It's called advertising. For both the paper version and the online version this is a major source of revenue. The mozilla foundation recently payed an enormous amount of money for a full page ad. Online advertising is much cheaper but sites like slashdot seem to manage just fine on online advertising.
Nyt has the potential to get millions of visitors on a daily basis. If they provide good quality content there will be lots of regular visitors. They have the content anyway so not exploiting it online would be bad for business.
Now you can't blame the nyt people to explore options for a subscription model. But I don't think that it will be very profitable. There will be a few thousand who will subscribe and it will provide a very modest income but nothing spectecular. Probably the effect on advertisement sales will be negative because of all the people who won't subscribe and take their business elsewhere.
What nyt needs to do is maximize the value of the information they produce every day. They have four sources of income: paper subscriptions, street sales, advertising and online advertising. The last two generally provide more revenue if more people read nyt. The first two are unlikely to be influenced much by the online presence of nyt. Lots of people prefer to hold the paper in their hands. If you combine this information it can be deduced that free online access adds revenue and that restricting access in exchange for subscription fees probably isn't worth the trouble: you'll lose readers, you will lose advertisers and the subscription revenue is unlikely to compensate for that.
Scientific journal prices are outrageous when you consider that most of the work involved is done by volunteers. The current scientific publishing process is just a scam to pump vast amounts of research money into the mostly private publishing sector. I'm talking hundreds of millions of dollars here.
This outrageous because all the relevant parts of the process (writing articles and peer reviewing them) is done exclusively by volunteers. Of course there is some cost involved in printing, formating and hosting content. However printing is irrelevant now that we have internet. Formatting makes it look nice but does not add any value to an article and hosting can easily be covered by sponsors (universities, companies, other research minded organizations) and advertising.
I heard some jaw dropping figures a few weeks back. Apparently a well run, not very high profile journal can bring in around one to two million dollars annually. There's one or two guys doing the formatting & editing, a part time editor and that's about all the costs involved in producing the journal (except for the logistics of actually printing and distributing journals). Maybe alltogether they have 300K of expenses. The rest is profit. That's a single journal. There are many journals and university libraries pay hundreds of thousands of dollars (each) annually for subscriptions to all these journals. Internet makes publishers irrelevant so take them out of the equation. They suck at hosting content online (try a few publishers and see for yourself) and the stacks of paper are not interesting except maybe for archiving.
The IEEE should act in the interest of its members and the scientific community and not continue to provide the publishers with an easy source of revenue. Using their member subscriptions (which do not include access to their online library!) they should be able to cover all the costs.
I think it will only improve firefox adoption. And since you have to manually specify which sites use IE rendering and since users are lazy, this will only increase the amount of sites that will be fixed. Requiring site visitors to override a preference is not an option except for the kind of sites that should already display fine using firefox (i.e. it/tech oriented sites with technically skilled visitors). This is a great feature to shut up all those 'firefox is great but site A & B don't render correctly so I abolutely have to use internet explorer, all the time' kind of people. Effectively this takes away their last excuse to stick to internet explorer. All the other reasons (performance, features, themes, extensions) have already been taken away.
Actually there aren't a lot of sites that can afford not to render correctly on firefox. Even microsoft.com works fine (except for the update stuff). I work for a content management product company and anything we ship absolutely has to work on firefox or otherwise our clients complain, loudly. Anything high profile basically works with firefox nowadays.
Berkely db is just one of the (two) backends. At least they're using a db, cvs is just ascii files on disk. That means they're even easier to corrupt (which is probably why cvs fans consider this to be an important feature). And yes you can mess with them when that happens but do you really want that?
We haven't had any reliability problems so far and our repositories have been online for more than 1.5 years now. Of course we make nightly backups (which is also very easy with svn, even incrementally).
The nice thing about svn is that you can dump to plain ascii on the fly (i.e. without shutting down anything). The dump files are very portable, incremental and also very suitable for backup (and actually the output of cvs2svn). A dump file is like a chronological ordering of all commits. You can do incremental dumps every hour if you wish, hardly any performance penalty. Maybe backup the db binaries nightly/weekly and there's no risk. When bad stuff happens, just svnadmin load the dump files.
BTW. we've never had any need for backups so far. Maybe your friend has a grudge against berkely db and maybe for good reasons but I've heard no bad stories about subversion messing up repositories so far. It certainly works beautifully for us and we have dozens of commits per day.
People who hate Java generally don't understand much of Java. You're an excellent example. You hate Java for the wrong reasons. That's dumb.
There are actually quite a number of valid reasons to dislike Java and to prefer php. You don't list a single one. At least hate it for the right reasons. As to explaining why you are wrong is a waste of my time. Sorry, I'm not in the idiot reducation business.
I doubt it, unlike the IEEE wireless standards, 3G networks are actually designed to scale up to country wide coverage while providing access to hundreds/thousands of users per node rather than a few dozen at most.
Encapsulate your data with a proper API (getters and setters and maybe some additional stuff). Maybe throw some factory method in that returns the appropriate 'game' object given e.g. a filename.
This way you can adjust which instance is used in the game or change the implementation of the API without touching the game code or changing the way the object is persisted.
Your application code just calls GameProps foo = GameProps.getInstance("somefilenameorwhatever"); foo.getProperty1(..); foo.setProperty2(..);...
getInstance does stuff like opening files on disk if needed and instantiating the GameProps class. It may keep a private reference to a singleton instance or maybe cache some frequently used instances.
This is a nice, lightweight OO solution. You gain a lot of control over the behaviour without any real price and without breaking encapsulation, unlike your global variable.
I migrated some of our legacy repositories to svn yesterday. It's rediculously easy. I didn't encounter any problems with newlines like the mono guys.
Svn blame and svn log are very powerful tools and yes they take a while to complete. For each release I do a svn log -v -rbeginrev:HEAD > changelog. I usually edit some of the languahe inside changelog but this gives a pretty decent overview of changes. The -v option lets you see which files changed in a particular commit.
Of course we've been using svn for our main products for about a year now. Once you're used to svn, cvs feels like a huge step back.
BTW getting started with svn is rediculously easy too. Here's what you need to do to set up a server: - install svn. - make sure you have a working ssh server. - make sure svnserve is in the path. - svnadmin create somerepository
That's it. You can use the svn+ssh type url now to do stuff on your newly created repository.
