I wouldn't say that AJAX encourages poor development.
However, AJAX itself is abysmal. It's "graunching" a web browser and server to do something it fundamentally wasn't designed to do. Drawing a GUI by writing HTML fragments on a browser window? With a protocol which is stateless, designed for serving documents? Ye gods! Java applets are a MUCH better way to get AJAX-like things done, yet we've abandoned that and decided to go with this... hack.
Before you think how these warning labels - such as "Do not use iron on clothes you are wearing", a couple of years ago, a Slashdotter admitted to have burned himself while ironing the shirt he was wearing.
My favorite warning label is on a set of fairy lights: "For indoor or outdoor use only".
I use vi (actually, vim) all the time. Many people do. It is a *good* well featured editor which doesn't take up too much space. It runs on all the operating systems I use every day - OpenBSD, Linux, Macintosh and Windows. If I have a GUI, I use the GUI version. If I don't, I use the terminal version. It is consistent across all those four operating systems I mention regardless of whether I'm using it via the GUI or over an ssh terminal session. That consistency is worth _a lot_. It doesn't need the mouse either which makes it much faster to use. Vi is just as relevant today as it was back when it was written, possibly more so because of its consistency across systems.
I don't have an iPod so I can't comment on that, but I just plug my digital camera into my Fedora Core workstation and it appears. It couldn't be simpler. Visitors who've shown up with cameras - I plug it in, and there it is. I've found cameras to be utterly trouble free.
Even on newer laptops, I just put the Fedora Core disks in and it just works.
Note that if you install Windows XP on a new laptop, you have exactly the same problems - except not even the onboard ethernet NIC is supported, so you have trouble even downloading drivers to support your wireless, video, sound and chipset.
Most people are insulated from installing Windows because it comes pre-installed. XP is generally *harder* to install from scratch and get working than a good Linux distro. I've never had to manually fiddle with *any* configuration for Fedora Core since the Livna repository provided prebuilt nvidia packages.
We should deprecate all the 1000-based metric suffixes dammit. Life would be so much easier if we all counted in hexdecimal - I was writing an asm routine for an 8 bit embedded machine to convert decimal to a short the other day, and if we only counted in hex, the routine would have been about quarter of the instructions that it came to!
The same technology (which fundamentally is increasing the density of the data on the platters) can be used for making physically smaller, less power consuming drives. For example, a Microdrive sized disk with the capacity of current drives in desktop systems. This could go into a device like a HD camcorder, and have space for plenty of full quality uncompressed video.
The difficulty of desktop Linux is really a myth these days. I recently set up Fedora Core 6 on a laptop. Setting up FC6 as a desktop is now trivially easy. It roughly consisted of inserting a CD-ROM, booting it, clicking OK and Next a few times then feeding it disks until it finished.
Installing extra software was equally trivial. There is a GUI to start off the Applications menu for installing more software. It downloads and installs the software all as one step. No need to download it, run a separate installer or scroll through pages of impeneterable EULA.
To add extra applications to this GUI application installer - mainly multimedia applications - all it required was clicking on a link on Livna's web page to add the Livna repository. (Like Mac OS X, you're asked for the administrative password on application install).
Installing Fedora Core and extra applications and extra application repositories is actaully easier than doing the same on Windows, and about the equivalent difficulty of doing the same on Mac OS X.
For third-party applications, there is Autopackage: http://autopackage.org/ - which provides a distro-independent method of installing applications. It's reminiscent of things like the Mac OS X application installer (for apps you can't simply drag to the Applications folder) or the InstallShield types of installers for Windows. Except unlike InstallShield installers, it has the ability to resolve and fetch dependencies (ever tried to install Microsoft BizTalk? Complex and unweildy because you must manually install several dependencies, each with their own dependencies. Autopackage does away with this dependency hell).
That's all very well, but it severely limits the depth of the nesting of your calls and limits the flexibility of the CPU (pretty much rules out recursion, and puts an arbitrary limit on the complexity of your programs unless you use special programming techniques to avoid the use of function calls from other function calls).
