I love Quebec, but when it comes to politics, I hang my head. For example, you cannot even put up a poster in english. The stop signs say "arret", french for stop. In France, they say "stop".
I can only imagine what the politics would be like in a school board...
Why does it surprise so many people that road signs are not in english in non-english speaking parts of the globe? Although "Stop" is pretty well understood the world over, I don't see how it can be construed as shameful to use the appropriate locale.
Cities could put meters everywhere but they only do it in commercial areas. It is time limited precisely because it is designed to cater to shoppers. If we allow every commerce to remove their storefront meters, they'll soon complain that their shoppers are going elsewhere because they can't park.
Downtown commerce depends on the availability of this parking space because a lot of rich people want to drive everywhere. It might not be environmentally ideal but it is commercially imperative that we accommodate them.
Downtown traffic and parking issues are better managed through supply-demand. Too much demand? Up goes the price. Congestion pricing and higher meter rates are the solution, not enlargement of roads by removal of side-street parking.
Zonk's point is not that iTunes is his only alternative but rather that it is the only convenient one. I, for one, am not willing to wait several months for the show to be released on DVD nor I am willing or able to guarantee that I will be home or free at the moment Heroes airs.
TV is free yet a lot of people spend valuable dollars on extra bandwidth, go through the trouble downloading torrents and watch TV in their uncomfortable chair. Why? Because despite all of that they find it more convenient than traditionnal TV.
Stronger DRM won't stop illegal TV show downloads (in fact, it has nothing to do with it). Affordable convenient legal downloads will.
P.S. A DVR might fit the bill but, depending on your viewing habit, it can be a whole lot more expensive than a season pass on iTunes.
Google's worry is not that Verizon will offer better services than them, just that Verizon will cut your access to Google altogether so that you will have no other choice but to use their "gimmicky" stuff.
The terms they came up with were designed to mitigate that risk. I suspect that their promise to bid several bllions was just to get everybody's attention.
That's where the fun is: They "win" without even paying a cent. They succeeded in adding the openness term to the auction. Now, they just need to place *ONE* minimal amount bid and look at the other players rip each other's throat to block them access to the airwaves. But, by placing the bet, they ensure that the openness clause will take effect
First, Google didn't get from the FCC what they really wanted: unfettered Internet access for the users of that Spectrum (see condition 3 of their open letter which is designed to ensure that if the telcos provide partial or restricted access to the Internet, some other company will be allowed to redress the situation). The other conditions, I suspect, were hedges to mitigate loophole exploitation by the winner of the auction.
Second, Google does not need to bet one cent on this auction for the the FCC to impose the "open application" and "open devices" terms. The FCC already agreed to impose these terms on the auction whether Google bids or not. Google only agreed to bet the indicated sum if ALL four terms were imposed.
Third, IMHO the two terms the FCC agreed to are worthless by themselves. If the operator of a network decides what that network has access to, why would it matter what device or application one is allowed to use. These devices and applications are only as powerful as the network services they are able access.
Google (and the american public) got screwed by the FCC pure and simple.
In the end, they'll just have to put out a device on the standard.
Nope. Whatever device Google comes up with, the network operator has no obligation to provide that device or application any access to anything on the Internet or any other network.
Now, they definitely could use that spectrum to actually create a last mile connection network. As they are rumored to already own a bunch of dark fiber, they would have a top to bottom network infrastructure. Enough to scare the telcos. Maybe Google will enter that market to ensure a free (as in unrestricted) connection to their customers. Maybe they'll just stick to online service and enter devices on a free network. The uncertainty will push the telcos to bid higher and they certainly don't have as much cash laying around as Google does...
See above. Maybe I'm missing something but with all due respect, I don't get why your post was modded +5 insightful. To be fair though, I spent the last 20 minutes re-reading all the news articles on that topic and most journalists seemed to have missed the point just as badly.
I am not sure Google is really interested in winning the auction. Their play might be to put pressure on the telcos in order to strike an access deal with them.
The telcos have something that Google wants: unfettered and maybe even exclusive access to their users. Telcos however are notorious for their habit of restricting their devices' access to services that net them more profit. Google knows that and knows that wireless devices may be tomorrow's prime mean of accessing the Internet. If this were to happen, search and content providers would have to strike very onerous deals with telcos in order to maintain access to their clientele.
