most niches have decent software in them. There are some genuinely good word processors for Linux. Ditto for web browsers, email clients, etc. Why package 45 shitty ones in a distro?
And on the topic of hardware support, I'll just paint an analogy: BeOS. BeOS supported almost no hardware. It has worse support than any other OS I've used, in terms of quantity. But what it *does* support, it supports perfectly. Swap video cards? You won't get any messages. The new one will just work, same resolution, same bit depth (assuming they both were supported, but that's not avoidable). THIS is what support should be: when it works, it should *work*.
When I installed my HP722C a while back, I had to manually write a magicfilter print filter because no existing system supported it at the time. Unacceptable.
And people like you come along and make jackass comments like "You're not l33t enough to move to Linux, because you're still running Windows 95! Only Win2Kers are cool enough to join my OS!". Asshole. Shut the fuck up.
(apologies for the US-centric nature of this post)
We live in the best place in world. Sure, there's some dumb copyright laws, some dumb surveillance laws, some dumb drug laws ad nauseum, but as of right now (forgoing the orwellian near future, for a moment), there is simply no better place to be.
You live in a country with an incredibly good road system. You can get *anywhere* in the continental US by road. You can't get more than 15 miles away from a road in the continetal US.
You have running water. Reliably. You have indoor plumbing. You have readily available food. You have electricity. You live in a place that has as many cars as families, because cars and gas are just that damned cheap here.
You have the best military in the world. You don't have to fear for your life walking down the street (well, in some places, you do, but it's safer here than much of the rest of the world).
This is a nation in which *anyone* can get a job. Not necessarily a good job, or the job they want, but you can land a job that'll pay well enough for you to eat every day.
I can drink the water anywhere in this nation without fear. Some places it looks a little brown, or have hard water, etc., but you can drink it without *dying*.
You have incredible medical care. I know many places have better systems for covering payment, and it's free in many places, but there's very few places in US where you can't get immediate medical care.
It's simply that, the particular set of advantages you get by being an American and living here on American soil is almost impossible to get anywhere else. Many places have worthwhile tradeoffs, but you can't get all the above just about anywhere else.
I realize that many of the above comments don't apply to everywhere in the world, and I apologize to the denizens of any nation that may be that much better, but I think that most of them apply somewhere.
And I hate our government as much as the next guy; more probably. I think we've made some very, very bad decisions, but I see every day how much worse it could be, and I'm happy for what we have.
"Thomas edison worked on the problem of designing a filament for an electric light bulb for nearly two years. An issastant once asked him how he could keep trying after failing so many times. Edison didn't understand the question. In his mind, he hadn't failed at all. He is supposed to have replied, "What failure? I know thousands of things that do not work."
e l_02.htm
From http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991222/mcconn
Insult him for being stupid. Insult him for using cheap rockets. But don't insult the man for trying. Don't knock him because he hasn't succeeded. Don't berate him for not being the best.
You may hate him for statements he makes, but at least he tries. Most people I know haven't the spine to do anything requiring half the courage as what he's trying. I may not respect him for what he chooses to attempt, but I respect his courage, and that he does attempt it.
XML isn't intended for web pages. That's what you missed:
It's biggest use right now is data interchange. Moving bits between one magic widget and another. And for that, HTML sucks. It just can't represent arbitrary data. Programming languages (C++, Java) are for instructions, not data.
XML fits in perfectly where it's at use-wise. Tim Bray is talking about programming for it: The available interfaces are very counter-intuitive, and that's what Bray's getting at.
I think it'll be good for us. When the Ruskies got sputnik up there, it really riled us up. A lot of people stepped up and said, "I can do better than that!". "I'll see your satelite and raise you the Moon," they said.
So Europe wants to go to the moon? Good for them. They can have second place, and if it motivates us a bit, we'll see Mars, astroid mining, and the Space Hilton long before I'm visiting the Lunar Beni Hana.
I hope they go there; it'll light a fire under our ass to get back into the swing of things.
I considered this too. I don't think it's that much of a danger.
1) Anyone mining it to bring back to earth will have a vested interest in keeping prices high, so they won't sell enough to flood a market (... DeBeers diamands, eh?).