No it wouldn't. Microsoft also made NT for the Alpha back in the day. The trouble is - all that closed source software that won't get recompiled for the new arch any time soon means it can never gain traction. While you could buy Windows NT for Alpha, and run it quite happily, the machine was effectively a doorstop for most people because the only thing that ran on it was NT itself. No one bought Alphas to run NT on, because no closed source software ran on it. None of the closed source vendors were willing to make Alpha versions of their software, because no one was buying the hardware to run Alpha NT. Catch 22.
I was under the impression that the amd64 instruction set added a number of general purpose registers and instructions - so in the 64-bit versions of x86 (both AMD and now Intel) finally you could avoid this.
Doesn't x86 asm have an equivalent to things like the Z80's EX DE,HL instruction where you can exchange register contents without needing to go to memory, for those instructions hardwired to a particular register?
I could be wrong - but I thought these days, ARM massively outsold x86 because it's in so many embedded devices - and dozens of these are sold for each PC sold. (Of course, ARM is optimized for low electric power, where vast computing power is not needed).
Whether the robot can be easily repaired or not, surely to a sentient robot that can feel something that may be defined as 'pain', deliberately causing damage to the robot just for kicks would count as cruelty?
After all, inflicting minor electric shocks on a person may not do any damage that can't be repaired by the body itself (or do any damage at all). But to do so deliberately would still be cruel. To do so deliberately to a dog would also be cruel. So why not to a sentient machine which can 'feel pain'?
Regardless, they emit enough light to see where you're going. The dim start-up is actually a feature in bathrooms - when you get up in the middle of the night and need to use the bathroom, the light doesn't half blind you when you turn it on against your dark-adapted vision.
LEDs are only more efficient if you want to live in a house illuminated by either red, green or yellow light - but if you're happy with yellow light, then use low pressure sodium - it's still the most efficient lighting that exists. If you want white LEDs, they still haven't quite got the efficiency of CF - so at least for the time being, CF is the way to go for normal lighting. No doubt in a few years time, white LEDs will be able to beat CF for efficiency.
This makes sense if everybody else involved with the production of the music worked for free. This is correct in some instances (e.g. self-produced music where everybody works on a volunteer basis) but in most cases, it is not.
No - it makes sense to pay the artist directly if you pirate their music. While it is true that the production cost something, the ARTIST paid for this. Record companies don't go 'Hey, here's a recording studio, have at it' - no, what they do is give the artist a loan, and charge back the costs of *everything* directly to the artists. So the artist does in fact pay for all of their production anyway - so it makes complete sense to pay the artist directly. They can use part of the payment you sent to them to help pay off their debt to the record company.
Some of it can come down to the lack of teaching things like assembly language in programming courses. Everyone says 'why bother' about asm. However, you only have to do some elementary asm programming in even just a simple 8 bit architecture to know at a visceral level WHY buffer overflows are bad things - because then you get to see your unchecked buffer write all over the call return address in the debugger. You realise how things tend to get arranged in memory, and why these things happen.
People who haven't done asm generally have heard the term 'buffer overflow' but don't really understand why it's so dangerous because they've never watched the return address of their function call get replaced by something else. It's likely that they don't even understand that function call return addresses are not something that's held in a special internal CPU memory [0], and is just in normal RAM along with all their code and data. If they don't understand this it's unlikely they will have a gut understanding of what happens when their stack gets smashed.
[0] well, unless it's a PIC microcontroller with a separate stack memory.
Re:Vista already doing some of this
on
DieHard, the Software
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OpenBSD prevents double frees and illegal frees and heap corruption too, and has been doing so for at least a couple of years. The code is BSD licensed too, so you can use it in closed source products like Windows. OpenBSD also has had something called W^X (Write XOR execute) for several years now, even for CPU architectures that don't support making executable pages read-only.
I'm British, but spent 7 years in the US before eventually moving back.