As a result, the FCC's decision not to require open access to the Internet for users of the 700Mhz spectrum threatens to put Google's future in the hands of the telcos.
The menace to enter the telcos' market strenghtens Google's barganing position because a) Google has the money to make good on that threat and may chose to do so as a defensive measure b) the telcos need that spectrum a lot more than Google does.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear in the coming months that Google has struck many major long term deals with several telcos and has finally decided to bow out of the auction.
The home invasion analogy is a very bad one. A home is by its very nature badly protected (you don't spend millions securing it, do you?) but it is also a sanctuary, a place where a break-in results in a certain emotional stigma.
A better analogy would be this one: Suppose that somebody is waiting in an airport's lobby. He has not gone through the security checks yet. While waiting, he notices airport personnel going through what seems to be an unlocked employee-only door. A thought flashes in his mind: "This doesn't seem very secure. I thought airports were supposed to be secure." So he goes to the door and lo and behold, it is unlocked! He goes through it and find a bunch or corridors and doors.
Naturally curious and a little adventurous, our guy wonders how far he can go. He goes forward and manages to get to the departure area WITHOUT going through security. He feels a little proud of having easily broken a system on which governements and airlines has spent millions.
Being a good citizen, our guy then goes to the security counter and shows his finding to the cop. But suddenly, the cop puts cuffs on him and charges him with trespassing and attempting to bypass security in an airport. Of course, the proper action would have been for the guy to go to security as soon as the unlocked door was found. Adrian Lamo should have stopped his investigation at the misconfigured proxy.
However, is it reasonable to charge somebody with a federal crime for having gone a little further in testing the security of a system? Whether is was an airport or NYT's intranet.
I don't think so. The FBI can claim that they don't know whether the guy smuggled dope during his attempt and the NYT can claim that they'll have to check every system for backdoors but I believe it's mostly bad faith from people lashing out because they felt humiliated. Get a grip... fix your stuff and move on. Destroying the life of somebody who tried to help you is just stupid and cruel.
Hmmm... while I understand what the author is trying to say, I believe his article is misguiding. The problems he mentions are not urban legends and could conceivably be at the root of a performance bottleneck.
What I think the author is trying to say is that "Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming". Most of the stuff enumerated in the article usually has a minor impact on performance and no programmer should worry about them during coding.
However, when all the coding is over, the system will have to meet some performance criteria. If it crawls like a quadraplegic snail, a programmer will have to get its hands dirty and tweak his code to remove the bottlenecks.
It is very possible that one of those bottlenecks will be rooted in these so-called "urban legends". Gross over-allocation of immutable objects and synchronized methods may impact performance.
It happened to me a while ago. I was working on a system that was designed to use lots of threads and message passing. We had completed the development and were ready to move on to testing. The system worked pretty well on the developers' workstations (1 CPU) but when we deployed it on our much more powerful servers, the throughput went down. At first, we thought that it was a thread contention problem but after some testing, we realized that the cost of obtaining a lock on multiprocessor systems is orders of magnitude higher than on uniprocessor systems.
This is because on uniprocessor machines, thread synchronization simply amounts to doing an atomic if/set. However, on multiprocessor machines, complex mechanisms have to be used so that the lock becomes effective for both processors. It involves a lot more overhead because the required extra-cpu operations cost a lot of cycles.
While, in theory, you concerns about Sun's control of the different Java standards seem justified, in practice, Sun has proved to be very decent about how they handle their standards. In fact, as I will exlpain later, Java's success is now more and more tied to open source implementations.
Firstly, Sun is serious about cross-platform compatibility. They helped IBM, SGI and many others in developing a VM for their architecture and they did not cripple their competitors by providing fuzzy standards or by ignoring them as partners. They didn't even require VM implementors to fork off huge amounts of cash for a chance to look at Sun's implementation (case in point: Blackdown's Linux VM). Now, I will admit that Sun's licensing is in no way as open as it could be but it seems to me that Sun's attitude is more open than Microsoft's and that they deserve a little more credit than you give them (Isn't Sun's JDK now open source?).