That remark caught my eye as well but you'd have to consider fixing the problem and distributing the fix are two different things. Just committing a change in cvs is not a good solution when you have hundreds of millions of people who need it. You need to properly test the patch and then when you are absolutely certain the patch won't break anything, you need to distribute it to all your customers. Ms gets this right most of the time but sadly it usually takes them a few months.
With linux, you can pull the fix from cvs (or fix it yourself), wait for the binaries (a few days later), wait for an official patch from your distribution vendor (here things start to vary from vendor to vendor and faster is not always better) or wait for the next release of the distribution. It is not uncommon for fixes to break other stuff. Arguably the linux process is better because you can choose when to upgrade. The testing phase is open and you can choose to not wait for its completion. But claiming it is faster is not really a fair comparison.
ASSEMBLY is a totally inappropriate language for the vast majority of applications, including operating system kernels, video card drivers and games. The complexity and security tradeoff simply doesn't justify the performance gains. That's why it isn't used anymore in most of the software industry. The same is true to a lesser extent for C and C++.
These languages are inherently insecure because they allow for mistakes that other languages do not allow for. Combine this with the fact that it doesn't take a fool to make mistakes and you have the perfect proof that C is inherently insecure. Refute either of those arguments and you might have a point.
The problem with C is that it takes the inhuman capability to not make mistakes to end up with secure software. That's why all of the long lived C software projects have to be constantly patched to correct mistakes. Buffer overflows are no accidents, they are the predictable result of using C. Use C -> expect to deal with buffer overflows, memory leaks, etc. Every good C programmer knows this.
The difference between good C software and bad C software is that in the latter case the programmers are surprised whereas in the first case the programmers actually do some testing and prevention (because they expect things to go wrong). Mozilla Firefox comes with a talkback component because the developers know that the software will crash sometimes and want to be able to do a post mortem. The software crashes because the implementation language of some components is C. IMHO mozilla firefox is good software because it crashes less than internet explorer and offers nice features.
Of course we have learned to work around C's limitations. Using custom memory allocation routines, code verifiers and checkers, extensive code reviews we can actually build pretty stable C software. The only problem is that C programmers are extremely reluctant to let go of their bad habits. Some actually think they are gods when they sit down behind their editors and do such stupid things as using string manipulation functions everyone recommends to avoid like the plague, trying to outsmart garbage collecting memory allocaters by not using them, etc. If you'd build in a switch in the compiler which enforces the use of the improvements listed above, most of the popular C software simply wouldn't compile. But then it wouldn't be C anymore because the whole point of C is to allow the programmer to do all the bad things listed above, even accidentally.
IMHO programmer reeducation is an inherently bad solution to inherent security problems of the C language. You can't teach people not to make mistakes. You need to actively prevent them from making mistakes. You can make mistakes in other languages but they are a subset of the mistakes you can make in C. Therefore you should use those languages rather than C unless you have a good reason not to. Any other reason than performance is not good enough.
What's wrong with it is that it has been demonstrated in the past that it doesn't work for a large group of people. This very naive view of how people are supposed to be able to take care of themselves is the main cause that compared to other 'civilized' nations the US has an embarrassingly large degree of poverty, homeless people, uninsured people, etc. And I say embarrasing because the US is one of the richest countries in the world.
A functioning social security system is supposed to counter the negative effects of this. A good social security system certainly comes at a price but it does work. The US has an unusually expensive and poorly functioning social security system (you pay quite a bit of money and it doesn't seem to work very well). For example, you guys pay lots of health insurance but receive pretty poor health service compared to for example the Netherlands where everybody is insured and the per capita fees are much lower (pay less, receive more and still cost effective). In the US people are going bankrupt because they can't afford their medical bills and people are uninsured because they can't afford the insurance fees. We don't have that problem, if you're sick you get treatment, medication, etc. If you can't work because you are sick you still get some income (so you don't starve to death and can afford to live somewhere). It's all covered by mandatory insurance fees.
Our reasoning in the Netherlands is very simple: you need to work to have income, there is a certain risk you lose your job and the government requires you to cover that risk with social security fees. So if you lose your job you are entitled to some basic income for a while. Same goes for pensions: if you stay alive you'll likely retire at some point and need a basic income to support yourself so there's an insurance fee for that too and you will have a pension by the time you retire (not much, you need to complement it if you want to retire in style). The same goes for health cost: you are going to die at some point and are likely to have some medical cost before you do so. Therefore you need to cover the risk by paying insurance fees.
Now there's a group of people that are not able to take care of themselves (for whatever reason). Every country has them and they are a problem. The US has a lot of them. These people need to eat, sleep, live, have medical care just like everybody else and that costs money. The associated criminality and people starving in the gutter with all sorts of untreated medical problems are considered to be not very welcome things in most civilized places (though the US is surprisingly tolerant in this respect).
So you need to solve that problem somehow. Obviously, no matter how much you want it, this problem is not going to solve itself (this is essentially what you are proposing). It will probably get worse if you do nothing. Doing nothing has a very high economical cost (insurance fees are a great example: in the US you are effectively paying the health insurance of those who can't afford insurance, that's why the fees are about twice that of what is common in most european countries).
The solution is called social welfare. It doesn't need to be much but such basic things as housing, a warm meal once a day education for children does a lot to keep the problem from spiraling out of control as it has in the US. We have homeless people too in the Netherlands, it's a problem and we're not proud of it but it's much less of a problem than it is in the US where for example in LA tens of thousands of people live on the streets.
Social security costs money but you get something back as well. Maybe you think you don't need it but your luck might change. I certainly wouldn't want you sleeping on a bench in front of my house and I'm sure you feel the same way about me. That's basically why social security is everybodies responsibility and not something to opt-out like you are proposing.
Yep, perfect opportunity to migrate. Test the migration on some machine until you are sure everything migrates properly and then flip the switch over night.
It works great but it looks awful. GTK on windows just doesn't feel right. The dialogs are awkward (especially the open & save dialogs are extremely ugly), everything looks different and it doesn't even try to blend in.
