Strangely enough, Hungarian worked quite well for the problem it was originally intended to solve.
I worked at Xerox in the late 70's and my manager was Charles Simonyi, inventor of this notation. The project was BravoX (grandparent of MS Word) and was written in BCPL. BCPL basically has one type: integer. How that integer is treated is purely a function of how you reference it. E.g. fooFirst>>fooNext means "use the variable 'fooFirst' as a pointer to a structure of type FOO, one of whose elements is (from the naming convention) a pointer to some other FOO." Whereas fooFirst+1 adds one to an integer and (almost certainly) yields an invalid point that bill blow up when you try to use it. (It's been 30 years since I wrote anything in it, so I probably screwed up the example.)
Since there was only one type, the compiler didn't/couldn't perform type checking. Hungarian was a way of putting the type into the name of the variable so that the programmer could perform visual type checking. There were 9 of us on the project and the consistency/readability across the code base was impressive. Any of us could go into anyone else's code and almost immediately see what was going on.
I still use a light variant of it in my own code, but when in someone else's code I try to stick to their naming/formatting convention.
Like so many good ideas, it worked well in its original context but became twisted out of shape when used for something never intended/envisioned by the original developers (even though the person doing the twisting was, in fact, the original developer!). Another example of this is the Third Eye Software symbol table format I created for my debugger, CDB, but which was then used and abused by Mips to create a complete piece of crap. What they did still has people swearing at me 20+ years after the fact. (More on this at Third Eye Software and
the MIPS symbol table)
Sort of on the flip side of that, there was an ad back in the mid-70's from CSC. They had been contracted by the FAA to design and build the next-gen Air Traffic Control system. The ad listed a couple of must-have's and a bunch of nice-to-have's.
I was interested and called. As the woman was running through her check list she was getting more and more excited as she realized that not only did I have all of their technical wish list, I was actually a former Army Air Traffic Controller. She said something like, "My God! You not only know how to program this thing, you actually know what to do with it!"
She then said in an off-hand manner, "So, where did you get your degree?" I replied, "Well, I'm about 10 hours short of a Bachelor's in Finance, but I didn't bother finishing it because I was too busy making money programming."
She almost cried because, although I was pretty much the perfect candidate, she absolutely *had* to have people with at least a BA.
It all worked out for the best: that project turned out to be a complete disaster and I ended up working at Xerox in Palo Alto instead.
Not to one-up you:-), but we use to have the NSA as customers (not something I'm particularly proud of, but they were about the only people that understood the need for similarity-based full-text retrieval in 1987, so...)
Anywho, they are the perfect no-comment referral customer because they will neither confirm nor deny that they even know you, let alone use your software. The funny thing was that people would take our word for it because they knew the NSA wasn't going to say anything.
> never let a bunch of hardware guys write software
I testify, Brother, I TESTIFY!
30 Years ago, I ended up in therapy (literally) after dealing with an assembly program written by a hardware guy. The program emulated a CDC communications protocol that was originally done in hardware. This was on a Cincinnati Milacron 2200B, a machine that had both variable instruction length and variable data length. The hardware guy had implemented the protocol state changes by putting a label *on the address portion* of jump statements (he did this in 50 different places in the program) and then in some other area of the code he would change where the jump branched to next time through. It bordered on an implementation of the mythical COME FROM instruction. Of course, there was zero documentation and almost zero comments.
After one marathon debugging session I was so frustrated I was in tears. My manager came in and wanted to know what the problem was. I gave him the listing and left to walk around the building a few times. When I came back, he told me that it was, hands down, the worst piece of crap he had seen in 20 years. He had me rewrite it from scratch, which I did over a long weekend.
The program's name was RIP/TIP (Receive Interrupt Processor/Transmit Interrupt Processor) and I was in therapy for most of a year. (There were a few other issues, but this was the bale of hay that made me snap.)
"Fortunately the problem is easy to fix: encrypt TPMS data the way keyless entry systems do."
Unfortunately, there is a major difference here: failure to encrypt keyless entry resulted in stolen cars (something which caught people's attention and pissed them off), whereas you'll never even notice that your TPMS isn't encrypted. People are incredibly lazy and only take action when they perceive a threat to their person or property. Liberty? As Dick Cheney would say, "So?"
