One is tied up in this contractual mess, but the other, InnoDB has no such issues, and may even be faster for many purposes.
That might be the understatement of the year. InnoDB touts itself as the "fastest disk-based database" currently on the market. It's a pretty tall-order, but it lives up to it. Our internal benchmarking tests for our application purposes show it to be about 7x faster than an identical PostgreSQL 7.1.2 solution. I've seen reports on the mailing lists that it can be up to 18x faster. You also get the simplicity and maturity of MySQL. The InnoDB benchmark page has their own benchmarks, which pretty much mirror what we've seen internally.
Of course, MySQL has other drawbacks, namely that it doesn't support triggers or table inheritance or some of the more complex nuances of standard SQL, but the 95% of stuff it does have is very fast, and the other 5% can be handled in code. MySQL isn't popular because it's open-source, though. It's popular because it's good, free, and most importantly, extremely easy and intuitive to use.
Usually the latter turns out to be some baroque conglomeration of features piled on features, creating a very top heavy feeling to the language, while the former classification languages all have a purity to them, e.g. smalltalk, lisp, and c.
Well, I mean, as long as we're talking in generalities here, the latter also seem to be geared towards getting jobs done where the former are geared towards elegant problem-solving. Purity is great when you're admiring something, but no one wants to hang out with the righteous virgin when they feel like getting laid. Personally, when I program, I'm not looking for my code to fit some elegant theory. I'm looking for the job to get done as succinctly as possible.
Some would defend the "hack languages" as a means to Rapid Application Development, but Smalltalk has been shown to be the most productive language, and Ruby/Python/Perl all seem to me to have a BASIC odor to them; I'm wondering if people are afraid to learn a new way of speaking?
I would say that Perl stinks more of shell and C than it does BASIC. If you're talking because it has a lot of built-in features, there are plenty of languages that have it. But out of all the languages you've mentioned, I found it ironic you say that because Perl has problem undergone the most intensive language development of any (and the new process probably blows efforts for other languages out of the water). Larry Wall has a great affinity for languages (both spoken and programming), and it shows, because, for English speakers, Perl is designed so that you can write it like you almost would speak it. Now, you might say that that is "hack"-ish, but that shows a lot more care for the process of programming than a language that idealistically sticks to a theoretical truth in favor of making the language easier to use.
And provide a link to a study that shows Smalltalk is the most productive language. I'm not saying I don't believe you, but I personally find the "hack languages" to allow a much more natural flow between my brain and the screen, so I'd be interested in seeing how that conclusion was reached.
Yeah, or one of two more likely scenarios will happen:
Microsoft pays billions of dollars to abide by patent, recognizing that it too has patents it would like to continue to protect. Payment results in Microsoft shelling out 0.5% of net worth.
Microsoft pays billions of dollars and buys McAfee, thus obtaining one more slice of the planet.
So, as you can see, Microsoft can pay lots of money to lobby Washington and hurt itself for a minor victory or pay lots of money to protect itself for the status quo. I think I'll put my money on the latter.
let me see-- it is the single most common OS on web servers when counting per site according to Netcraft (Windows is more common when counting by server). It has made tremendous inroads into that industry.
Netcraft numbers mean nothing. Think of how many people are running a web server on their machine and don't even know it because they clicked the "web server" checkbox during their RedHat install. I have four web sites at home (two boxen) that are on Linux machine. That's simply ridiculous. If you wanted to prove your point about mainstream linux acceptance, check out the number of web servers running Linux found at Fortune 500 companies. That would be mainstream acceptance (oh yeah, there aren't that many).
Note that I have been using Linux for over two years and have seen immense improvement in the end user experience (RH5.1 is the oldest distro I have worked with, RH7.1 and SuSE 7.1 are the most recent but I have also worked with versions of Slackware and Debian). PnP and USB support are both becoming more powerful and user friendly in the system level (not only talking the kernel here).
Great, and while Linux is working on those wonderful features, Microsoft and Apple have already developed operating systems that support those and more, and do it better and more intuitively for the user. While Linux has been improving, what do you think other companies have been doing? Just sitting around on their hands? Microsoft's developing a whole new way to think about operating systems and software, which Linux is starting to copy. Apple refined the UI experience to a ridiculous level, which Linux promptly tried to copy (failing somewhat because they don't have the underlying technology.
Microsoft's current model of selling large ammounts of proprietary software is not sustainable, and Microsoft top execs know it. This is why they need to move to a subscription model. And it is why open source software like Linux will become mainstream in the end user market (it has been common in the server market for some time).
And somehow selling large amounts of free software is? Eventually, people are going to realize that to have a business and earn money and feed the kiddies at home, you're going to have to sell something, be it software or support. Software is a hell of a lot easier to sell because people need it for things to work. People don't need support. In fact, many large companies have their own internal support structure so they don't have to pay other companies for it.
Linux is a mainstream word, not a mainstream operating system. You can wax poetic about the "improvements" that Linux has made, but in the end, the mainstream user (be it individual or corporate) still finds better options in Microsoft and Apple.
Rather than trying to convince the trademark offices that various words shouldn't be trademarked, why can't the various open-source projects come up with more original project names? I'm sick of seeing KOffice and thinking to myself, "Oh, it's just a clone of MS Office" or seeing "GAIM" and thinking to myself, "Oh, it's a GTK version of AIM." KDE seems to be the worst offender in this category.
Not only will you avoid these types of pointless lawsuits, but you'll stop enforcing the MegaCorp's brand strength and start developing some for Linux apps. Pick an original name and quit crying when someone gives you a little legal nudge over your blatant copying of their property.
And that's why the system is GNU/Linux, and not 'Linux', which merely refers to the kernel.
A lot of the code they're listing as "Linux" code isn't GNU code at all. It's released under the BSD license (e.g. Apache). It's released under the Artistic license (e.g. Perl). Calling the system GNU/Linux simply because it has some GNU tools on it is like me calling my Windows box Netscape Windows because I have an old version of Navigator on it or GNU/Windows because I have GNU apps on it.