But the Gimp is a great app and once you rearrange the toolbars into one window it almost looks usable. I've spend some time with it lately and it's a good photoshop replacement unless you know what you are doing when using photoshop (surprisingly few people do). Photoshop is just more polished in the more advanced features and the Gimp doesn't really compare well in that area. But it is well equiped for all the basic stuff like fixing holiday pics, pngs for your website etc.
The most relevant thing about xml is that it is a standard for representing structured information. A problem with the current representation is that it requires a relatively large amount of cpu horse power and bandwidth to process and transport xml. This is the price we pay for something we do not really need in cases where xml is used for communication between two programs (i.e. most cases).
Both problems are easy to solve. Ebxml for example is a binary xml industry standard that is used in the mobile domain. It's simply a more efficient way of storing the same information. It uses small binary tokens for tags and attributenames and doesn't include comments. This makes the parsing process simpler and faster. In addition ebxml wastes less bytes, especially when combined with compression. Parsers simply parse the data to the usual internal datastructures with the usual apis (dom, sax, etc) so at the application level there is no difference.
The main problem with ebxml is non technical: it is not a widely adopted standard. What is needed is a w3c endorsed standard similar to ebxml with support in the form of dom & sax parsers and conversion tools for all major platforms and a mime type like binary/xml. Then stuff like soap, rss etc. can be served up in binary form to applications that can handle binary/xml and text/xml to other applications. The performance gains for soap heavy applications are probably considerable.
The data itself does not change, it's just being transmitted more efficiently so there are no consequences for applications that use the dom/sax apis or higher level apis based on those. Also there's no reason for stuff like xsl processors, schema validators etc to stop working just because the xml data is handed to them as binary/xml instead of text/xml. Of course all applications that spit out hand coded xml need to feed their output through some conversion filter (if binary/xml is required).
IMHO it would also be a great way to serve up XHTML to browsers.
The only democratic outcome of the 2004 election is to organize new elections. If the Ukraine can do it, the US should be able to do the democratically right thing too. Of course the legal context and its current implementation is deeply flawed so that needs to be fixed as well. Three recounts and three different outcomes is unacceptable. Obviously sombody has trouble counting or someone is manipulating rather than counting the results.
It's unbelievable that two times in a row, the US gets a president whose election victory is all but certain. I'm not saying Bush didn't win. I'm just saying that it is pretty hard too establish that he won (and with how many votes) given the many legitimate (amd not so legitimate complaints) about the voting procedure, the way of counting votes, etc.
IMHO Bush should fix democracy in his own country before spreading it to the rest of the world.
After all they used the exact same arguments to not port win32 to unix. Vendor lockin is their business model.
If there's a technical problem, don't port KDE. If there is no technical problem: go ahead and don't worry too much about things like OSS politics.
A lot of popular OSS software already runs on windows (e.g. most of the apache stuff, cygwin, openoffice, all of the mozilla stuff, the gimp, etc). Many of these software packages are being adopted by large companies precisely because they also run on windows. Openoffice would be a hard sell if it wasn't portable. IMHO porting KDE would only improve KDE adoptation for both users and application developers.
A side effect would be that it would remove reasons for users to stick to windows. If you have Kontact, you don't need outlook. If KWord keeps you happy, away with msword. Lots of people are waiting for a proper OSS excuse to ditch the Outlook/exchange combo. Right now this requires expensive proprietary client/server solutions or migrating desktops to linux. Therefore outlook remains the client of choice for many, despite the security issues, licensing cost, etc. KDE can fix the client side and combined with a linux server solution (and exchange compatibility) it's bye bye exchange & outlook.
The KDE software stack is perfectly positioned to basically take over client application development for the windows platform. MS has been relying too much on their monopoly for the past few years and this presents a perfect opportunity to jump in and take over. KDE has all the required features. Much of the infrastructure (QT, GCC) is already ported to win32 (license remains an obstacle though). For many small software companies, being able to develop one application and deploy it on multiple platforms is a very valuable thing. It's too easy not to do it so therefore it should be done.
Why? High end phones meet these requirements already. And they'll be low end phones by the time this technology matures. Requiring stuff that is available now for software that won't be available until somewhere late next year (at the earliest) seems pretty conservative to me. I imagine, minimo will run quite nicely in phones with 128 or 256 MB of ram in about two years.
Actually content producers will probably compensate lost sales with sales of existing formats (like dvd and vhs) and the fact that they are not losing money over the production cost for what will initially be a low volume market. Right now content producers are pretty happy selling overpriced dvds to eager customers. With virtually no production cost per unit and lots of people owning a dvd player, the margins and volumes are high. It will take years of investment to reach a similar situation with a new format. During that time they'll have produce both dvds and the new replacement format(s).
The ones who are really going to lose a lot of money are the hardware manufacturers who have invested heavily into their products over the past few years. Most of the standards being argued over today will be obsolete (from a technical point of view) by the time there will be significant market adoption of any of them. By that time they'll be a hard sell to both consumers and content producers.
If things aren't rendering correctly on firefox it's not firefox that is the problem but your technology. After all, you can choose to test and fix your technology. Many firefox users have a flash plugin and firefox has excellent support for all the latest html, CSS and DOM stuff so that can't be the problem. Doing things the nice way will ensure that your ad displays well in all browsers.
Of course if you can safely ignore 5-10% of your potential audience, the firefox community certainly won't stop you. Firefox users are technical savvy users with generally good jobs. If that's useless information to you, you shouldn't be in the advertisement business.
I use adblock on any flash ad that annoys me (flashing annoyingly, doing stuff with mouse events, sound, etc). Usually that means blocking everything from all advertisement servers linked from the page. I do click on ads sometimes if they are unobtrusive and look like something I need. For that to happen the ad needs to be specifically targeted at what I am doing or I'll consider them as noise.
Well it's quite a challenge to find really objective media in the US (or elsewhere) since most are owned by two or three companies. I browse news.google.com, nation.com, nyt, msnbc, reuters, cnn.com on a regular basis. To ammuse myself I also read Fox news sometimes and there are of course many foreign english language publications you can turn to. I generally have more respect for the journalistic quality of the NYT than e.g. CNN. I find that what CNN doesn't mention is often more significant than what it does mention. In any case I prefer having the facts over some interpretation. The only way to get to the facts is by monitoring multiple news sources. Inevitably you compare them and to say the least, Fox is not very informative and often interprets things in ways not supported by facts I already know from other newssources.