2) At the per-pound cost of thousands of USD to move something from Earth to orbit, that makes a trillion dollars in space worth how much?! It takes a lot of metals to build a space station, and lifting them is the biggest cost incurred. The materials may never get to Earth to flood the markets.
Don't be so sure. The thing is, asteroids are valuable.
Check out this page and read some of the value of asteroids.
There are around one million asteroids with diameters of 1km. On average, it'll contain (among other metals), 30 million tons of nickel (for example, picked randomly).
According to metalprices.com, the market price for nickel per metric tonne is $8950 USD on the London Metal Exchange as of 2/28/2003. A little math suggests that the value of one of our average asteroids purely for the nickel would be $268 billion. According to the first page, the platinum contained would be worth more than $150 billion. Not to mention the cobalt, iron, etc in an asteroid.
So what will it cost to mine? $100 billion? $200 billion? $300 billion can go far, and you're still far less than the current market value of just ONE ASTEROID. Of course, there's dangers of flooding the market, but you can manipulate the market (DeBeers diamonds, anyone?).
As for the moon, you have helium-3, which is damned good for fusion.
It's definately worth mining in space. The asteroids are worth an incredible fortune, and the moon is a great place to put a base.
I hope we do try. If we try, we'll do it. Only time will tell if it was worth it, but we must make the first step. We'll never get there or get the tech to get there if we don't try.
For that matter: Do you think it is important?
I, for one, think differences in technology and history are interesting. My favorite example of this is Ben Bova's novel, The Kinsman Saga (one of many in the same universe), which was written before the moon landing and has a different "future history" of the space race and the cold war. Very interesting perspective.
Technological differences are not usually as interesting, but they don't annoy me much either.
Less than that. I can't give you any numbers, but /.'s history has stories on fusion. Basically, we've long since gotten past the point of getting more energy out than we put in. We just can't sustain it for more than about 2 minutes, yet.
There could be advantages of common formats, but pretty much every game which doesn't use a standard format has a free converted to convert from standard formats.
The problem with using a common format is that games work in different ways. Consider this: If we were talking about making maps interoperable, that'd be impossible: You could never share between a portals-based game (like Descent) with a BSP-tree based game like Quake, because they organize data in a fundamentally different manner.
You can't make a format common and still allow the coders any flexibility.
With say, images, it's different: it's an image, there is only so much you can do with it, but even now many of the things that an ingenius programmer (... Carmack, Romero, Sweeney... ) *could* do with an engine have yet to be conceived of: the possibilities for a full 3D interactive environment is a lot greater than for the simple things that have already been standardized.
It might be nice, but don't hold your breath.
The instant you try to use it like this: sure it is valid under the letter of the law, however, it's clearly a wrong and misguided law, and arguably unconstitutional.
You'd probably win in court with this: this would be bad because it sets a precedent that the DMCA is valid, which it is not. Be better than they are and don't fsck over the rest of us.
I see your point, and agree with you; in fact, I use links myself as I post this.
But I never said you were stealing from them: WHat I did say was that you were abusing the intent of their services.
The "spirit" of what they offer is information in exchange for ad impressions. They are trying to offer a service in exchange for you viewing ads.
You may not be stealing from them, but you can't deny that 1) they intend for viewers of their information to also view the ads and 2) that you are abusing it when you violate their intentions.
And it may not cost them money, but it's money they aren't making, and if they are not making any money, how do you propose they stay in business?
I think it'd be great to be able to use these perl moduls w/o putting them out of business, and I'd love to do so, but seriously, how do you propose to have this occur?
Maybe they can't dictate what you use to access their content, but they can dictate whether you get the content or not. Seriously: If they are getting no ad impressions, then they are getting no money. Poof, your not getting the service any more.
I don't know what the answer is, but seriously, abusing the intent of their services (which *IS* to generate ad revenue, after all) shall do little but get them to change or remove those services.
Oh, and kudos for them for not just up and suing CPAN (which they have little grounds for, but we all know that proof is worth less than a cat fart in the U.S. legal system).
This isn't necessarily directed at you or your ISP, but just an observation about many ISPs.
Your argument is that having multiple machines correlates strongly with high bandwidth usage. I am not going to debate this.
My problem starts when you try to say users shouldn't be using that much bandwidth. When you say that P2P burns bandwidth like popcorn, and you can't support those users.