I think the reason people are more apt to further describe Linux as GNU/Linux is not because it uses GNU apps, but because it is released under the GNU Public License.
What I find amazing is that the Mozilla source code is larger than X (which isn't all that amazing when you look at the size of their respective tarballs). On the one hand, hats off to the Mozilla developers who've managed that monstrosity to almost-1.0. On the other hand, why is a browser bigger than X?! That's insane! That shows there's a lot a feature bloat in Mozilla.
What I failed to find in that article, though, is how much of that "operating system code" is actually beta code. Mozilla and other programs like it can hardly be considered OS code as they haven't even reached any level of maturity.
No, but human programmers that tell computers how to work do (well, some of them anyway). Generally, when a game player yells out, "XYZ is a cheater!" he's made a conclusion based on certain logic (moves too fast, shoots too accurately, has a nick like "cheatBot", climbs walls backwards, etc.). You can certainly program the same logic into a game server.
Anything that has rules someone will try to cheat at. Everyone dies, right? Well, that doesn't stop people from trying to cheat death. Why? Rules inherently suck. They were made to be broken. A Christian man and woman get in a relationship. God says don't cheat. What do they do? You guessed it. They cheat.
So how do real-life games take care of this scenario? Well, let's take basketball as an example. You have two basic ways of handling cheating in basketball. At the organized level (ie. NBA), you have referees. They have the rulebook, and when someone cheats, they call a foul. In an online game, this would be akin to a server admin maintaining the rules. It would be even better if it was automated (ie. the game could identify cheaters). Hell, human players can detect cheaters, so why not computers? At the unorganized level (ie. street ball), you have mob rule. Jim travels, so Bob calls a foul. Jim says, "No way, dood." Bob's buddies nod their heads. What happens if Jim refuses to agree? He's either out of the game or beat up (or both). What happens if Bob keeps calling wussy fouls? Bob's either out of the game or beat up. In an online server, this would be akin to sort of moderation system. Players could identify another player as a cheater. If this person gets identified enough, he's kicked off. If some jackass starts going around fingering everyone as a cheater (or the cheater himself starts fingering everyone), he gets knocked off. Mob rule is very effective.
The thing is that game developers are never going to be able to stop people from creating cheats. The effective way to handle cheating is the same way any other real-life game handles cheating. You out the cheater. Unfortunately, game developers haven't developed effective ways to out cheaters, and so, you have a Wild West scenario in online gaming communities. If developers would stop fighting the phenomenon and start understanding it, they might be able to work in more effective coutermeasures.
Doolittle's Raid More Important Than Many Think
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Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 2
To further muddy matters, the movie adds a sub-plot involving Doolittle's Raiders, the U.S. Army Air unit that first bombed Tokyo. That story is riveting; the pilots were on a virtual suicide run, since the bombers they flew couldn't carry enough fuel to return to safe waters, forcing them to ditch over China. But the saga feels like an afterthought in this movie, a strained vehicle for keeping our hunky fly-boys in the plot beyond all reason. The battle at Midway was really the Navy's payback for Pearl Harbor, and the turning point in the Pacific conflict.
Actually, I'm glad they put this into the movie. A lot of people forget this raid and how incredibly important it was to us winning the war. The raid was not meant for any revenge or tactical advantage. It was flown for one purpose only, and that was to scare the Japanese. At the time, the Japanese had this idea that they were immune from American attack, that their Far East island position made them invincible, since we couldn't fly all the way across the Pacific to get them (and they pretty much had a stranglehold on the Far East otherwise). When Doolittle's fliers bombed Tokyo, it showed the Japanese that we meant business, forcing them to consider a two-front war and scaring the Japanese into a more defensive posture with regards to the Pacific. Indeed, the Japanese overeagerness to push the Americans out of the war and into defeat that led to the Battle at Midway was prompted in large part because the Japanese were worried that if they didn't strike quickly, they wouldn't be able to stop a true threat in the American Navy.
While history remembers Pearl Harbor as the entry point of American into the war, most gloss over the immediate events after that and wait until late 1942/early 1943 to talk about active and positive American military involvement. The truth is that the American military was already prepared for war, and Doolittle's raid showed it.
Well, it looks like Slashdot corrected their error, which is nice to see. Normally, though, the journalistic standard is to issue a correction highlighting the mistake and apologizing, not just fixing. Normally, the editors do that (with an Update: section or something), but now, those of us who noticed it and pointed it out just look like jackasses.
The industry has been gradually moving toward a 64-bit architecture [From 32 Bits], which multiplies the amount of data the processor can access by four". Rock on CNN!
Normally, I don't point out the journalistic errors of Slashdot, but I can't help myself here. At least CNN knows how to spell Transmeta without the D.
He who lives in glass houses should not throw stones, Taco.
I can't understand why this product isn't tied into their Worldnet service. What even bothers me more is the fact that their screenshot has a little AOL.com button down on the bottom buttonbar. What are the head-honchos thinking?
Think about it. Sell your Worldnet service for $9.95 month or whatever the going rate is for generic dialup Internet service and give a special membership card with it. If you swipe this card in any AT&T Pay Phone 2000-i (aren't they a year late?) and you've immediately got access to Worldnet service, probably for a reduced rate or even for free. You've got your pay phones everywhere, so it's like free advertising. You have the opportunity to expand your userbase immensely, and maybe further take on the corporate megamonster AOL.
I think AT&T's missing a golden opportunity to turn a public service into a cash cow.
I know this will probably get modded down to where no one will see it, but I don't see why this guy doesn't deserve a patent. Yes, it's a split keyboard, but one of the split parts actually IS the mouse, a really bright (IMHO) idea that deserves to be rewarded. More importantly, this isn't a software patent, but an actual physical invention that has to be built and manufactured, and therefore, an exclusive right to distribute and/or license its design seems appropriate.
Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of patents these days are pretty bad, but this thing actually seems fairly inventive and worthy of the rights.
Actually, AFAIC, Futurama is already better than The Simpsons (note, not The Simpsons in their prime, just the show as it stands now). It makes sense, though. Groening, et al, took the good writers off of The Simpsons and put them on Futurama so that it would have the benefit of well-written episodes from the beginning to bring in a large supportive audience. Futurama is just plain funnier. The gags are faster, the humor is darker, the comraderie is more bitter, and the episodes all around are more cohesive. The use of special guests is consistently flaunted exceptionally well through the "heads in a jar" theme, which means you don't have to fight to believe Drew Barrymore as Krusty's suddenly received daughter or some such nonsense. Believing that Lucy Liu's head survived because of futuristic technology is much easier to digest. The recent episode with the Harlem Globetrotters and the time shifts was downright the fastest, most hilarious, continuously played-out gag I've ever seen.
What do The Simpsons have this season? I lot of completely inane, very loosely organized episodes without any constant thread that made the earlier episodes such a joy to watch. Now, it's like watch 4 five-minute skits. I'm glad the writers are living on in Futurama with fresh faces and fresh adventures (that's much easier to do in a completely fresh setting, of course), but it kind of hurts to see The Simpsons sort of degrade like an old NFL pro who won't retire.
Never the less, cheating in any form in a multiplayer game is not only rude and unfair, but you _will_ be found out, and when that happens, you are immediatly discredited. Just try to use a cheat patch or auto-aiming script for more than one round before someone yells "[your name here] is a BOT!!!". Then, hopefully someone in the room has administrative privlidges, and can ban the cheater. Or there could be a voting system in place to kick the cheater (like there is in CS). This is really the only way to stop cheating. It is impossible to prevent, but easy to stop with the right methods.
I think you're misunderstanding the motives of people who would use these hacks in online games. It's not about gaining prestige with better players by playing like them. Your last line, 'Cheaters:Online Games::Script Kiddies:Hackers', is closer to the truth. They're after just annoying and pissing people off. Nothing tweaks a cheater's knob more than seeing some really good player go down, and then scream bloody murder that someone's cheating or someong's a bot. It's funny, because the cheater's really destroying their ego. When a cheater gets banned, he just moves to another server and starts over, laughing when he magically beats the best and makes them cry. Given all the gaming servers out there, it would take a while to run through them all, and by the time you do, at least three or four new games are out ready to be tackled.
Script kiddies and cheaters are both annoying plagues. The best way to deal with them is not to have reputable companies give out tools with which they can easily cause problems, but to actively work to prevent them from causing problems in the first place. Voting and admin bans are simply measures to stop problems after they've annoyed people (akin to locking down a box after you've let a script kiddie do some damage).
In this story, Slashdot posted the front page to the Huntsville Times from the day that Yuri Gagarin was launched into space. In it, you can clearly see the headline "Reds Deny Spacemen Have Died" (lower center of page). It has long been thought that the Soviets lost some astronauts during their initial test flights. The American media has yet to get their hands on any rock-hard evidence, though.
I work for a regional ISP. Basically, the real problem with DSL is that the phone companies make it extremely difficult to sign up new customers. For our customers, they basically have to go through Bell to get their DSL line, telling them that they want service with us. When they get DSL installed, then we turn up our end. It used to be that they could call us and we'd setup everything (including handling work with the telco), but Bell did everything they could to make it difficult for us to do any work with them. Hence, we have the current situation. Along the way, when the customer calls, the phone company lets them know about special deals that their Internet provider has on getting DSL, and how much easier it is to sign up with them instead. You can get a free DSL modem and a discount on your service if you sign up through them. It smells very much like an abuse of a monopoly to me, but it's hard to put any pressure on them when they have the politicians in the palms of their money-filled hands.
Make no bones about it, the Telcos are not going to give up their hold on DSL without a fight.
On our side, we've basically shifted our focus. We still provide the best dialup service you can get, but we're targeting businesses now for Internet service. Most businesses need T1s, and with contracts, we don't have the same volatility. Unfortunately, most ISPs seem stuck on the on the dialup model, which was never a real big revenue generator anyway, what with AOL and the increase in cable modem usage.
Mom-n-pop ISPs are going to go under, unless Mom and Dad are smart business people, and realize that they need to get off the sinking ship that is dial-up and DSL and move onto more stable revenue generators (such as business broadband and outsourced services). Of course, it sucks for the residential consumer, because what's left are giant companies that can afford the low prices that consumers are demanding through mass equipment purchases and rollouts. Those companies also have stronger revenue streams coming in from other subsidiaries, to make up for any short-term losses generated by an almost saturated dial-up market.
Like Traffic, this movie takes a bleak view of the government's desperate and ineffective war on drugs.
No it doesn't. It doesn't comment on the government's efforts at all. The only time the government is even portrayed is when Jung himself gets caught and put under the punishment of the law.
Columbian
When you're referring to the country of Colombia, the descriptive is 'Colombian'. I hope you don't anger too many patriotic cartels.
This movie is first and foremost a biography. It's not necessarily a commentary on the drug culture. It's not commentary on government policy. It's a biography of one man's life showing the consequences of certain decisions, not the least of which is total alienation from everything he loved. The characters are very well-portrayed (despite what Katz says, the Cruz/Depp on-screen relationship is perfect, because it accurately mirrors the Jung/Mirta relationship) and the movie moves along at a snappy enough pace that you're not left idling on any one scene.
What I didn't really like about the movie is that it never encouraged any sort of feeling about the protagonist. The movie tries at points to make you feel sorry for Jung or angry at Jung or understanding, but it never really comes through, because when he's a victim, it's really his own fault, and when he's not the taking advantage of various oppurtunities, you just see them as dumb but acceptable decisions. At the end, when I'm supposed to feel somewhat bad for this man who's lost literally everything, I don't, because everything wasn't taken away; he gave it all away. I end up feeling worse for the father than for anyone else, simply because he's the only one who constantly gets the shaft (by no fault of his own).