The most shocking thing to me is the downplaying of facts I've already read somewhere else. For instance last year I read on BBC news that an estimated (by the police) 200.000 demonstrators were on the streets in London (this number went up as more reports came in) and then cnn which supposedly has excellent news sources (i.e. the same) spoke of tens of thousands of people. The number was corrected several times as the events unfolded and each time the numbers were lower than elsewhere. I remembered being quite shocked at this misrepresentation and browsed several other US media to confirm my theory that they were downplaying the numbers. My conclusion was that the US media were indeed trying to shield their audience from the fact that a shitload of people were protesting against them. They weren't really lying but merely misrepresenting stuff they knew, ignoring facts they had, etc. This was not an incident. Fox news probably barely mentioned the whole event. The same happens with casualty numbers in iraq, numbers of 'insurgents', etc. They do mention the numbers but not if they can get away with it.
During the whole iraq conflict there basically was a media blackout. During this time basically all news came from rumsfeld et al. Now that journalists are doing their job again it is interesting to see how the media filters through the facts. US written media is still functioning quite well, especially if you also read the comments sections where you can read fascinating contributions of all sorts of people with their views and interpretations. But channels like CNN and Fox choose to downplay bad news, only invite retired army generals as experts and are very mild in their critique on whitehouse pressconferences, pentagon briefings and other forms of propaganda. The pictures of dead civilians and soldiers are taken but never reach their intended audience. The papers won't print them, the news channels won't broadcast the footage from the battlefield. Only if the shit really hits the fan like with the abu graib thing, they come out with pictures etc. If they'd done their job at the time, Rumsfeld would have had to resign over this 'incident'.
There are plenty of smart US citizens who care to inform themselves and find that they can do just that. The majority however watches Fox, CNN and reads US Today and actually believe what they see & read. That's a problem because this majority gives legitamacy to its government that acts on its behalf (but not necessarily in its interest). And what you see on those media has not much to do with such core journalistic values as truth, objectiveness, completeness, accuratenes, ect. Smart US citizens who care to inform themselves are very much aware of this but that doesn't seem to matter much anymore.
As a european citizen, I find the fact that the US no longer listens to its more intelligent part of the population the most worrying thing. The problem is not lack of people with a clue but dominance of clueless people.
Very effective. All of these attacks require open ports, a router makes it impossible to reach those ports (unless you configure the router to forward connections). The problem with windows xp is that until sp2, the firewall defaulted to off. This means that if you are connected directly to the internet during the installation there is a period of time during which you are vulnerable until you manage to patch the system. During this time, you are very likely to be attacked succesfully.
The solution is simple, if you are not behind a router, don't connect (unplug network cable during installation) until you have enabled the windows firewall (or a third party firewall product). Then, asap update to sp2. A router will shield you from any attacks.
Many linux distros still do not enable a firewall by default and run many deamons that open tcp ports. So it really depends on your distribution how safe you are. Patching & closing unnecessary ports are a good idea regardless of your OS.
Some will not find this a fair comparison but consider what would happen if you'd install a linux distribution from late 2000 on a PC directly connected to the internet now. At the time, popular distributions like red-hat and mandrake launched a large number of deamons (e.g. openssh, sendmail and sometimes even bind) and did not by default enable a firewall. Also many of the deamons these distributions have had multiple critical security upgrades over the past few years. Many of these distributions are no longer being supported by their vendors. Technically both OSes are insecure and offer multiple intrusion points. However, a linux distribution from 2000 is of course unlikely to come under attack immediately like a windows xp box because of the number of similar configurations connected to the internet. Windows XP installations have a high degree of similarity and if one has a weakness, the same weakness is likely to be found on many more computers. Linux configurations and especially those common in 2000 vary to a large degree and security through obscurity tends to be a significant form protection for otherwise insecure linux configurations.
It's not a technical problem. Most programmers don't understand this because they are trained to provide technical solutions for problems.
The problem with the software industry is that it doesn't seem to learn much from its past. People were talking about complexity and the growing scale of things in the sixties already. Many of the technical solutions (e.g. components, object orientation) suggested then have been more or less adopted now. This has allowed us to scale development up to the point where we have constantly been pushing the technical limitations of the technology we use for the past forty years. The non technical problems have remained the same throughout those decades. No matter what the technology is, there is only so much code a single individual can manage. As soon as you cross that boundary, there are multiple programmers working together. A few intelligent individuals can work together very efficiently but as soon as this group of individuals grows, communication problems and not technical problems become the main issue.
Many companies start out as a handfull of smart individuals doing cool stuff. Then they grow and before you know it they are a a lot of people walking in each others way (i.e. a large software company).
Delivering software on time, within budget and implementing the specified requirements is an art that surprisingly few programmers have mastered. The OSS community doesn't solve this problem either, it merely makes it a not so important problem. Most OSS projects don't have real deadlines. For example Firefox and Mozilla have a history of constantly shifting roadmaps. Every few months they say like hey this milestone (e.g. a 1.0 release) is not going to be ready next month like we said last year so let's push it ahead six months. Companies don't have this luxury and either deliver late (costs money) or deliver crap on time (also costs money). Very few companies actually ship high quality software on time.
Last year one of the firefox developers pushed for some strong deadlines to beat Microsoft to the market with a firefox release before IE 7. Microsoft kicked their ass despite being late on their own schedule for six months or so and released service pack 2 with IE 7 months before the actual firefox 1.0 release. The original schedule of firefox just wasn't realistic and people knew it wasn't realistic. Originally the 1.0 was going to be released early spring. By early spring it was mid summer and by mid summer it was definately before the end of the year. November proved to be more realistic then April and all is well know (I love firefox).
On the other hand Microsoft also has a long history of very unrealistic deadlines. It seems all their products are delivered late. Despite all this, Microsoft is actually quite impressive from a software engineering perspective. They have one of the largest development teams in the world (with thousands of engineers) and their software is very profitable.
Well given the choice between a phone that can do just voice calls and a a phone that can do a lot more, customers buy the latter. From the point of view of phone manufacturers it's quite clear where the money is.