Secondly, the problem with Microsoft's standard is not the CLR but the libraries. Let's face the facts here: what prevents people from writing their own implementation of a Java VM or a VB interpreter is not the core language. It is duplicating the library specification. It is much easier to write a new Java VM than to recreate all the standard Java libraries with all their idiosyncracies from a fuzzy standard and an inability to look at the source. The same argument applies to every Microsoft API.
However, in Java's case these are only a few libraries. What makes Java such a strong language is its HUGE enterprise API. It is JNDI, JDBC, EJB, Servlets, JSP, DOM, SAX, etc. However, unlike Swing and the other base APIs, these enterprise APIs have open reference implementations! These standards are actually standards, not just a description of the de facto implentation because there is not de facto implementation. This means that Sun cannot lock you in their implementation and so you have a real choice.
With.NET, if you want to do XML, you have to use the Microsoft implementation. With Sun, you choose a SAX or DOM provider (open source, closed source, whatever implementation suits you). With Microsoft, if you want to develop a web application, you have to use Microsoft's implementation of ASP. With Java, you can choose Tomcat, Jetty, Weblogic. The ability to make that choice is very important because it gives you the ability to choose you implentation based on criterias such as free (as in beer or speech), scalable, business supported, etc.
This essentially means that the most important part of Java (its libraries) can be and mostly is open source. Sun already relies a lot on open source projects for Java (Ant, Tomcat, Crimson, Xalan, to name a few). This is good news for the open source community because it means that Java's success is more and more tied to open source implementations.
So, to summarize, I believe Java is in fact a much more open language than.NET. I would even go so far as to say that for an Enterprise developer (what.NET is all about), Java is almost open source. To me, this, combined with TRUE cross-platform compatibility (you will forgive me if I doubt Mono's chances) makes Java a much more attractive alternative.
To those who are complaining about the price, I would point out that 150$USD is far less than what you would have to pay for most conference tickets. LinuxExpo, for instance, is more expensive, especially when you factor in the cost of tutorial sessions.
I am glad to see that this conference focuses on the two things that really interest me:
What MORE can I do with Linux.
How does it work.
The idea to keep away from exhibits and business talks is a good one IMHO. I've always thought that most conferences could do without them anyway.
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I love Quebec, but when it comes to politics, I hang my head. For example, you cannot even put up a poster in english. The stop signs say "arret", french for stop. In France, they say "stop".
I can only imagine what the politics would be like in a school board...
Why does it surprise so many people that road signs are not in english in non-english speaking parts of the globe? Although "Stop" is pretty well understood the world over, I don't see how it can be construed as shameful to use the appropriate locale.
Cities could put meters everywhere but they only do it in commercial areas. It is time limited precisely because it is designed to cater to shoppers. If we allow every commerce to remove their storefront meters, they'll soon complain that their shoppers are going elsewhere because they can't park.
Downtown commerce depends on the availability of this parking space because a lot of rich people want to drive everywhere. It might not be environmentally ideal but it is commercially imperative that we accommodate them.
Downtown traffic and parking issues are better managed through supply-demand. Too much demand? Up goes the price. Congestion pricing and higher meter rates are the solution, not enlargement of roads by removal of side-street parking.
I wasn't aware of the service. It seems nice for Windows users, which I am not.
Zonk's point is not that iTunes is his only alternative but rather that it is the only convenient one. I, for one, am not willing to wait several months for the show to be released on DVD nor I am willing or able to guarantee that I will be home or free at the moment Heroes airs.
TV is free yet a lot of people spend valuable dollars on extra bandwidth, go through the trouble downloading torrents and watch TV in their uncomfortable chair. Why? Because despite all of that they find it more convenient than traditionnal TV.
Stronger DRM won't stop illegal TV show downloads (in fact, it has nothing to do with it). Affordable convenient legal downloads will.
P.S. A DVR might fit the bill but, depending on your viewing habit, it can be a whole lot more expensive than a season pass on iTunes.
Google's worry is not that Verizon will offer better services than them, just that Verizon will cut your access to Google altogether so that you will have no other choice but to use their "gimmicky" stuff.
The terms they came up with were designed to mitigate that risk. I suspect that their promise to bid several bllions was just to get everybody's attention.