I'll bet adding encryption would cost the manufacturers $0.01 per tire (or some equally trivial amount), which they will claim will ruin them. Nobody else (except for a bunch of whiny, personal liberty freaks) will care about this and it will quietly become ubiquitous.
Besides, if you aren't doing anything illegal, why should you care who takes note of your comings and goings. We're here to help you and we certainly can't do that unless we know where you are... at all times...
Actually, the community had nothing to do with nocat.net. The primary westward link is at the Victorian Christmas Tree Farm, which is about 200 feet North of the city limits (and just down the street from ORA). This had nothing to with politics, it was just that they had a nice water tower to mount the parabolic antenna on.
Actually, it's weirder than that. From the City's history page:
The name of Sebastopol first came into use in the late 1850's as a result of a prolonged and lively fistfight in the newly formed town, which was likened to the long British siege of the Russian seaport of Sevastopol during the then-raging Crimean War. Britain, France, Sardinia and Turkey fought Russia in this war, one of the first wars to be directly reported by journalists and photographers. Evidently, many Americans in the west sympathized more for the Russian than for the British cause as there were at one time four other Sebastopols in California.
I wasn't there, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least.
One of the weird disconnects about Sebastopol is that most of the residents are not Luddites, at least not in the classical sense. This place is arguably the Prius capital of the US. When we go to local stores it is not unusual for there to be as many as a dozen Prii (including ours) of various vintages in the lot. At a Celtic music festival in September (this place is a hotbed of Celtic music for some reason), I counted about 35 Prii.
So, they'll happily expose themselves to cellphones & whatever electro-magnetic field is coming from their Prius, but 100mW a block away? Inconceivable!
On the other hand, the HGG was right: this place is "mostly harmless."
Having lived in Sebastopol for 15 years, and in Silicon Valley for 20 years before that, I feel compelled to make a few observations about the context of this decision by the city council (with which I disagree).
1. "Hippie friendly" does little to convey the truly eclectic mix of people who live here. You name it, we got it: 5th generation farming families, refugees from Berkeley and the Valley, 200 acre commercial winemaking operations next door to the 2 acre "wine estates" of retired attorneys, a surprising number of geezer geeks (including me), a large gay/lesbian community, and, yes, a certain number of people wearing tie-dyed clothing and reeking of patchouli oil. About the only group in short supply here is neo-cons. (Thank.)
2. Speaking of geeks, some of you may have heard of a project call nocat.net. It uses off-the-shelf WiFi hardware to deliver broadband to places miles (and hills) away from the nearest cable/DSL connection. It was started by a group of people in... (wait for it)... Sebastopol. It was founded by people from, and had its meetings at, O'Reilly.
3. This area has higher-than-average levels of education and of political activism. I think these are good things. However, having a college degree and being willing to make yourself heard does not necessarily translate into knowing what the hell you are talking about. This is a universal truth.
4. People in general do not understand the technologies they use, and Sebastopol is no exception. I would bet good money that at least some of the people who are so vocal (here and elsewhere) about the dangers of WiFi are actually using a laptop that has--you guessed it--WiFi. Some of them may have actually decided not to have a WiFi router in their home "because of the radiation," but it's almost a certainty that they forgot to turn off the radio in their laptop. I'm not a radio engineer, but I seem to remember something about radiated energy falling off as the inverse square of the distance. Which means that, whatever the perceived dangers from the router, they are actually much more exposed to radiation from their own laptop. (Not to mention that little radio transmitter they nestle against their brain, AKA their cellphone.)
What does all of that mean? Hell, I don't know. I guess I was irked by the simplistic labeling from the original story.
All the vendors mentioned (ironically, with the exception of Novell) already have fixes/workarounds either ready or in progress.
I kind of doubt there are any antitrust implications when MS contacts the affected vendors in advance. TFA even notes that "this step was taken with the consent of the affected vendors."
Circular slide rules were very popular with pilots because of their compactness. Some of them had specially marked scales for doing Time, Speed, and Distance problems.
Hey, you do your codec testing with the testers you have, not the testers you wish you had.:-)
Seriously, lossy codecs are all about what is "good enough." That is a fuzzy concept which becomes even moreso when you take into account different people's tastes in sound and their ability to discriminate. Because of my hearing loss (I think), I actually like things a bit brighter than my audiophile friend does.