But you are right, most phones are just expensive toys used mostly for sending text messages and calling other people. I have a very old, unfashionable one which does just that and is light and reliable too.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called advertising. For both the paper version and the online version this is a major source of revenue. The mozilla foundation recently payed an enormous amount of money for a full page ad. Online advertising is much cheaper but sites like slashdot seem to manage just fine on online advertising.
Nyt has the potential to get millions of visitors on a daily basis. If they provide good quality content there will be lots of regular visitors. They have the content anyway so not exploiting it online would be bad for business.
Now you can't blame the nyt people to explore options for a subscription model. But I don't think that it will be very profitable. There will be a few thousand who will subscribe and it will provide a very modest income but nothing spectecular. Probably the effect on advertisement sales will be negative because of all the people who won't subscribe and take their business elsewhere.
What nyt needs to do is maximize the value of the information they produce every day. They have four sources of income: paper subscriptions, street sales, advertising and online advertising. The last two generally provide more revenue if more people read nyt. The first two are unlikely to be influenced much by the online presence of nyt. Lots of people prefer to hold the paper in their hands. If you combine this information it can be deduced that free online access adds revenue and that restricting access in exchange for subscription fees probably isn't worth the trouble: you'll lose readers, you will lose advertisers and the subscription revenue is unlikely to compensate for that.
Scientific journal prices are outrageous when you consider that most of the work involved is done by volunteers. The current scientific publishing process is just a scam to pump vast amounts of research money into the mostly private publishing sector. I'm talking hundreds of millions of dollars here.
This outrageous because all the relevant parts of the process (writing articles and peer reviewing them) is done exclusively by volunteers. Of course there is some cost involved in printing, formating and hosting content. However printing is irrelevant now that we have internet. Formatting makes it look nice but does not add any value to an article and hosting can easily be covered by sponsors (universities, companies, other research minded organizations) and advertising.
I heard some jaw dropping figures a few weeks back. Apparently a well run, not very high profile journal can bring in around one to two million dollars annually. There's one or two guys doing the formatting & editing, a part time editor and that's about all the costs involved in producing the journal (except for the logistics of actually printing and distributing journals). Maybe alltogether they have 300K of expenses. The rest is profit. That's a single journal. There are many journals and university libraries pay hundreds of thousands of dollars (each) annually for subscriptions to all these journals. Internet makes publishers irrelevant so take them out of the equation. They suck at hosting content online (try a few publishers and see for yourself) and the stacks of paper are not interesting except maybe for archiving.
The IEEE should act in the interest of its members and the scientific community and not continue to provide the publishers with an easy source of revenue. Using their member subscriptions (which do not include access to their online library!) they should be able to cover all the costs.
I think it will only improve firefox adoption. And since you have to manually specify which sites use IE rendering and since users are lazy, this will only increase the amount of sites that will be fixed. Requiring site visitors to override a preference is not an option except for the kind of sites that should already display fine using firefox (i.e. it/tech oriented sites with technically skilled visitors). This is a great feature to shut up all those 'firefox is great but site A & B don't render correctly so I abolutely have to use internet explorer, all the time' kind of people. Effectively this takes away their last excuse to stick to internet explorer. All the other reasons (performance, features, themes, extensions) have already been taken away.
Actually there aren't a lot of sites that can afford not to render correctly on firefox. Even microsoft.com works fine (except for the update stuff). I work for a content management product company and anything we ship absolutely has to work on firefox or otherwise our clients complain, loudly. Anything high profile basically works with firefox nowadays.
Berkely db is just one of the (two) backends. At least they're using a db, cvs is just ascii files on disk. That means they're even easier to corrupt (which is probably why cvs fans consider this to be an important feature). And yes you can mess with them when that happens but do you really want that?
We haven't had any reliability problems so far and our repositories have been online for more than 1.5 years now. Of course we make nightly backups (which is also very easy with svn, even incrementally).
The nice thing about svn is that you can dump to plain ascii on the fly (i.e. without shutting down anything). The dump files are very portable, incremental and also very suitable for backup (and actually the output of cvs2svn). A dump file is like a chronological ordering of all commits. You can do incremental dumps every hour if you wish, hardly any performance penalty. Maybe backup the db binaries nightly/weekly and there's no risk. When bad stuff happens, just svnadmin load the dump files.
BTW. we've never had any need for backups so far. Maybe your friend has a grudge against berkely db and maybe for good reasons but I've heard no bad stories about subversion messing up repositories so far. It certainly works beautifully for us and we have dozens of commits per day.
People who hate Java generally don't understand much of Java. You're an excellent example. You hate Java for the wrong reasons. That's dumb.
There are actually quite a number of valid reasons to dislike Java and to prefer php. You don't list a single one. At least hate it for the right reasons. As to explaining why you are wrong is a waste of my time. Sorry, I'm not in the idiot reducation business.
I doubt it, unlike the IEEE wireless standards, 3G networks are actually designed to scale up to country wide coverage while providing access to hundreds/thousands of users per node rather than a few dozen at most.
Encapsulate your data with a proper API (getters and setters and maybe some additional stuff). Maybe throw some factory method in that returns the appropriate 'game' object given e.g. a filename.
foo.getProperty1(..); ...
This way you can adjust which instance is used in the game or change the implementation of the API without touching the game code or changing the way the object is persisted.
Your application code just calls
GameProps foo = GameProps.getInstance("somefilenameorwhatever");
foo.setProperty2(..);
getInstance does stuff like opening files on disk if needed and instantiating the GameProps class. It may keep a private reference to a singleton instance or maybe cache some frequently used instances.
This is a nice, lightweight OO solution. You gain a lot of control over the behaviour without any real price and without breaking encapsulation, unlike your global variable.
I migrated some of our legacy repositories to svn yesterday. It's rediculously easy. I didn't encounter any problems with newlines like the mono guys.
Svn blame and svn log are very powerful tools and yes they take a while to complete. For each release I do a svn log -v -rbeginrev:HEAD > changelog. I usually edit some of the languahe inside changelog but this gives a pretty decent overview of changes. The -v option lets you see which files changed in a particular commit.
Of course we've been using svn for our main products for about a year now. Once you're used to svn, cvs feels like a huge step back.
BTW getting started with svn is rediculously easy too. Here's what you need to do to set up a server:
- install svn.
- make sure you have a working ssh server.
- make sure svnserve is in the path.
- svnadmin create somerepository
That's it. You can use the svn+ssh type url now to do stuff on your newly created repository.