In all, Blow is a worthwhile movie to see, but it's not a commentary on drugs like Traffic. Depp's not going to win any Oscars for his portrayal of Jung, even though it's a relatively good one, simply because the audience really isn't all that moved. Everyone who walked out of the theatre with me basically said, "Eh, it was a good film, but I wasn't really affected by it."
This question baits Microsoft with a presupposition that isn't even true. Take a look at the survey itself, and you'll see that while Apache numbers continue to outgrow MS numbers, MS actually holds a dominant position on SSL sites within the US. Now, given that a good percentage of the total web traffic is concentrated in the US and that most companies worth a damn have SSL sites, and you'll see that MS isn't hurting as bad as just a simple look at the first graph might tell you.
The thing none of those graphs show you is a relationship between hit rates and server usage. I'd be willing to bet that a good 60% (probably more) of those Apache servers are just people like me who run Apache at home for a small personal web server. I work for a managed hosting company, and more people request IIS than do Apache, although we generally use Apache more because we feel it's better (that's part of sales, though).
IIS is not struggling. It's gaining ground and acceptance in the corporate world, and when you pit a Wintel enterprise-class web solution against a Unix-based enterprise-class web solution (note I said "enterprise-class" which I don't feel Linux can really handle yet), they're actually rather competitive.
I'd rather see non-BS questions coming from the Slashdot community rather than questions that twist and manipulate facts to put the interviewee in a bad position before he even answers.
Don't forget that something like 80-90% of world's population lives on less that 1 USD/day - that's 30 USD/mo.
I would venture to say that the 80-90% of the world's population that lives on less than 1 USD/day are not on the Internet, much less needing to run their own secure sites. Ten dollars/month equates out to roughly 33 US cents/day. If you're running a business on the Internet that can't get at least that much money/day for operating costs, I don't think the SSL certificate is going to be the issue about whether you're successful or not.
Verisign bought Thawte sometime back (I believe it was May or June of last year). They're essentially the same company. I think by buying a Verisign cert over a Thawte cert, you're essentially getting a better support structure, although honestly, putting in a cert is brain-dead simple and shouldn't require much in the way of support (I do it every once in a while).
But take a look at the costs again. It's $125/yr. for a Thawte certs (the drawback to a Thawte cert is that it doesn't work in older versions of Netscape and IE which make up less than 1% of browser usage). That's roughtly $10/mo. for a secure site which is not at all expensive. It's really not that prohibitive to setup an SSL site. Prior to the release of the RSA patent into the public domain, that was your primary cost (passed on through purchases of software like Stronghold), and that cost is now basically gone.
If I was a small business, I would gladly pay only $10/mo. for secure server capabilities.
The thing a lot of people don't know about art is how incredibly rooted in science and natural understanding it was (I say was, because the last half of the 20th century has moved away from this). Artists grew up keenly studying nature to try to understand natural aesthetics, and developed a set of unwritten standards that are used in virtually all masterpiece paintings. While we may associate this binding of art and science only with Renaissance artists, the fact is it existed throughout art history, and art has always been about representing the world according to natural laws.
With that said, though, this painting probably wasn't painted on a specific date. It may represent a specific date, but paintings took months and months to prepare. For that one painting, van Gogh probably did no less than nine study paintings, each refining the position of every line, every stroke, and yes, the location of Venus. van Gogh could probably paint any sky he wanted to at any time he wanted to, and he would've known exactly where everything should be.
It's kind of sad, actually, that such knowledge (and training) has to be rediscovered, but such are the ways of history.
Re:Why isn't XML-RPC considered bloat?
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ESR On XML-RPC
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· Score: 4
Anyone see any errors in this thinking?
Yes. It's true that as a consequence of its text-based nature, communication via XML is decidedly more bandwidth-intensive than any binary counterpart. The problem, though, lies in translation of that binary format two and from different machines, architectures, languages, and implementations.
I currently do quite a bit of work using SOAP, which is similar to XML-RPC, but a little less well-developed. It's a no-brainer. If I'm using Java, Perl, C, C++ or even Python, it's relatively easy to make calls between these different languages. I don't have to worry about the endianess of the data I'm working with. I don't have to worry about learning some new data encoding scheme (XML is very well-defined, and very ubiquitous; almost every language has a translator). Communicating between a language like Perl, which has no typing, and Java, which has more strict typing is a no brainer, because the data structures are defined by a well-documented, human readable schema, and when I look at the data I'm sending, I can see the raw information.
Bandwidth concerns might have been paramount two years ago, but the world in which XML-RPC and SOAP are being used has already shifted to broadband. Now, human clarity and complete interoperability, as well as the ease of use of porting XML-RPC (or SOAP) constructs to another language (since it's just XML text) make it a much more efficient model in terms of programmer time.
Yes, from a strictly bandwidth concern, CORBA or DCOM beat XML hands down, but when you remove that consideration, it's not that big a deal. Couple it with existing protocols (I've seen SOAP implementations via HTTP, FTP, and even SMTP), and the opportunity to grow via existing infrastructure and well-known technologies, and you just have an easier (and thus, I would argue, more open) model to work with.
Along came those crappy Zip-drives with 100 MB and they nearly made it 'cause they were relatively cheap and became almost ubiquitious. Iomega was smart and went for broad distribution over profits trying to become a standard but eventually their quality-control problems, competition, and internal problems overwhelmed them. Now their Zip drives have been passed by. They've tried variations - 200 MB Zips and 40 MB "Clicks" but the train has left the station.