The quip about RIAA aside, you are about the 20th person to ask that. My wife and I talked (briefly) about this, but decided that the RIAA is too insane, and the courts too inefective to stop them, to wander into these waters. Additionally, we do believe that *the artists* need to be compensated for their creations.
We have stored away each and every CD that our digital library represents. We'll probably never touch them again, but they are there just in case some clown in jack boots convinces the court that we are a threat to Western Civilization.
A while ago I ripped our entire CD collection (about 1200 discs) to FLAC, a lossless codec. Each minute of audio takes approximately 5.5MB, so it lives on a 750GB drive (x 2 because I mirrored that sucker -- don't want to have to go through *that* again). I then did a batch down-convert to OGG/Vorbis to go onto my iRiver player (no, not all of it). I ripped to FLAC so that if/when better lossy codecs come along, I can simply do batch down-convert without reripping. Note: you do *not* want to convert one lossy codec to another lossy codec; all you will get is the worst of both codecs in one file.
I became curious about just how the various compressions stacked up against each other. I knew Vorbis was better than "normal" MP3 by a long shot, but newer MP3 variations have definitely gotten better. Here are the formats tested: WAV (straight from the CD), FLAC, Vorbis, and about 15 different MP3 variations (VBR, CBR/ABR, 32k to 320K). I tried both down-convert from FLAC and ripped-direct-from-CD (there should be no difference, and I certainly couldn't hear any). This was done on a variety of material, choosing particularly demanding/revealing passages from acoustic guitar, cafe jazz trios, brass ensembles, Beethoven's 6th, piano (jazz and classical), rock and vocalists (Streisand, Baez, Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody).
I did a few tests and verified that I could not distinguish between WAV and FLAC -- no surprise there -- so for convenience the other formats were compared to FLAC as the baseline.
I did extensive A-B, B-C, A-C, etc., etc. comparisons using my main system (Marantz A/V amp with Magneplanar MG-IIIa speakers) and also with Sennheiser HD595 headphones. Below 128k, MP3 is complete crap. Starting at 128-CBR, it got more difficult to hear the difference. At CBR/192 or VBR/medium, I could rarely distinguish MP3 from FLAC, although sometimes the high-hat cymbals sounded like they lost a little bit of brilliance.
Although I'm a fairly discerning listener, I do have high-frequency hearing damage in my right ear. So I brought in a friend who is a serious audiophile. We did a lot of listening and comparing (many hours over several days because your ears get "tired"), both on my system and back at his house.
The Verdict: Vorbis is good, really good. But MP3's produced by Lame at VBR/Medium to VBR/High are also really, really good, maybe even better. MP3/VBR/Medium is approximately the same size as Vorbis/Normal (-q 4.99) at about 1MB/minute -- 1/5 the size of the FLAC files. Although there are players out there that can handle Vorbis, there are many more that don't.
Ps. We're not going to throw out the FLACs, because something better *will* come along. By that I mean 'smaller than' MP3/VBR/HIGH.
On April 26th a few years ago, a dental office I did work for called up saying they were having trouble booting their server. While trying to figure this out over the phone, the manager said, "Oh, by the way, we're having some problems with the 5 client machines."
Bing! Red flag. I googled on "virus April 26" and found Chernobyl. I told her there was a good chance the machines were toast.
Good outcome, though. The manager was anal about backing up their patient database (quite a large one). She bought 6 new machines at BestBuy and the office was back in business the next day.
Basically, it says if you maintain personal information of California residents and if that info *might* be compromised, then you *must* notify all affected parties. The information includes first name (or initial) and last name, plus one or more of SSN, driver's license #, CC number, bank account, and a few others.
The fine for failure to notify is $10,000 *per account*. The first big story on this was a few months after the law became effective. A consultant for Wells Fargo (I think), took home (on a laptop) info on 50,000 high level accounts to do marketing analysis. The laptop was stolen (but recovered). Wells Fargo was all over the evening news telling everyone in California that they had screwed up. Why? They were looking at a potential fine of $500,000,000, that's why.