If 'American culture' brings images of McDonalds etc. then no offence meant - but it just shows that you're ignorant. The United States has a very rich culture indeed. If you've never been outside the tourist spots in the US, I can quite understand how that ignorance comes about. There's a lot more to the US than Hollywood and McDonald's. A *lot* more. US culture is every bit as rich as European culture.
It was a tiny network - four machines! It would be a real WTF if he went for expensive 'server' hardware for such a tiny installation. This is more akin to a home network than some large enterprisey setup, and putting in so-called 'server' hardware for such a small network would be wasting money.
It was for a network of *four* machines. If all you want to do is share files between 4 desktops and a printer, there's nothing wrong with using XP as a fileserver.
The Daily Mail is probably one of the most ignorant newspapers published in Britain, read by reactionary permanently offended right wing little Englanders (the audience to which it panders). Unfortunately, if the report's only in the Daily Mail, it's almost certainly wrong in every important detail. The Mail is one of the least credible papers in Britain.
You don't need LED lighting - compact flourescents already exist (and are cheap) and have been around for over a decade. Flourescent is more efficient than semiconductor lighting.
The big problem in North America is the sheer number of things like apartments with air conditioning -- but NO timer. The typical person in the summer goes to work, and leaves the AC on when no one's at home. This wastes tremendous amounts of power. But people just forget to turn it off when they go. An easy to use timer would fix this problem.
I always tried to remember to turn off my AC. When I left the apartment, the power company mistakenly sent me a bill some time after I left - and I noticed the next person to live in the apartment was using *three times* the electricity that I did - presumably because they left the AC on all day (The power company, First Choice power, previously Texas-New Mexico Power put nice little graphs on the bill so it was really obvious).
I doubt it (because you'd have to turn 240vac to DC, then use an inverter to make 120VAC/60Hz to do that - and the semiconductors would be big heat producing monsters to control a few hundred watts.
I moved from the US to the Isle of Man and have a large transformer to run the US stuff that won't run on 240 volts (most stuff will - computer monitors and computers have switch mode power supplies that will take any voltage from about 90v to 250v, the regulation on the SMPS taking care of the output voltage regardless of input voltage). None of it cares about the line frequency.
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I wouldn't say that AJAX encourages poor development.
... hack.
However, AJAX itself is abysmal. It's "graunching" a web browser and server to do something it fundamentally wasn't designed to do. Drawing a GUI by writing HTML fragments on a browser window? With a protocol which is stateless, designed for serving documents? Ye gods! Java applets are a MUCH better way to get AJAX-like things done, yet we've abandoned that and decided to go with this
Before you think how these warning labels - such as "Do not use iron on clothes you are wearing", a couple of years ago, a Slashdotter admitted to have burned himself while ironing the shirt he was wearing.
My favorite warning label is on a set of fairy lights: "For indoor or outdoor use only".
I use vi (actually, vim) all the time. Many people do. It is a *good* well featured editor which doesn't take up too much space. It runs on all the operating systems I use every day - OpenBSD, Linux, Macintosh and Windows. If I have a GUI, I use the GUI version. If I don't, I use the terminal version. It is consistent across all those four operating systems I mention regardless of whether I'm using it via the GUI or over an ssh terminal session. That consistency is worth _a lot_. It doesn't need the mouse either which makes it much faster to use. Vi is just as relevant today as it was back when it was written, possibly more so because of its consistency across systems.
I don't have an iPod so I can't comment on that, but I just plug my digital camera into my Fedora Core workstation and it appears. It couldn't be simpler. Visitors who've shown up with cameras - I plug it in, and there it is. I've found cameras to be utterly trouble free.
Even on newer laptops, I just put the Fedora Core disks in and it just works.
Note that if you install Windows XP on a new laptop, you have exactly the same problems - except not even the onboard ethernet NIC is supported, so you have trouble even downloading drivers to support your wireless, video, sound and chipset.
Most people are insulated from installing Windows because it comes pre-installed. XP is generally *harder* to install from scratch and get working than a good Linux distro. I've never had to manually fiddle with *any* configuration for Fedora Core since the Livna repository provided prebuilt nvidia packages.