I don't know where you've been, but I'd have to say that ZIP drives have been a phenomenal success. I've definitely seen more ZIP drives than SuperDisk drives. Mac and Dell and Gateway all offer them, and if you go to college these days, you seriously can't get by without a ZIP drive. At my school, all of them had one, and that was in 1997.
Slashdot Mirror
One is tied up in this contractual mess, but the other, InnoDB has no such issues, and may even be faster for many purposes.
That might be the understatement of the year. InnoDB touts itself as the "fastest disk-based database" currently on the market. It's a pretty tall-order, but it lives up to it. Our internal benchmarking tests for our application purposes show it to be about 7x faster than an identical PostgreSQL 7.1.2 solution. I've seen reports on the mailing lists that it can be up to 18x faster. You also get the simplicity and maturity of MySQL. The InnoDB benchmark page has their own benchmarks, which pretty much mirror what we've seen internally.
Of course, MySQL has other drawbacks, namely that it doesn't support triggers or table inheritance or some of the more complex nuances of standard SQL, but the 95% of stuff it does have is very fast, and the other 5% can be handled in code. MySQL isn't popular because it's open-source, though. It's popular because it's good, free, and most importantly, extremely easy and intuitive to use.
Usually the latter turns out to be some baroque conglomeration of features piled on features, creating a very top heavy feeling to the language, while the former classification languages all have a purity to them, e.g. smalltalk, lisp, and c.
Well, I mean, as long as we're talking in generalities here, the latter also seem to be geared towards getting jobs done where the former are geared towards elegant problem-solving. Purity is great when you're admiring something, but no one wants to hang out with the righteous virgin when they feel like getting laid. Personally, when I program, I'm not looking for my code to fit some elegant theory. I'm looking for the job to get done as succinctly as possible.
Some would defend the "hack languages" as a means to Rapid Application Development, but Smalltalk has been shown to be the most productive language, and Ruby/Python/Perl all seem to me to have a BASIC odor to them; I'm wondering if people are afraid to learn a new way of speaking?
I would say that Perl stinks more of shell and C than it does BASIC. If you're talking because it has a lot of built-in features, there are plenty of languages that have it. But out of all the languages you've mentioned, I found it ironic you say that because Perl has problem undergone the most intensive language development of any (and the new process probably blows efforts for other languages out of the water). Larry Wall has a great affinity for languages (both spoken and programming), and it shows, because, for English speakers, Perl is designed so that you can write it like you almost would speak it. Now, you might say that that is "hack"-ish, but that shows a lot more care for the process of programming than a language that idealistically sticks to a theoretical truth in favor of making the language easier to use.
And provide a link to a study that shows Smalltalk is the most productive language. I'm not saying I don't believe you, but I personally find the "hack languages" to allow a much more natural flow between my brain and the screen, so I'd be interested in seeing how that conclusion was reached.
So, as you can see, Microsoft can pay lots of money to lobby Washington and hurt itself for a minor victory or pay lots of money to protect itself for the status quo. I think I'll put my money on the latter.
let me see-- it is the single most common OS on web servers when counting per site according to Netcraft (Windows is more common when counting by server). It has made tremendous inroads into that industry.
Netcraft numbers mean nothing. Think of how many people are running a web server on their machine and don't even know it because they clicked the "web server" checkbox during their RedHat install. I have four web sites at home (two boxen) that are on Linux machine. That's simply ridiculous. If you wanted to prove your point about mainstream linux acceptance, check out the number of web servers running Linux found at Fortune 500 companies. That would be mainstream acceptance (oh yeah, there aren't that many).
Note that I have been using Linux for over two years and have seen immense improvement in the end user experience (RH5.1 is the oldest distro I have worked with, RH7.1 and SuSE 7.1 are the most recent but I have also worked with versions of Slackware and Debian). PnP and USB support are both becoming more powerful and user friendly in the system level (not only talking the kernel here).
Great, and while Linux is working on those wonderful features, Microsoft and Apple have already developed operating systems that support those and more, and do it better and more intuitively for the user. While Linux has been improving, what do you think other companies have been doing? Just sitting around on their hands? Microsoft's developing a whole new way to think about operating systems and software, which Linux is starting to copy. Apple refined the UI experience to a ridiculous level, which Linux promptly tried to copy (failing somewhat because they don't have the underlying technology.
Microsoft's current model of selling large ammounts of proprietary software is not sustainable, and Microsoft top execs know it. This is why they need to move to a subscription model. And it is why open source software like Linux will become mainstream in the end user market (it has been common in the server market for some time).
And somehow selling large amounts of free software is? Eventually, people are going to realize that to have a business and earn money and feed the kiddies at home, you're going to have to sell something, be it software or support. Software is a hell of a lot easier to sell because people need it for things to work. People don't need support. In fact, many large companies have their own internal support structure so they don't have to pay other companies for it.
Linux is a mainstream word, not a mainstream operating system. You can wax poetic about the "improvements" that Linux has made, but in the end, the mainstream user (be it individual or corporate) still finds better options in Microsoft and Apple.
Rather than trying to convince the trademark offices that various words shouldn't be trademarked, why can't the various open-source projects come up with more original project names? I'm sick of seeing KOffice and thinking to myself, "Oh, it's just a clone of MS Office" or seeing "GAIM" and thinking to myself, "Oh, it's a GTK version of AIM." KDE seems to be the worst offender in this category.
Not only will you avoid these types of pointless lawsuits, but you'll stop enforcing the MegaCorp's brand strength and start developing some for Linux apps. Pick an original name and quit crying when someone gives you a little legal nudge over your blatant copying of their property.
And that's why the system is GNU/Linux, and not 'Linux', which merely refers to the kernel.
A lot of the code they're listing as "Linux" code isn't GNU code at all. It's released under the BSD license (e.g. Apache). It's released under the Artistic license (e.g. Perl). Calling the system GNU/Linux simply because it has some GNU tools on it is like me calling my Windows box Netscape Windows because I have an old version of Navigator on it or GNU/Windows because I have GNU apps on it.