Since then, there have been many breakins/screwups that have been announced by national and multinational corps. because some of the data was about California residents. Personally, I consider this a Very Good Thing®. Too bad they don't have similar fines connected with producing broken/fraudulent voting systems.
If the compromised data might contain anything covered by CA AB 700, Salvance's friend should, at the very least, write a letter to his boss (and boss's boss, etc. if necessary) informing them of the company's extreme exposure on this matter. He just might save them from self-disctructing.
I wrote the first post in this sequence, but I feel like I missed an opportunity to talk about how you *can* actually do something like this. I have a good friend, Sarge Gerbode, who, although an apparently mild-mannered man, keeps causing fusses whereever he goes. First he did it by being one of the first persons to stand up to the Church of Scientology *and win in court* (no mean feat), then he did it in the world of Lute Music.
Lute Music? Yeah, lute music. At his site (http://gerbode.net/) you can find over 3,000 lute songs (the front page says 2,000, but I just did an quick scan) that he has transcribed to Fronimo 2 & 3 and TAB (tablature formats) plus PDF and MIDI. Many of these he copied from the original manuscripts in European libraries. He's been at this for quite a few years now.
Since the transcriptions are his own, he holds copyright to them. This isn't easy, but it's a labor of love for him. Obviously, others could do this in other genres, but it takes a fair bit of commiment.
Good luck. The copyright on sheet music is the same as for other works. If published before 1923, it's in the public domain, between 1922 and 1978, 95 years from publication date, after that, it's life of author + 70 years.
In short, almost none of it can be legally scanned *and distributed*.
There are two approaches: live with it and make as few changes as possible, or bite the bullet and do a complete rebuild. To do a cleanup, checkout tidy - it does a good analysis of the existing pages and can generate CSS that is OK, but not beautiful. If you want the final pages to look the same, but be standards compliant, see meyerweb.com and read his books on rebuilding pages ("Eric Meyer On CSS" and "More Eric Meyer on CSS"). Pragmatic is his keyword: lots of examples and he makes sense.
A number of people have already touched on some of these points.
1. This is primarily a legal matter. Having said that, there are an infinite number of contracts that can be created. Find out what they really want and why, then decide what would make you feel comfortable with giving that to them. This may represent essentially free money for your company.
2. I suggest that you be both paranoid and trusting.:-) My first attorney told me that I should not do business with people I fundamentally didn't trust, but once I decided to do business with them I should draft a contract that was absolutely crystal clear on who could do, or not do, what and when. The vast majority of people and businesses are honest, but that doesn't mean that weak or vaguely worded contracts won't get interpreted differently by different people.
(As a side note: we once had a corporate-wide contract with HP. Five years after signing it, they were licensing manufacturing rights to the machine to a Japanese company. The contract wording was unfortunately vague on this point and could have been read that HP already had the rights to give our code to the other company. We reluctantly said as much, but noted that that had not been our intention. HP decided that that since it was not what we had *intended* when we made the contract with them, then they owed us some more money. The next week a check for twice the original contract amount was hand-delivered to us. Amazing. This happened 17 years ago and it still represents the classiest thing I have ever seen a company do. But you can't count on HP being on the other side of your contracts.)
3. We had a clause in one of our contracts we called the 'Microsoft clause', that gave us significant auditing rights if the other party developed a product or service that was significantly similar to the code being licensed. If they suddenly annouced a TurboCharged Toaster, 6 months after licensing our Competition Toaster, then we had broad rights to examine the code of the competing product.
4. More than likely, their having your code will actually bind them *more* tightly to you. This is especially true if you have a plug-in archetecture and most of their mods are in the plugins. They may also find that they benefit by their people helping to strengthen your product. I don't know your details, but it could happen.
5. Make sure that the contract covers what happens if they are acquired by someone else -- someone you might not have wanted to do business with directly. Say, for example, Microsoft (this *is*/. after all). If this is a real fear, then you could either cause that to terminate the license or, probably a better path, you have the right to determine if the transfer is agreeable. Remember, this is *your* code. If they can't agree to it, then maybe you should not be giving it to them.
Ansonmont said, "but you are probably better off doing something to help your business than spending a lot of time reading how to help your business."