We should deprecate all the 1000-based metric suffixes dammit. Life would be so much easier if we all counted in hexdecimal - I was writing an asm routine for an 8 bit embedded machine to convert decimal to a short the other day, and if we only counted in hex, the routine would have been about quarter of the instructions that it came to!
The same technology (which fundamentally is increasing the density of the data on the platters) can be used for making physically smaller, less power consuming drives. For example, a Microdrive sized disk with the capacity of current drives in desktop systems. This could go into a device like a HD camcorder, and have space for plenty of full quality uncompressed video.
The difficulty of desktop Linux is really a myth these days. I recently set up Fedora Core 6 on a laptop. Setting up FC6 as a desktop is now trivially easy. It roughly consisted of inserting a CD-ROM, booting it, clicking OK and Next a few times then feeding it disks until it finished.
Installing extra software was equally trivial. There is a GUI to start off the Applications menu for installing more software. It downloads and installs the software all as one step. No need to download it, run a separate installer or scroll through pages of impeneterable EULA.
To add extra applications to this GUI application installer - mainly multimedia applications - all it required was clicking on a link on Livna's web page to add the Livna repository. (Like Mac OS X, you're asked for the administrative password on application install).
Installing Fedora Core and extra applications and extra application repositories is actaully easier than doing the same on Windows, and about the equivalent difficulty of doing the same on Mac OS X.
For third-party applications, there is Autopackage: http://autopackage.org/ - which provides a distro-independent method of installing applications. It's reminiscent of things like the Mac OS X application installer (for apps you can't simply drag to the Applications folder) or the InstallShield types of installers for Windows. Except unlike InstallShield installers, it has the ability to resolve and fetch dependencies (ever tried to install Microsoft BizTalk? Complex and unweildy because you must manually install several dependencies, each with their own dependencies. Autopackage does away with this dependency hell).
That's all very well, but it severely limits the depth of the nesting of your calls and limits the flexibility of the CPU (pretty much rules out recursion, and puts an arbitrary limit on the complexity of your programs unless you use special programming techniques to avoid the use of function calls from other function calls).
No it wouldn't. Microsoft also made NT for the Alpha back in the day. The trouble is - all that closed source software that won't get recompiled for the new arch any time soon means it can never gain traction. While you could buy Windows NT for Alpha, and run it quite happily, the machine was effectively a doorstop for most people because the only thing that ran on it was NT itself. No one bought Alphas to run NT on, because no closed source software ran on it. None of the closed source vendors were willing to make Alpha versions of their software, because no one was buying the hardware to run Alpha NT. Catch 22.
I was under the impression that the amd64 instruction set added a number of general purpose registers and instructions - so in the 64-bit versions of x86 (both AMD and now Intel) finally you could avoid this.
Doesn't x86 asm have an equivalent to things like the Z80's EX DE,HL instruction where you can exchange register contents without needing to go to memory, for those instructions hardwired to a particular register?
I could be wrong - but I thought these days, ARM massively outsold x86 because it's in so many embedded devices - and dozens of these are sold for each PC sold. (Of course, ARM is optimized for low electric power, where vast computing power is not needed).
Whether the robot can be easily repaired or not, surely to a sentient robot that can feel something that may be defined as 'pain', deliberately causing damage to the robot just for kicks would count as cruelty?
After all, inflicting minor electric shocks on a person may not do any damage that can't be repaired by the body itself (or do any damage at all). But to do so deliberately would still be cruel. To do so deliberately to a dog would also be cruel. So why not to a sentient machine which can 'feel pain'?
Regardless, they emit enough light to see where you're going. The dim start-up is actually a feature in bathrooms - when you get up in the middle of the night and need to use the bathroom, the light doesn't half blind you when you turn it on against your dark-adapted vision.