I think the reason people are more apt to further describe Linux as GNU/Linux is not because it uses GNU apps, but because it is released under the GNU Public License.
What I find amazing is that the Mozilla source code is larger than X (which isn't all that amazing when you look at the size of their respective tarballs). On the one hand, hats off to the Mozilla developers who've managed that monstrosity to almost-1.0. On the other hand, why is a browser bigger than X?! That's insane! That shows there's a lot a feature bloat in Mozilla.
What I failed to find in that article, though, is how much of that "operating system code" is actually beta code. Mozilla and other programs like it can hardly be considered OS code as they haven't even reached any level of maturity.
computers do not have intellegence
No, but human programmers that tell computers how to work do (well, some of them anyway). Generally, when a game player yells out, "XYZ is a cheater!" he's made a conclusion based on certain logic (moves too fast, shoots too accurately, has a nick like "cheatBot", climbs walls backwards, etc.). You can certainly program the same logic into a game server.
Anything that has rules someone will try to cheat at. Everyone dies, right? Well, that doesn't stop people from trying to cheat death. Why? Rules inherently suck. They were made to be broken. A Christian man and woman get in a relationship. God says don't cheat. What do they do? You guessed it. They cheat.
So how do real-life games take care of this scenario? Well, let's take basketball as an example. You have two basic ways of handling cheating in basketball. At the organized level (ie. NBA), you have referees. They have the rulebook, and when someone cheats, they call a foul. In an online game, this would be akin to a server admin maintaining the rules. It would be even better if it was automated (ie. the game could identify cheaters). Hell, human players can detect cheaters, so why not computers? At the unorganized level (ie. street ball), you have mob rule. Jim travels, so Bob calls a foul. Jim says, "No way, dood." Bob's buddies nod their heads. What happens if Jim refuses to agree? He's either out of the game or beat up (or both). What happens if Bob keeps calling wussy fouls? Bob's either out of the game or beat up. In an online server, this would be akin to sort of moderation system. Players could identify another player as a cheater. If this person gets identified enough, he's kicked off. If some jackass starts going around fingering everyone as a cheater (or the cheater himself starts fingering everyone), he gets knocked off. Mob rule is very effective.
The thing is that game developers are never going to be able to stop people from creating cheats. The effective way to handle cheating is the same way any other real-life game handles cheating. You out the cheater. Unfortunately, game developers haven't developed effective ways to out cheaters, and so, you have a Wild West scenario in online gaming communities. If developers would stop fighting the phenomenon and start understanding it, they might be able to work in more effective coutermeasures.
To further muddy matters, the movie adds a sub-plot involving Doolittle's Raiders, the U.S. Army Air unit that first bombed Tokyo. That story is riveting; the pilots were on a virtual suicide run, since the bombers they flew couldn't carry enough fuel to return to safe waters, forcing them to ditch over China. But the saga feels like an afterthought in this movie, a strained vehicle for keeping our hunky fly-boys in the plot beyond all reason. The battle at Midway was really the Navy's payback for Pearl Harbor, and the turning point in the Pacific conflict.
Actually, I'm glad they put this into the movie. A lot of people forget this raid and how incredibly important it was to us winning the war. The raid was not meant for any revenge or tactical advantage. It was flown for one purpose only, and that was to scare the Japanese. At the time, the Japanese had this idea that they were immune from American attack, that their Far East island position made them invincible, since we couldn't fly all the way across the Pacific to get them (and they pretty much had a stranglehold on the Far East otherwise). When Doolittle's fliers bombed Tokyo, it showed the Japanese that we meant business, forcing them to consider a two-front war and scaring the Japanese into a more defensive posture with regards to the Pacific. Indeed, the Japanese overeagerness to push the Americans out of the war and into defeat that led to the Battle at Midway was prompted in large part because the Japanese were worried that if they didn't strike quickly, they wouldn't be able to stop a true threat in the American Navy.
While history remembers Pearl Harbor as the entry point of American into the war, most gloss over the immediate events after that and wait until late 1942/early 1943 to talk about active and positive American military involvement. The truth is that the American military was already prepared for war, and Doolittle's raid showed it.
Well, it looks like Slashdot corrected their error, which is nice to see. Normally, though, the journalistic standard is to issue a correction highlighting the mistake and apologizing, not just fixing. Normally, the editors do that (with an Update: section or something), but now, those of us who noticed it and pointed it out just look like jackasses.
Oh well.
The industry has been gradually moving toward a 64-bit architecture [From 32 Bits], which multiplies the amount of data the processor can access by four". Rock on CNN!
Normally, I don't point out the journalistic errors of Slashdot, but I can't help myself here. At least CNN knows how to spell Transmeta without the D.
He who lives in glass houses should not throw stones, Taco.
I can't understand why this product isn't tied into their Worldnet service. What even bothers me more is the fact that their screenshot has a little AOL.com button down on the bottom buttonbar. What are the head-honchos thinking?
Think about it. Sell your Worldnet service for $9.95 month or whatever the going rate is for generic dialup Internet service and give a special membership card with it. If you swipe this card in any AT&T Pay Phone 2000-i (aren't they a year late?) and you've immediately got access to Worldnet service, probably for a reduced rate or even for free. You've got your pay phones everywhere, so it's like free advertising. You have the opportunity to expand your userbase immensely, and maybe further take on the corporate megamonster AOL.
I think AT&T's missing a golden opportunity to turn a public service into a cash cow.
I know this will probably get modded down to where no one will see it, but I don't see why this guy doesn't deserve a patent. Yes, it's a split keyboard, but one of the split parts actually IS the mouse, a really bright (IMHO) idea that deserves to be rewarded. More importantly, this isn't a software patent, but an actual physical invention that has to be built and manufactured, and therefore, an exclusive right to distribute and/or license its design seems appropriate.
Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of patents these days are pretty bad, but this thing actually seems fairly inventive and worthy of the rights.