I can't comment on the value of the book being reviewed, but I can say that techies have a tendency to blowoff "the other 80%" of the business of being in business. In particular, techies are notoriously weak at marketing. I am speaking from direct, personal, and expensive experience here.
There is a book, "Crossing the Chasm". Had I read and understood it when it first came out 1991(?), I might still have a company. My company made the error described in paragraph 3, page 40 (first edition numbering). I did not understand (and claimed I didn't need to) the difference between Early Adopters and Visionaires (early part of the adoption curve) and the Early Majority.
Was I a smart guy? Absolutely! Did I need anyone telling me how my product was only a piece of the solution to the customer's problem? Hell no! This is hubris before the fall. It's bad enough when you are doing it with Other People's Money, but it's a lot worse when you are funding product 2 with the profits from product 1. Can you say crater? I knew you could.
My point is that no matter how high your IQ is, or how uber-geek you are, you don't know everything. Reading business books at home won't tend to impact your productivity on the project and it just might prevent you driving a good idea off a cliff you never even knew was there.
Diversity? It looks more like careening towards homogeneity to me. First they bought Innobase, giving them the ability to cut MySQL's transaction nuts off, then they buy another open-sourece-friendly DBMS which has transaction capability.
Now, if you were the largest commercial DBMS vendor in the world and you were worried about the OSS people moving into your space, what would you buy in order to stop them cold? Me? I'd keep them out of atomic transaction space.
Do keep in mind we are talking about Larry Ellison here. Just google on "larry ellison greed" to see what some other people think of this champion of diversity.
Slashdot Mirror
Strangely enough, Hungarian worked quite well for the problem it was originally intended to solve.
I worked at Xerox in the late 70's and my manager was Charles Simonyi, inventor of this notation. The project was BravoX (grandparent of MS Word) and was written in BCPL. BCPL basically has one type: integer. How that integer is treated is purely a function of how you reference it. E.g. fooFirst>>fooNext means "use the variable 'fooFirst' as a pointer to a structure of type FOO, one of whose elements is (from the naming convention) a pointer to some other FOO." Whereas fooFirst+1 adds one to an integer and (almost certainly) yields an invalid point that bill blow up when you try to use it. (It's been 30 years since I wrote anything in it, so I probably screwed up the example.)
Since there was only one type, the compiler didn't/couldn't perform type checking. Hungarian was a way of putting the type into the name of the variable so that the programmer could perform visual type checking. There were 9 of us on the project and the consistency/readability across the code base was impressive. Any of us could go into anyone else's code and almost immediately see what was going on.
I still use a light variant of it in my own code, but when in someone else's code I try to stick to their naming/formatting convention.
Like so many good ideas, it worked well in its original context but became twisted out of shape when used for something never intended/envisioned by the original developers (even though the person doing the twisting was, in fact, the original developer!). Another example of this is the Third Eye Software symbol table format I created for my debugger, CDB, but which was then used and abused by Mips to create a complete piece of crap. What they did still has people swearing at me 20+ years after the fact. (More on this at Third Eye Software and the MIPS symbol table)
Sort of on the flip side of that, there was an ad back in the mid-70's from CSC. They had been contracted by the FAA to design and build the next-gen Air Traffic Control system. The ad listed a couple of must-have's and a bunch of nice-to-have's.
I was interested and called. As the woman was running through her check list she was getting more and more excited as she realized that not only did I have all of their technical wish list, I was actually a former Army Air Traffic Controller. She said something like, "My God! You not only know how to program this thing, you actually know what to do with it!"
She then said in an off-hand manner, "So, where did you get your degree?" I replied, "Well, I'm about 10 hours short of a Bachelor's in Finance, but I didn't bother finishing it because I was too busy making money programming."
She almost cried because, although I was pretty much the perfect candidate, she absolutely *had* to have people with at least a BA.
It all worked out for the best: that project turned out to be a complete disaster and I ended up working at Xerox in Palo Alto instead.
Not to one-up you :-), but we use to have the NSA as customers (not something I'm particularly proud of, but they were about the only people that understood the need for similarity-based full-text retrieval in 1987, so ...)
Anywho, they are the perfect no-comment referral customer because they will neither confirm nor deny that they even know you, let alone use your software. The funny thing was that people would take our word for it because they knew the NSA wasn't going to say anything.