LEDs are only more efficient if you want to live in a house illuminated by either red, green or yellow light - but if you're happy with yellow light, then use low pressure sodium - it's still the most efficient lighting that exists. If you want white LEDs, they still haven't quite got the efficiency of CF - so at least for the time being, CF is the way to go for normal lighting. No doubt in a few years time, white LEDs will be able to beat CF for efficiency.
No - it makes sense to pay the artist directly if you pirate their music. While it is true that the production cost something, the ARTIST paid for this. Record companies don't go 'Hey, here's a recording studio, have at it' - no, what they do is give the artist a loan, and charge back the costs of *everything* directly to the artists. So the artist does in fact pay for all of their production anyway - so it makes complete sense to pay the artist directly. They can use part of the payment you sent to them to help pay off their debt to the record company.
Some of it can come down to the lack of teaching things like assembly language in programming courses. Everyone says 'why bother' about asm. However, you only have to do some elementary asm programming in even just a simple 8 bit architecture to know at a visceral level WHY buffer overflows are bad things - because then you get to see your unchecked buffer write all over the call return address in the debugger. You realise how things tend to get arranged in memory, and why these things happen.
People who haven't done asm generally have heard the term 'buffer overflow' but don't really understand why it's so dangerous because they've never watched the return address of their function call get replaced by something else. It's likely that they don't even understand that function call return addresses are not something that's held in a special internal CPU memory [0], and is just in normal RAM along with all their code and data. If they don't understand this it's unlikely they will have a gut understanding of what happens when their stack gets smashed.
[0] well, unless it's a PIC microcontroller with a separate stack memory.
OpenBSD prevents double frees and illegal frees and heap corruption too, and has been doing so for at least a couple of years. The code is BSD licensed too, so you can use it in closed source products like Windows. OpenBSD also has had something called W^X (Write XOR execute) for several years now, even for CPU architectures that don't support making executable pages read-only.
I'm British, but spent 7 years in the US before eventually moving back.
If 'American culture' brings images of McDonalds etc. then no offence meant - but it just shows that you're ignorant. The United States has a very rich culture indeed. If you've never been outside the tourist spots in the US, I can quite understand how that ignorance comes about. There's a lot more to the US than Hollywood and McDonald's. A *lot* more. US culture is every bit as rich as European culture.
It was a tiny network - four machines! It would be a real WTF if he went for expensive 'server' hardware for such a tiny installation. This is more akin to a home network than some large enterprisey setup, and putting in so-called 'server' hardware for such a small network would be wasting money.
It was for a network of *four* machines. If all you want to do is share files between 4 desktops and a printer, there's nothing wrong with using XP as a fileserver.
The Daily Mail is probably one of the most ignorant newspapers published in Britain, read by reactionary permanently offended right wing little Englanders (the audience to which it panders). Unfortunately, if the report's only in the Daily Mail, it's almost certainly wrong in every important detail. The Mail is one of the least credible papers in Britain.
You don't need LED lighting - compact flourescents already exist (and are cheap) and have been around for over a decade. Flourescent is more efficient than semiconductor lighting.
The big problem in North America is the sheer number of things like apartments with air conditioning -- but NO timer. The typical person in the summer goes to work, and leaves the AC on when no one's at home. This wastes tremendous amounts of power. But people just forget to turn it off when they go. An easy to use timer would fix this problem.
I always tried to remember to turn off my AC. When I left the apartment, the power company mistakenly sent me a bill some time after I left - and I noticed the next person to live in the apartment was using *three times* the electricity that I did - presumably because they left the AC on all day (The power company, First Choice power, previously Texas-New Mexico Power put nice little graphs on the bill so it was really obvious).
I doubt it (because you'd have to turn 240vac to DC, then use an inverter to make 120VAC/60Hz to do that - and the semiconductors would be big heat producing monsters to control a few hundred watts.
I moved from the US to the Isle of Man and have a large transformer to run the US stuff that won't run on 240 volts (most stuff will - computer monitors and computers have switch mode power supplies that will take any voltage from about 90v to 250v, the regulation on the SMPS taking care of the output voltage regardless of input voltage). None of it cares about the line frequency.