That remark caught my eye as well but you'd have to consider fixing the problem and distributing the fix are two different things. Just committing a change in cvs is not a good solution when you have hundreds of millions of people who need it. You need to properly test the patch and then when you are absolutely certain the patch won't break anything, you need to distribute it to all your customers. Ms gets this right most of the time but sadly it usually takes them a few months.
With linux, you can pull the fix from cvs (or fix it yourself), wait for the binaries (a few days later), wait for an official patch from your distribution vendor (here things start to vary from vendor to vendor and faster is not always better) or wait for the next release of the distribution. It is not uncommon for fixes to break other stuff. Arguably the linux process is better because you can choose when to upgrade. The testing phase is open and you can choose to not wait for its completion. But claiming it is faster is not really a fair comparison.
ASSEMBLY is a totally inappropriate language for the vast majority of applications, including operating system kernels, video card drivers and games. The complexity and security tradeoff simply doesn't justify the performance gains. That's why it isn't used anymore in most of the software industry. The same is true to a lesser extent for C and C++.
These languages are inherently insecure because they allow for mistakes that other languages do not allow for. Combine this with the fact that it doesn't take a fool to make mistakes and you have the perfect proof that C is inherently insecure. Refute either of those arguments and you might have a point.
The problem with C is that it takes the inhuman capability to not make mistakes to end up with secure software. That's why all of the long lived C software projects have to be constantly patched to correct mistakes. Buffer overflows are no accidents, they are the predictable result of using C. Use C -> expect to deal with buffer overflows, memory leaks, etc. Every good C programmer knows this.
The difference between good C software and bad C software is that in the latter case the programmers are surprised whereas in the first case the programmers actually do some testing and prevention (because they expect things to go wrong). Mozilla Firefox comes with a talkback component because the developers know that the software will crash sometimes and want to be able to do a post mortem. The software crashes because the implementation language of some components is C. IMHO mozilla firefox is good software because it crashes less than internet explorer and offers nice features.
Of course we have learned to work around C's limitations. Using custom memory allocation routines, code verifiers and checkers, extensive code reviews we can actually build pretty stable C software. The only problem is that C programmers are extremely reluctant to let go of their bad habits. Some actually think they are gods when they sit down behind their editors and do such stupid things as using string manipulation functions everyone recommends to avoid like the plague, trying to outsmart garbage collecting memory allocaters by not using them, etc. If you'd build in a switch in the compiler which enforces the use of the improvements listed above, most of the popular C software simply wouldn't compile. But then it wouldn't be C anymore because the whole point of C is to allow the programmer to do all the bad things listed above, even accidentally.
IMHO programmer reeducation is an inherently bad solution to inherent security problems of the C language. You can't teach people not to make mistakes. You need to actively prevent them from making mistakes. You can make mistakes in other languages but they are a subset of the mistakes you can make in C. Therefore you should use those languages rather than C unless you have a good reason not to. Any other reason than performance is not good enough.
What's wrong with it is that it has been demonstrated in the past that it doesn't work for a large group of people. This very naive view of how people are supposed to be able to take care of themselves is the main cause that compared to other 'civilized' nations the US has an embarrassingly large degree of poverty, homeless people, uninsured people, etc. And I say embarrasing because the US is one of the richest countries in the world.
A functioning social security system is supposed to counter the negative effects of this. A good social security system certainly comes at a price but it does work. The US has an unusually expensive and poorly functioning social security system (you pay quite a bit of money and it doesn't seem to work very well). For example, you guys pay lots of health insurance but receive pretty poor health service compared to for example the Netherlands where everybody is insured and the per capita fees are much lower (pay less, receive more and still cost effective). In the US people are going bankrupt because they can't afford their medical bills and people are uninsured because they can't afford the insurance fees. We don't have that problem, if you're sick you get treatment, medication, etc. If you can't work because you are sick you still get some income (so you don't starve to death and can afford to live somewhere). It's all covered by mandatory insurance fees.
Our reasoning in the Netherlands is very simple: you need to work to have income, there is a certain risk you lose your job and the government requires you to cover that risk with social security fees. So if you lose your job you are entitled to some basic income for a while. Same goes for pensions: if you stay alive you'll likely retire at some point and need a basic income to support yourself so there's an insurance fee for that too and you will have a pension by the time you retire (not much, you need to complement it if you want to retire in style). The same goes for health cost: you are going to die at some point and are likely to have some medical cost before you do so. Therefore you need to cover the risk by paying insurance fees.
Now there's a group of people that are not able to take care of themselves (for whatever reason). Every country has them and they are a problem. The US has a lot of them. These people need to eat, sleep, live, have medical care just like everybody else and that costs money. The associated criminality and people starving in the gutter with all sorts of untreated medical problems are considered to be not very welcome things in most civilized places (though the US is surprisingly tolerant in this respect).
So you need to solve that problem somehow. Obviously, no matter how much you want it, this problem is not going to solve itself (this is essentially what you are proposing). It will probably get worse if you do nothing. Doing nothing has a very high economical cost (insurance fees are a great example: in the US you are effectively paying the health insurance of those who can't afford insurance, that's why the fees are about twice that of what is common in most european countries).
The solution is called social welfare. It doesn't need to be much but such basic things as housing, a warm meal once a day education for children does a lot to keep the problem from spiraling out of control as it has in the US. We have homeless people too in the Netherlands, it's a problem and we're not proud of it but it's much less of a problem than it is in the US where for example in LA tens of thousands of people live on the streets.
Social security costs money but you get something back as well. Maybe you think you don't need it but your luck might change. I certainly wouldn't want you sleeping on a bench in front of my house and I'm sure you feel the same way about me. That's basically why social security is everybodies responsibility and not something to opt-out like you are proposing.
Yep, perfect opportunity to migrate. Test the migration on some machine until you are sure everything migrates properly and then flip the switch over night.
It works great but it looks awful. GTK on windows just doesn't feel right. The dialogs are awkward (especially the open & save dialogs are extremely ugly), everything looks different and it doesn't even try to blend in.