I testify, Brother, I TESTIFY!
30 Years ago, I ended up in therapy (literally) after dealing with an assembly program written by a hardware guy. The program emulated a CDC communications protocol that was originally done in hardware. This was on a Cincinnati Milacron 2200B, a machine that had both variable instruction length and variable data length. The hardware guy had implemented the protocol state changes by putting a label *on the address portion* of jump statements (he did this in 50 different places in the program) and then in some other area of the code he would change where the jump branched to next time through. It bordered on an implementation of the mythical COME FROM instruction. Of course, there was zero documentation and almost zero comments.
After one marathon debugging session I was so frustrated I was in tears. My manager came in and wanted to know what the problem was. I gave him the listing and left to walk around the building a few times. When I came back, he told me that it was, hands down, the worst piece of crap he had seen in 20 years. He had me rewrite it from scratch, which I did over a long weekend.
The program's name was RIP/TIP (Receive Interrupt Processor/Transmit Interrupt Processor) and I was in therapy for most of a year. (There were a few other issues, but this was the bale of hay that made me snap.)
I've been RickRolled!
Unfortunately, there is a major difference here: failure to encrypt keyless entry resulted in stolen cars (something which caught people's attention and pissed them off), whereas you'll never even notice that your TPMS isn't encrypted. People are incredibly lazy and only take action when they perceive a threat to their person or property. Liberty? As Dick Cheney would say, "So?"
I'll bet adding encryption would cost the manufacturers $0.01 per tire (or some equally trivial amount), which they will claim will ruin them. Nobody else (except for a bunch of whiny, personal liberty freaks) will care about this and it will quietly become ubiquitous.
Besides, if you aren't doing anything illegal, why should you care who takes note of your comings and goings. We're here to help you and we certainly can't do that unless we know where you are ... at all times ...
Actually, the community had nothing to do with nocat.net. The primary westward link is at the Victorian Christmas Tree Farm, which is about 200 feet North of the city limits (and just down the street from ORA). This had nothing to with politics, it was just that they had a nice water tower to mount the parabolic antenna on.
I wasn't there, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least.
One of the weird disconnects about Sebastopol is that most of the residents are not Luddites, at least not in the classical sense. This place is arguably the Prius capital of the US. When we go to local stores it is not unusual for there to be as many as a dozen Prii (including ours) of various vintages in the lot. At a Celtic music festival in September (this place is a hotbed of Celtic music for some reason), I counted about 35 Prii.
So, they'll happily expose themselves to cellphones & whatever electro-magnetic field is coming from their Prius, but 100mW a block away? Inconceivable!
On the other hand, the HGG was right: this place is "mostly harmless."
Having lived in Sebastopol for 15 years, and in Silicon Valley for 20 years before that, I feel compelled to make a few observations about the context of this decision by the city council (with which I disagree).
.)
... (wait for it) ... Sebastopol. It was founded by people from, and had its meetings at, O'Reilly.
1. "Hippie friendly" does little to convey the truly eclectic mix of people who live here. You name it, we got it: 5th generation farming families, refugees from Berkeley and the Valley, 200 acre commercial winemaking operations next door to the 2 acre "wine estates" of retired attorneys, a surprising number of geezer geeks (including me), a large gay/lesbian community, and, yes, a certain number of people wearing tie-dyed clothing and reeking of patchouli oil. About the only group in short supply here is neo-cons. (Thank
2. Speaking of geeks, some of you may have heard of a project call nocat.net. It uses off-the-shelf WiFi hardware to deliver broadband to places miles (and hills) away from the nearest cable/DSL connection. It was started by a group of people in
3. This area has higher-than-average levels of education and of political activism. I think these are good things. However, having a college degree and being willing to make yourself heard does not necessarily translate into knowing what the hell you are talking about. This is a universal truth.
4. People in general do not understand the technologies they use, and Sebastopol is no exception. I would bet good money that at least some of the people who are so vocal (here and elsewhere) about the dangers of WiFi are actually using a laptop that has--you guessed it--WiFi. Some of them may have actually decided not to have a WiFi router in their home "because of the radiation," but it's almost a certainty that they forgot to turn off the radio in their laptop. I'm not a radio engineer, but I seem to remember something about radiated energy falling off as the inverse square of the distance. Which means that, whatever the perceived dangers from the router, they are actually much more exposed to radiation from their own laptop. (Not to mention that little radio transmitter they nestle against their brain, AKA their cellphone.)