That's where the fun is: They "win" without even paying a cent. They succeeded in adding the openness term to the auction. Now, they just need to place *ONE* minimal amount bid and look at the other players rip each other's throat to block them access to the airwaves. But, by placing the bet, they ensure that the openness clause will take effect
First, Google didn't get from the FCC what they really wanted: unfettered Internet access for the users of that Spectrum (see condition 3 of their open letter which is designed to ensure that if the telcos provide partial or restricted access to the Internet, some other company will be allowed to redress the situation). The other conditions, I suspect, were hedges to mitigate loophole exploitation by the winner of the auction.
Second, Google does not need to bet one cent on this auction for the the FCC to impose the "open application" and "open devices" terms. The FCC already agreed to impose these terms on the auction whether Google bids or not. Google only agreed to bet the indicated sum if ALL four terms were imposed.
Third, IMHO the two terms the FCC agreed to are worthless by themselves. If the operator of a network decides what that network has access to, why would it matter what device or application one is allowed to use. These devices and applications are only as powerful as the network services they are able access.
Google (and the american public) got screwed by the FCC pure and simple.
In the end, they'll just have to put out a device on the standard.
Nope. Whatever device Google comes up with, the network operator has no obligation to provide that device or application any access to anything on the Internet or any other network.
Now, they definitely could use that spectrum to actually create a last mile connection network. As they are rumored to already own a bunch of dark fiber, they would have a top to bottom network infrastructure. Enough to scare the telcos. Maybe Google will enter that market to ensure a free (as in unrestricted) connection to their customers. Maybe they'll just stick to online service and enter devices on a free network. The uncertainty will push the telcos to bid higher and they certainly don't have as much cash laying around as Google does...
See above. Maybe I'm missing something but with all due respect, I don't get why your post was modded +5 insightful. To be fair though, I spent the last 20 minutes re-reading all the news articles on that topic and most journalists seemed to have missed the point just as badly.
I am not sure Google is really interested in winning the auction. Their play might be to put pressure on the telcos in order to strike an access deal with them.
The telcos have something that Google wants: unfettered and maybe even exclusive access to their users. Telcos however are notorious for their habit of restricting their devices' access to services that net them more profit. Google knows that and knows that wireless devices may be tomorrow's prime mean of accessing the Internet. If this were to happen, search and content providers would have to strike very onerous deals with telcos in order to maintain access to their clientele.
As a result, the FCC's decision not to require open access to the Internet for users of the 700Mhz spectrum threatens to put Google's future in the hands of the telcos.
The menace to enter the telcos' market strenghtens Google's barganing position because
a) Google has the money to make good on that threat and may chose to do so as a defensive measure
b) the telcos need that spectrum a lot more than Google does.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear in the coming months that Google has struck many major long term deals with several telcos and has finally decided to bow out of the auction.
And I thought I sucked at math when I couldn't remember how eigenvectors work the other day...
Thank you Verizon for lowering the bar for me.
The home invasion analogy is a very bad one. A home is by its very nature badly protected (you don't spend millions securing it, do you?) but it is also a sanctuary, a place where a break-in results in a certain emotional stigma.
A better analogy would be this one: Suppose that somebody is waiting in an airport's lobby. He has not gone through the security checks yet. While waiting, he notices airport personnel going through what seems to be an unlocked employee-only door. A thought flashes in his mind: "This doesn't seem very secure. I thought airports were supposed to be secure." So he goes to the door and lo and behold, it is unlocked! He goes through it and find a bunch or corridors and doors.
Naturally curious and a little adventurous, our guy wonders how far he can go. He goes forward and manages to get to the departure area WITHOUT going through security. He feels a little proud of having easily broken a system on which governements and airlines has spent millions.
Being a good citizen, our guy then goes to the security counter and shows his finding to the cop. But suddenly, the cop puts cuffs on him and charges him with trespassing and attempting to bypass security in an airport. Of course, the proper action would have been for the guy to go to security as soon as the unlocked door was found. Adrian Lamo should have stopped his investigation at the misconfigured proxy.
However, is it reasonable to charge somebody with a federal crime for having gone a little further in testing the security of a system? Whether is was an airport or NYT's intranet.
I don't think so. The FBI can claim that they don't know whether the guy smuggled dope during his attempt and the NYT can claim that they'll have to check every system for backdoors but I believe it's mostly bad faith from people lashing out because they felt humiliated. Get a grip... fix your stuff and move on. Destroying the life of somebody who tried to help you is just stupid and cruel.