Actually, AFAIC, Futurama is already better than The Simpsons (note, not The Simpsons in their prime, just the show as it stands now). It makes sense, though. Groening, et al, took the good writers off of The Simpsons and put them on Futurama so that it would have the benefit of well-written episodes from the beginning to bring in a large supportive audience. Futurama is just plain funnier. The gags are faster, the humor is darker, the comraderie is more bitter, and the episodes all around are more cohesive. The use of special guests is consistently flaunted exceptionally well through the "heads in a jar" theme, which means you don't have to fight to believe Drew Barrymore as Krusty's suddenly received daughter or some such nonsense. Believing that Lucy Liu's head survived because of futuristic technology is much easier to digest. The recent episode with the Harlem Globetrotters and the time shifts was downright the fastest, most hilarious, continuously played-out gag I've ever seen.
...
What do The Simpsons have this season? I lot of completely inane, very loosely organized episodes without any constant thread that made the earlier episodes such a joy to watch. Now, it's like watch 4 five-minute skits. I'm glad the writers are living on in Futurama with fresh faces and fresh adventures (that's much easier to do in a completely fresh setting, of course), but it kind of hurts to see The Simpsons sort of degrade like an old NFL pro who won't retire.
Bite My Shiny Metal
Never the less, cheating in any form in a multiplayer game is not only rude and unfair, but you _will_ be found out, and when that happens, you are immediatly discredited. Just try to use a cheat patch or auto-aiming script for more than one round before someone yells "[your name here] is a BOT!!!". Then, hopefully someone in the room has administrative privlidges, and can ban the cheater. Or there could be a voting system in place to kick the cheater (like there is in CS). This is really the only way to stop cheating. It is impossible to prevent, but easy to stop with the right methods.
I think you're misunderstanding the motives of people who would use these hacks in online games. It's not about gaining prestige with better players by playing like them. Your last line, 'Cheaters:Online Games::Script Kiddies:Hackers', is closer to the truth. They're after just annoying and pissing people off. Nothing tweaks a cheater's knob more than seeing some really good player go down, and then scream bloody murder that someone's cheating or someong's a bot. It's funny, because the cheater's really destroying their ego. When a cheater gets banned, he just moves to another server and starts over, laughing when he magically beats the best and makes them cry. Given all the gaming servers out there, it would take a while to run through them all, and by the time you do, at least three or four new games are out ready to be tackled.
Script kiddies and cheaters are both annoying plagues. The best way to deal with them is not to have reputable companies give out tools with which they can easily cause problems, but to actively work to prevent them from causing problems in the first place. Voting and admin bans are simply measures to stop problems after they've annoyed people (akin to locking down a box after you've let a script kiddie do some damage).
In this story, Slashdot posted the front page to the Huntsville Times from the day that Yuri Gagarin was launched into space. In it, you can clearly see the headline "Reds Deny Spacemen Have Died" (lower center of page). It has long been thought that the Soviets lost some astronauts during their initial test flights. The American media has yet to get their hands on any rock-hard evidence, though.
I work for a regional ISP. Basically, the real problem with DSL is that the phone companies make it extremely difficult to sign up new customers. For our customers, they basically have to go through Bell to get their DSL line, telling them that they want service with us. When they get DSL installed, then we turn up our end. It used to be that they could call us and we'd setup everything (including handling work with the telco), but Bell did everything they could to make it difficult for us to do any work with them. Hence, we have the current situation. Along the way, when the customer calls, the phone company lets them know about special deals that their Internet provider has on getting DSL, and how much easier it is to sign up with them instead. You can get a free DSL modem and a discount on your service if you sign up through them. It smells very much like an abuse of a monopoly to me, but it's hard to put any pressure on them when they have the politicians in the palms of their money-filled hands.
Make no bones about it, the Telcos are not going to give up their hold on DSL without a fight.
On our side, we've basically shifted our focus. We still provide the best dialup service you can get, but we're targeting businesses now for Internet service. Most businesses need T1s, and with contracts, we don't have the same volatility. Unfortunately, most ISPs seem stuck on the on the dialup model, which was never a real big revenue generator anyway, what with AOL and the increase in cable modem usage.
Mom-n-pop ISPs are going to go under, unless Mom and Dad are smart business people, and realize that they need to get off the sinking ship that is dial-up and DSL and move onto more stable revenue generators (such as business broadband and outsourced services). Of course, it sucks for the residential consumer, because what's left are giant companies that can afford the low prices that consumers are demanding through mass equipment purchases and rollouts. Those companies also have stronger revenue streams coming in from other subsidiaries, to make up for any short-term losses generated by an almost saturated dial-up market.
Like Traffic, this movie takes a bleak view of the government's desperate and ineffective war on drugs.
No it doesn't. It doesn't comment on the government's efforts at all. The only time the government is even portrayed is when Jung himself gets caught and put under the punishment of the law.
Columbian
When you're referring to the country of Colombia, the descriptive is 'Colombian'. I hope you don't anger too many patriotic cartels.
This movie is first and foremost a biography. It's not necessarily a commentary on the drug culture. It's not commentary on government policy. It's a biography of one man's life showing the consequences of certain decisions, not the least of which is total alienation from everything he loved. The characters are very well-portrayed (despite what Katz says, the Cruz/Depp on-screen relationship is perfect, because it accurately mirrors the Jung/Mirta relationship) and the movie moves along at a snappy enough pace that you're not left idling on any one scene.
What I didn't really like about the movie is that it never encouraged any sort of feeling about the protagonist. The movie tries at points to make you feel sorry for Jung or angry at Jung or understanding, but it never really comes through, because when he's a victim, it's really his own fault, and when he's not the taking advantage of various oppurtunities, you just see them as dumb but acceptable decisions. At the end, when I'm supposed to feel somewhat bad for this man who's lost literally everything, I don't, because everything wasn't taken away; he gave it all away. I end up feeling worse for the father than for anyone else, simply because he's the only one who constantly gets the shaft (by no fault of his own).