What does all of that mean? Hell, I don't know. I guess I was irked by the simplistic labeling from the original story.
I know this is /., but please RTFA.
All the vendors mentioned (ironically, with the exception of Novell) already have fixes/workarounds either ready or in progress.
I kind of doubt there are any antitrust implications when MS contacts the affected vendors in advance. TFA even notes that "this step was taken with the consent of the affected vendors."
Circular slide rules were very popular with pilots because of their compactness. Some of them had specially marked scales for doing Time, Speed, and Distance problems.
One place you should definitely checkout is http://www.sugarcrm.com/. It's waaay beyond anything I need, but it might fit the bill.
Hey, you do your codec testing with the testers you have, not the testers you wish you had. :-)
Seriously, lossy codecs are all about what is "good enough." That is a fuzzy concept which becomes even moreso when you take into account different people's tastes in sound and their ability to discriminate. Because of my hearing loss (I think), I actually like things a bit brighter than my audiophile friend does.
YFMV (Your Frequencies May Vary),
Peter
> Can I borrow your mirror?
> Your friend,
> RIAA
LOL, ROTFLMAO, YMMV, IANAL, etc. etc.
Ahem. No.
The quip about RIAA aside, you are about the 20th person to ask that. My wife and I talked (briefly) about this, but decided that the RIAA is too insane, and the courts too inefective to stop them, to wander into these waters. Additionally, we do believe that *the artists* need to be compensated for their creations.
We have stored away each and every CD that our digital library represents. We'll probably never touch them again, but they are there just in case some clown in jack boots convinces the court that we are a threat to Western Civilization.
Peter
Grooving to Blind Faith, "Do What You Like," 1969
A while ago I ripped our entire CD collection (about 1200 discs) to FLAC, a lossless codec. Each minute of audio takes approximately 5.5MB, so it lives on a 750GB drive (x 2 because I mirrored that sucker -- don't want to have to go through *that* again). I then did a batch down-convert to OGG/Vorbis to go onto my iRiver player (no, not all of it). I ripped to FLAC so that if/when better lossy codecs come along, I can simply do batch down-convert without reripping. Note: you do *not* want to convert one lossy codec to another lossy codec; all you will get is the worst of both codecs in one file.
I became curious about just how the various compressions stacked up against each other. I knew Vorbis was better than "normal" MP3 by a long shot, but newer MP3 variations have definitely gotten better. Here are the formats tested: WAV (straight from the CD), FLAC, Vorbis, and about 15 different MP3 variations (VBR, CBR/ABR, 32k to 320K). I tried both down-convert from FLAC and ripped-direct-from-CD (there should be no difference, and I certainly couldn't hear any). This was done on a variety of material, choosing particularly demanding/revealing passages from acoustic guitar, cafe jazz trios, brass ensembles, Beethoven's 6th, piano (jazz and classical), rock and vocalists (Streisand, Baez, Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody).
I did a few tests and verified that I could not distinguish between WAV and FLAC -- no surprise there -- so for convenience the other formats were compared to FLAC as the baseline.
I did extensive A-B, B-C, A-C, etc., etc. comparisons using my main system (Marantz A/V amp with Magneplanar MG-IIIa speakers) and also with Sennheiser HD595 headphones. Below 128k, MP3 is complete crap. Starting at 128-CBR, it got more difficult to hear the difference. At CBR/192 or VBR/medium, I could rarely distinguish MP3 from FLAC, although sometimes the high-hat cymbals sounded like they lost a little bit of brilliance.
Although I'm a fairly discerning listener, I do have high-frequency hearing damage in my right ear. So I brought in a friend who is a serious audiophile. We did a lot of listening and comparing (many hours over several days because your ears get "tired"), both on my system and back at his house.