Hmmm... while I understand what the author is trying to say, I believe his article is misguiding. The problems he mentions are not urban legends and could conceivably be at the root of a performance bottleneck.
What I think the author is trying to say is that "Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming". Most of the stuff enumerated in the article usually has a minor impact on performance and no programmer should worry about them during coding.
However, when all the coding is over, the system will have to meet some performance criteria. If it crawls like a quadraplegic snail, a programmer will have to get its hands dirty and tweak his code to remove the bottlenecks.
It is very possible that one of those bottlenecks will be rooted in these so-called "urban legends". Gross over-allocation of immutable objects and synchronized methods may impact performance.
It happened to me a while ago. I was working on a system that was designed to use lots of threads and message passing. We had completed the development and were ready to move on to testing. The system worked pretty well on the developers' workstations (1 CPU) but when we deployed it on our much more powerful servers, the throughput went down. At first, we thought that it was a thread contention problem but after some testing, we realized that the cost of obtaining a lock on multiprocessor systems is orders of magnitude higher than on uniprocessor systems.
This is because on uniprocessor machines, thread synchronization simply amounts to doing an atomic if/set. However, on multiprocessor machines, complex mechanisms have to be used so that the lock becomes effective for both processors. It involves a lot more overhead because the required extra-cpu operations cost a lot of cycles.
Firstly, Sun is serious about cross-platform compatibility. They helped IBM, SGI and many others in developing a VM for their architecture and they did not cripple their competitors by providing fuzzy standards or by ignoring them as partners. They didn't even require VM implementors to fork off huge amounts of cash for a chance to look at Sun's implementation (case in point: Blackdown's Linux VM). Now, I will admit that Sun's licensing is in no way as open as it could be but it seems to me that Sun's attitude is more open than Microsoft's and that they deserve a little more credit than you give them (Isn't Sun's JDK now open source?).
Secondly, the problem with Microsoft's standard is not the CLR but the libraries. Let's face the facts here: what prevents people from writing their own implementation of a Java VM or a VB interpreter is not the core language. It is duplicating the library specification. It is much easier to write a new Java VM than to recreate all the standard Java libraries with all their idiosyncracies from a fuzzy standard and an inability to look at the source. The same argument applies to every Microsoft API.
However, in Java's case these are only a few libraries. What makes Java such a strong language is its HUGE enterprise API. It is JNDI, JDBC, EJB, Servlets, JSP, DOM, SAX, etc. However, unlike Swing and the other base APIs, these enterprise APIs have open reference implementations! These standards are actually standards, not just a description of the de facto implentation because there is not de facto implementation. This means that Sun cannot lock you in their implementation and so you have a real choice.
With .NET, if you want to do XML, you have to use the Microsoft implementation. With Sun, you choose a SAX or DOM provider (open source, closed source, whatever implementation suits you). With Microsoft, if you want to develop a web application, you have to use Microsoft's implementation of ASP. With Java, you can choose Tomcat, Jetty, Weblogic. The ability to make that choice is very important because it gives you the ability to choose you implentation based on criterias such as free (as in beer or speech), scalable, business supported, etc.
This essentially means that the most important part of Java (its libraries) can be and mostly is open source. Sun already relies a lot on open source projects for Java (Ant, Tomcat, Crimson, Xalan, to name a few). This is good news for the open source community because it means that Java's success is more and more tied to open source implementations.
So, to summarize, I believe Java is in fact a much more open language than .NET. I would even go so far as to say that for an Enterprise developer (what .NET is all about), Java is almost open source. To me, this, combined with TRUE cross-platform compatibility (you will forgive me if I doubt Mono's chances) makes Java a much more attractive alternative.
- To those who are complaining about the price, I would point out that 150$USD is far less than what you would have to pay for most conference tickets. LinuxExpo, for instance, is more expensive, especially when you factor in the cost of tutorial sessions.
- I am glad to see that this conference focuses on the two things that really interest me:
One ticket sold.- What MORE can I do with Linux.
- How does it work.
The idea to keep away from exhibits and business talks is a good one IMHO. I've always thought that most conferences could do without them anyway.