But the Gimp is a great app and once you rearrange the toolbars into one window it almost looks usable. I've spend some time with it lately and it's a good photoshop replacement unless you know what you are doing when using photoshop (surprisingly few people do). Photoshop is just more polished in the more advanced features and the Gimp doesn't really compare well in that area. But it is well equiped for all the basic stuff like fixing holiday pics, pngs for your website etc.
The most relevant thing about xml is that it is a standard for representing structured information. A problem with the current representation is that it requires a relatively large amount of cpu horse power and bandwidth to process and transport xml. This is the price we pay for something we do not really need in cases where xml is used for communication between two programs (i.e. most cases).
Both problems are easy to solve. Ebxml for example is a binary xml industry standard that is used in the mobile domain. It's simply a more efficient way of storing the same information. It uses small binary tokens for tags and attributenames and doesn't include comments. This makes the parsing process simpler and faster. In addition ebxml wastes less bytes, especially when combined with compression. Parsers simply parse the data to the usual internal datastructures with the usual apis (dom, sax, etc) so at the application level there is no difference.
The main problem with ebxml is non technical: it is not a widely adopted standard. What is needed is a w3c endorsed standard similar to ebxml with support in the form of dom & sax parsers and conversion tools for all major platforms and a mime type like binary/xml.
Then stuff like soap, rss etc. can be served up in binary form to applications that can handle binary/xml and text/xml to other applications. The performance gains for soap heavy applications are probably considerable.
The data itself does not change, it's just being transmitted more efficiently so there are no consequences for applications that use the dom/sax apis or higher level apis based on those. Also there's no reason for stuff like xsl processors, schema validators etc to stop working just because the xml data is handed to them as binary/xml instead of text/xml. Of course all applications that spit out hand coded xml need to feed their output through some conversion filter (if binary/xml is required).
IMHO it would also be a great way to serve up XHTML to browsers.
The only democratic outcome of the 2004 election is to organize new elections. If the Ukraine can do it, the US should be able to do the democratically right thing too. Of course the legal context and its current implementation is deeply flawed so that needs to be fixed as well. Three recounts and three different outcomes is unacceptable. Obviously sombody has trouble counting or someone is manipulating rather than counting the results.
It's unbelievable that two times in a row, the US gets a president whose election victory is all but certain. I'm not saying Bush didn't win. I'm just saying that it is pretty hard too establish that he won (and with how many votes) given the many legitimate (amd not so legitimate complaints) about the voting procedure, the way of counting votes, etc.
IMHO Bush should fix democracy in his own country before spreading it to the rest of the world.
After all they used the exact same arguments to not port win32 to unix. Vendor lockin is their business model.
If there's a technical problem, don't port KDE. If there is no technical problem: go ahead and don't worry too much about things like OSS politics.
A lot of popular OSS software already runs on windows (e.g. most of the apache stuff, cygwin, openoffice, all of the mozilla stuff, the gimp, etc). Many of these software packages are being adopted by large companies precisely because they also run on windows. Openoffice would be a hard sell if it wasn't portable. IMHO porting KDE would only improve KDE adoptation for both users and application developers.
A side effect would be that it would remove reasons for users to stick to windows. If you have Kontact, you don't need outlook. If KWord keeps you happy, away with msword. Lots of people are waiting for a proper OSS excuse to ditch the Outlook/exchange combo. Right now this requires expensive proprietary client/server solutions or migrating desktops to linux. Therefore outlook remains the client of choice for many, despite the security issues, licensing cost, etc. KDE can fix the client side and combined with a linux server solution (and exchange compatibility) it's bye bye exchange & outlook.
The KDE software stack is perfectly positioned to basically take over client application development for the windows platform. MS has been relying too much on their monopoly for the past few years and this presents a perfect opportunity to jump in and take over. KDE has all the required features. Much of the infrastructure (QT, GCC) is already ported to win32 (license remains an obstacle though). For many small software companies, being able to develop one application and deploy it on multiple platforms is a very valuable thing. It's too easy not to do it so therefore it should be done.
Why? High end phones meet these requirements already. And they'll be low end phones by the time this technology matures. Requiring stuff that is available now for software that won't be available until somewhere late next year (at the earliest) seems pretty conservative to me. I imagine, minimo will run quite nicely in phones with 128 or 256 MB of ram in about two years.
Actually content producers will probably compensate lost sales with sales of existing formats (like dvd and vhs) and the fact that they are not losing money over the production cost for what will initially be a low volume market. Right now content producers are pretty happy selling overpriced dvds to eager customers. With virtually no production cost per unit and lots of people owning a dvd player, the margins and volumes are high. It will take years of investment to reach a similar situation with a new format. During that time they'll have produce both dvds and the new replacement format(s).
The ones who are really going to lose a lot of money are the hardware manufacturers who have invested heavily into their products over the past few years. Most of the standards being argued over today will be obsolete (from a technical point of view) by the time there will be significant market adoption of any of them. By that time they'll be a hard sell to both consumers and content producers.
If things aren't rendering correctly on firefox it's not firefox that is the problem but your technology. After all, you can choose to test and fix your technology. Many firefox users have a flash plugin and firefox has excellent support for all the latest html, CSS and DOM stuff so that can't be the problem. Doing things the nice way will ensure that your ad displays well in all browsers.
Of course if you can safely ignore 5-10% of your potential audience, the firefox community certainly won't stop you. Firefox users are technical savvy users with generally good jobs. If that's useless information to you, you shouldn't be in the advertisement business.
I use adblock on any flash ad that annoys me (flashing annoyingly, doing stuff with mouse events, sound, etc). Usually that means blocking everything from all advertisement servers linked from the page. I do click on ads sometimes if they are unobtrusive and look like something I need. For that to happen the ad needs to be specifically targeted at what I am doing or I'll consider them as noise.
works for me, on xp as well. Did you use the installers for both?
Well it's quite a challenge to find really objective media in the US (or elsewhere) since most are owned by two or three companies. I browse news.google.com, nation.com, nyt, msnbc, reuters, cnn.com on a regular basis. To ammuse myself I also read Fox news sometimes and there are of course many foreign english language publications you can turn to. I generally have more respect for the journalistic quality of the NYT than e.g. CNN. I find that what CNN doesn't mention is often more significant than what it does mention. In any case I prefer having the facts over some interpretation. The only way to get to the facts is by monitoring multiple news sources. Inevitably you compare them and to say the least, Fox is not very informative and often interprets things in ways not supported by facts I already know from other newssources.