Here's the thing: I pay for *unlimited* bandwidth. I should be able to saturate my 768/128 pipe 24/7 and no one should be able to complain. That's what my ISP advertised.
Now, if the ISP can't afford to provide unlimited (and they advertised that they would), then they should fix the advertising. Don't cap my bandwidth usage, I pay for unlimited.
I understand that you guys can't afford to allow unlimited access: stop advertising it, then.
My high school was one of the best in the area (And still is). It was well funded with $29 million.
And that school was big: about 3500 students.
I call your post as bullshit. No, it's not a complete budget. But you could throw it at one or two districts and it would be a massive help.
And if you want it for education, it doesn't have to go there: $7M in scholarships goes a *long* way. Maybe not far enough, but pretty damned far.
I just want to dump a different perspective here:
Organic fruits cost what, (out of my ass guess) 99 cents per pound? Versus, say, 50 cents per pound of not-so-organicly grown fruits.
Those numbers aren't based on anything, but they're in the range of produce, with the same margin quoted be the author of the top level thread (dirty ram for $59, and clean ram for $129).
Now look at these numbers: If it costs me 50 cents more (even if it is twice as much), I'll hardly notice over the course of this one transaction. If I track it over several months, I may notice a significant difference, but most people don't track things that granularly.
My point is this: a 50% markup on clean fruits and stuff is feasible, because it's 50% of a MUCH smaller number. People don't notice that half a dollar as much, because it is not an all-at-once purchase (that is, you may notice if you were to buy $50 worth, but who does that?).
I may go with organic if its 3 dollars versus 4 dollars. But I won't buy clean computer hardware at that same margin: a $300 video card is $400 for no performance bonus? No way.
The information and "clean" versions would be nice, but I think, this considered, it won't work.
It can be inferred from your post that you support space exploration.
I submit that this promotes space exploration by making it sound better for the ordinary people. It becomes more accessible because the teacher is just a regular person, not a specially trained astronaut.
With normal people (hey, millionaires and teachers!) going into space, we begin to see that outer space is out there and people can go there. With the interest that this could help drum up (which would be an improvement over current views, no matter how small of one), it could help restore confidence in NASA.
Also, for those that say the U.S. should focus on local issues first, I'd like to say this: firstly, they are already working on them. Maybe this money could help it a bit, but we ARE working on fixing local problems. Second, I think that it's important to achieve things. Not just to be the first to put a man on the moon, just to beat the Russians, but to advance science. If we don't do it, someone else will, and the intelligent people who want to do it will leave. America is losing a lot of great minds because the government is not encouraging, or even discouraging, their research.
If we get enough support for NASA to try for Mars, we'll make it. If we go for Mars, we will succeed: every other time we've said "we *WILL* do this", we do. Imagine what it'll mean if we do get to Mars! The technology that would spur, there would be massive repurcussions, and the results would be amazing.
In addition to what other posters have said, it takes time.
2 years ago the pendulum had swung so far into the other extreme that a ten year old could get multimillion dollar funding for a modern art made of dog poop 3d scanning through the mail startup.
Now we're on the other end: People have seen so much stupidity and crap and dying dot coms with no business plan that we're at the end where we'll need a lot more to get things through.
In time, the averages will work out. But that doesn't help you much now, does it?
No, the speed of light can't be broken.
Carmen may be an exception worth studying, but wormholes theoretically allow the speed of light to be effectively (but not really) passed by moving through a different kind of space. I don't recall what the currently trendy explanation is (out of universe different dimension, whatever), but it can't be broken.
And besides, if your pipe is a 14.4 modem, it's going to be slow. Like I said, you can cache stuff, look ahead, render quickly, but there's a limit to how fast things can be. It's finite. Sorry.
It's not.
No, I haven't used it. But there are simple facts, like the speed of light. The thing is this: data can only be transferred so fast.
If I have a 56k connection, than the fastest I can transfer is 56k (I know there are other considerations, but that's not important). It's that simple.
There are some things that can be done to speed it up: cache things. Render things faster, but they are all stopgap measures. I don't care what it says, the fact is that you only get so much speed. Any more just is not there.
It's like saying my car gets infinite miles per gallon. I can improve things, but I still need some fuel no matter what I do.