In all, Blow is a worthwhile movie to see, but it's not a commentary on drugs like Traffic. Depp's not going to win any Oscars for his portrayal of Jung, even though it's a relatively good one, simply because the audience really isn't all that moved. Everyone who walked out of the theatre with me basically said, "Eh, it was a good film, but I wasn't really affected by it."
YMMV.
This question baits Microsoft with a presupposition that isn't even true. Take a look at the survey itself, and you'll see that while Apache numbers continue to outgrow MS numbers, MS actually holds a dominant position on SSL sites within the US. Now, given that a good percentage of the total web traffic is concentrated in the US and that most companies worth a damn have SSL sites, and you'll see that MS isn't hurting as bad as just a simple look at the first graph might tell you.
The thing none of those graphs show you is a relationship between hit rates and server usage. I'd be willing to bet that a good 60% (probably more) of those Apache servers are just people like me who run Apache at home for a small personal web server. I work for a managed hosting company, and more people request IIS than do Apache, although we generally use Apache more because we feel it's better (that's part of sales, though).
IIS is not struggling. It's gaining ground and acceptance in the corporate world, and when you pit a Wintel enterprise-class web solution against a Unix-based enterprise-class web solution (note I said "enterprise-class" which I don't feel Linux can really handle yet), they're actually rather competitive.
I'd rather see non-BS questions coming from the Slashdot community rather than questions that twist and manipulate facts to put the interviewee in a bad position before he even answers.
Don't forget that something like 80-90% of world's population lives on less that 1 USD/day - that's 30 USD/mo.
I would venture to say that the 80-90% of the world's population that lives on less than 1 USD/day are not on the Internet, much less needing to run their own secure sites. Ten dollars/month equates out to roughly 33 US cents/day. If you're running a business on the Internet that can't get at least that much money/day for operating costs, I don't think the SSL certificate is going to be the issue about whether you're successful or not.
Verisign bought Thawte sometime back (I believe it was May or June of last year). They're essentially the same company. I think by buying a Verisign cert over a Thawte cert, you're essentially getting a better support structure, although honestly, putting in a cert is brain-dead simple and shouldn't require much in the way of support (I do it every once in a while).
But take a look at the costs again. It's $125/yr. for a Thawte certs (the drawback to a Thawte cert is that it doesn't work in older versions of Netscape and IE which make up less than 1% of browser usage). That's roughtly $10/mo. for a secure site which is not at all expensive. It's really not that prohibitive to setup an SSL site. Prior to the release of the RSA patent into the public domain, that was your primary cost (passed on through purchases of software like Stronghold), and that cost is now basically gone.
If I was a small business, I would gladly pay only $10/mo. for secure server capabilities.
The thing a lot of people don't know about art is how incredibly rooted in science and natural understanding it was (I say was, because the last half of the 20th century has moved away from this). Artists grew up keenly studying nature to try to understand natural aesthetics, and developed a set of unwritten standards that are used in virtually all masterpiece paintings. While we may associate this binding of art and science only with Renaissance artists, the fact is it existed throughout art history, and art has always been about representing the world according to natural laws.
With that said, though, this painting probably wasn't painted on a specific date. It may represent a specific date, but paintings took months and months to prepare. For that one painting, van Gogh probably did no less than nine study paintings, each refining the position of every line, every stroke, and yes, the location of Venus. van Gogh could probably paint any sky he wanted to at any time he wanted to, and he would've known exactly where everything should be.
It's kind of sad, actually, that such knowledge (and training) has to be rediscovered, but such are the ways of history.
Anyone see any errors in this thinking?
Yes. It's true that as a consequence of its text-based nature, communication via XML is decidedly more bandwidth-intensive than any binary counterpart. The problem, though, lies in translation of that binary format two and from different machines, architectures, languages, and implementations.
I currently do quite a bit of work using SOAP, which is similar to XML-RPC, but a little less well-developed. It's a no-brainer. If I'm using Java, Perl, C, C++ or even Python, it's relatively easy to make calls between these different languages. I don't have to worry about the endianess of the data I'm working with. I don't have to worry about learning some new data encoding scheme (XML is very well-defined, and very ubiquitous; almost every language has a translator). Communicating between a language like Perl, which has no typing, and Java, which has more strict typing is a no brainer, because the data structures are defined by a well-documented, human readable schema, and when I look at the data I'm sending, I can see the raw information.
Bandwidth concerns might have been paramount two years ago, but the world in which XML-RPC and SOAP are being used has already shifted to broadband. Now, human clarity and complete interoperability, as well as the ease of use of porting XML-RPC (or SOAP) constructs to another language (since it's just XML text) make it a much more efficient model in terms of programmer time.
Yes, from a strictly bandwidth concern, CORBA or DCOM beat XML hands down, but when you remove that consideration, it's not that big a deal. Couple it with existing protocols (I've seen SOAP implementations via HTTP, FTP, and even SMTP), and the opportunity to grow via existing infrastructure and well-known technologies, and you just have an easier (and thus, I would argue, more open) model to work with.
Along came those crappy Zip-drives with 100 MB and they nearly made it 'cause they were relatively cheap and became almost ubiquitious. Iomega was smart and went for broad distribution over profits trying to become a standard but eventually their quality-control problems, competition, and internal problems overwhelmed them. Now their Zip drives have been passed by. They've tried variations - 200 MB Zips and 40 MB "Clicks" but the train has left the station.
I don't know where you've been, but I'd have to say that ZIP drives have been a phenomenal success. I've definitely seen more ZIP drives than SuperDisk drives. Mac and Dell and Gateway all offer them, and if you go to college these days, you seriously can't get by without a ZIP drive. At my school, all of them had one, and that was in 1997.
I'd say that ZIP drives made it all right.