The most shocking thing to me is the downplaying of facts I've already read somewhere else. For instance last year I read on BBC news that an estimated (by the police) 200.000 demonstrators were on the streets in London (this number went up as more reports came in) and then cnn which supposedly has excellent news sources (i.e. the same) spoke of tens of thousands of people. The number was corrected several times as the events unfolded and each time the numbers were lower than elsewhere. I remembered being quite shocked at this misrepresentation and browsed several other US media to confirm my theory that they were downplaying the numbers. My conclusion was that the US media were indeed trying to shield their audience from the fact that a shitload of people were protesting against them. They weren't really lying but merely misrepresenting stuff they knew, ignoring facts they had, etc. This was not an incident. Fox news probably barely mentioned the whole event. The same happens with casualty numbers in iraq, numbers of 'insurgents', etc. They do mention the numbers but not if they can get away with it.
During the whole iraq conflict there basically was a media blackout. During this time basically all news came from rumsfeld et al. Now that journalists are doing their job again it is interesting to see how the media filters through the facts. US written media is still functioning quite well, especially if you also read the comments sections where you can read fascinating contributions of all sorts of people with their views and interpretations. But channels like CNN and Fox choose to downplay bad news, only invite retired army generals as experts and are very mild in their critique on whitehouse pressconferences, pentagon briefings and other forms of propaganda. The pictures of dead civilians and soldiers are taken but never reach their intended audience. The papers won't print them, the news channels won't broadcast the footage from the battlefield. Only if the shit really hits the fan like with the abu graib thing, they come out with pictures etc. If they'd done their job at the time, Rumsfeld would have had to resign over this 'incident'.
There are plenty of smart US citizens who care to inform themselves and find that they can do just that. The majority however watches Fox, CNN and reads US Today and actually believe what they see & read. That's a problem because this majority gives legitamacy to its government that acts on its behalf (but not necessarily in its interest). And what you see on those media has not much to do with such core journalistic values as truth, objectiveness, completeness, accuratenes, ect. Smart US citizens who care to inform themselves are very much aware of this but that doesn't seem to matter much anymore.
As a european citizen, I find the fact that the US no longer listens to its more intelligent part of the population the most worrying thing. The problem is not lack of people with a clue but dominance of clueless people.
Very effective. All of these attacks require open ports, a router makes it impossible to reach those ports (unless you configure the router to forward connections). The problem with windows xp is that until sp2, the firewall defaulted to off. This means that if you are connected directly to the internet during the installation there is a period of time during which you are vulnerable until you manage to patch the system. During this time, you are very likely to be attacked succesfully.
The solution is simple, if you are not behind a router, don't connect (unplug network cable during installation) until you have enabled the windows firewall (or a third party firewall product). Then, asap update to sp2. A router will shield you from any attacks.
Many linux distros still do not enable a firewall by default and run many deamons that open tcp ports. So it really depends on your distribution how safe you are. Patching & closing unnecessary ports are a good idea regardless of your OS.
Some will not find this a fair comparison but consider what would happen if you'd install a linux distribution from late 2000 on a PC directly connected to the internet now. At the time, popular distributions like red-hat and mandrake launched a large number of deamons (e.g. openssh, sendmail and sometimes even bind) and did not by default enable a firewall. Also many of the deamons these distributions have had multiple critical security upgrades over the past few years. Many of these distributions are no longer being supported by their vendors. Technically both OSes are insecure and offer multiple intrusion points. However, a linux distribution from 2000 is of course unlikely to come under attack immediately like a windows xp box because of the number of similar configurations connected to the internet. Windows XP installations have a high degree of similarity and if one has a weakness, the same weakness is likely to be found on many more computers. Linux configurations and especially those common in 2000 vary to a large degree and security through obscurity tends to be a significant form protection for otherwise insecure linux configurations.
It's not a technical problem. Most programmers don't understand this because they are trained to provide technical solutions for problems.
The problem with the software industry is that it doesn't seem to learn much from its past. People were talking about complexity and the growing scale of things in the sixties already. Many of the technical solutions (e.g. components, object orientation) suggested then have been more or less adopted now. This has allowed us to scale development up to the point where we have constantly been pushing the technical limitations of the technology we use for the past forty years. The non technical problems have remained the same throughout those decades. No matter what the technology is, there is only so much code a single individual can manage. As soon as you cross that boundary, there are multiple programmers working together. A few intelligent individuals can work together very efficiently but as soon as this group of individuals grows, communication problems and not technical problems become the main issue.
Many companies start out as a handfull of smart individuals doing cool stuff. Then they grow and before you know it they are a a lot of people walking in each others way (i.e. a large software company).
Delivering software on time, within budget and implementing the specified requirements is an art that surprisingly few programmers have mastered. The OSS community doesn't solve this problem either, it merely makes it a not so important problem. Most OSS projects don't have real deadlines. For example Firefox and Mozilla have a history of constantly shifting roadmaps. Every few months they say like hey this milestone (e.g. a 1.0 release) is not going to be ready next month like we said last year so let's push it ahead six months. Companies don't have this luxury and either deliver late (costs money) or deliver crap on time (also costs money). Very few companies actually ship high quality software on time.
Last year one of the firefox developers pushed for some strong deadlines to beat Microsoft to the market with a firefox release before IE 7. Microsoft kicked their ass despite being late on their own schedule for six months or so and released service pack 2 with IE 7 months before the actual firefox 1.0 release. The original schedule of firefox just wasn't realistic and people knew it wasn't realistic. Originally the 1.0 was going to be released early spring. By early spring it was mid summer and by mid summer it was definately before the end of the year. November proved to be more realistic then April and all is well know (I love firefox).
On the other hand Microsoft also has a long history of very unrealistic deadlines. It seems all their products are delivered late. Despite all this, Microsoft is actually quite impressive from a software engineering perspective. They have one of the largest development teams in the world (with thousands of engineers) and their software is very profitable.
Well given the choice between a phone that can do just voice calls and a a phone that can do a lot more, customers buy the latter. From the point of view of phone manufacturers it's quite clear where the money is.
But you are right, most phones are just expensive toys used mostly for sending text messages and calling other people. I have a very old, unfashionable one which does just that and is light and reliable too.