The Verdict: Vorbis is good, really good. But MP3's produced by Lame at VBR/Medium to VBR/High are also really, really good, maybe even better. MP3/VBR/Medium is approximately the same size as Vorbis/Normal (-q 4.99) at about 1MB/minute -- 1/5 the size of the FLAC files. Although there are players out there that can handle Vorbis, there are many more that don't.
Ps. We're not going to throw out the FLACs, because something better *will* come along. By that I mean 'smaller than' MP3/VBR/HIGH.
Eight Ball Deluxe is the damn pinball machine ever made. Or, if you like more chrome, fancier fields and a sexy android voice, try Xenon.
One of the all time classics.
On April 26th a few years ago, a dental office I did work for called up saying they were having trouble booting their server. While trying to figure this out over the phone, the manager said, "Oh, by the way, we're having some problems with the 5 client machines."
Bing! Red flag. I googled on "virus April 26" and found Chernobyl. I told her there was a good chance the machines were toast.
Good outcome, though. The manager was anal about backing up their patient database (quite a large one). She bought 6 new machines at BestBuy and the office was back in business the next day.
Basically, it says if you maintain personal information of California residents and if that info *might* be compromised, then you *must* notify all affected parties. The information includes first name (or initial) and last name, plus one or more of SSN, driver's license #, CC number, bank account, and a few others.
The fine for failure to notify is $10,000 *per account*. The first big story on this was a few months after the law became effective. A consultant for Wells Fargo (I think), took home (on a laptop) info on 50,000 high level accounts to do marketing analysis. The laptop was stolen (but recovered). Wells Fargo was all over the evening news telling everyone in California that they had screwed up. Why? They were looking at a potential fine of $500,000,000, that's why.
Since then, there have been many breakins/screwups that have been announced by national and multinational corps. because some of the data was about California residents. Personally, I consider this a Very Good Thing®. Too bad they don't have similar fines connected with producing broken/fraudulent voting systems.
If the compromised data might contain anything covered by CA AB 700, Salvance's friend should, at the very least, write a letter to his boss (and boss's boss, etc. if necessary) informing them of the company's extreme exposure on this matter. He just might save them from self-disctructing.
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HBO: Hacking Democracy
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I wrote the first post in this sequence, but I feel like I missed an opportunity to talk about how you *can* actually do something like this. I have a good friend, Sarge Gerbode, who, although an apparently mild-mannered man, keeps causing fusses whereever he goes. First he did it by being one of the first persons to stand up to the Church of Scientology *and win in court* (no mean feat), then he did it in the world of Lute Music.
Lute Music? Yeah, lute music. At his site (http://gerbode.net/) you can find over 3,000 lute songs (the front page says 2,000, but I just did an quick scan) that he has transcribed to Fronimo 2 & 3 and TAB (tablature formats) plus PDF and MIDI. Many of these he copied from the original manuscripts in European libraries. He's been at this for quite a few years now.
Since the transcriptions are his own, he holds copyright to them. This isn't easy, but it's a labor of love for him. Obviously, others could do this in other genres, but it takes a fair bit of commiment.
Good luck. The copyright on sheet music is the same as for other works. If published before 1923, it's in the public domain, between 1922 and 1978, 95 years from publication date, after that, it's life of author + 70 years.
e _Overview/chapter0/0-a.html
In short, almost none of it can be legally scanned *and distributed*.
For more authoritative info, google on "length of copyright" and "sheet music", or see http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Us
There are two approaches: live with it and make as few changes as possible, or bite the bullet and do a complete rebuild. To do a cleanup, checkout tidy - it does a good analysis of the existing pages and can generate CSS that is OK, but not beautiful. If you want the final pages to look the same, but be standards compliant, see meyerweb.com and read his books on rebuilding pages ("Eric Meyer On CSS" and "More Eric Meyer on CSS"). Pragmatic is his keyword: lots of examples and he makes sense.
Good luck. You're going to need it.
A number of people have already touched on some of these points.
:-) My first attorney told me that I should not do business with people I fundamentally didn't trust, but once I decided to do business with them I should draft a contract that was absolutely crystal clear on who could do, or not do, what and when. The vast majority of people and businesses are honest, but that doesn't mean that weak or vaguely worded contracts won't get interpreted differently by different people.
/. after all). If this is a real fear, then you could either cause that to terminate the license or, probably a better path, you have the right to determine if the transfer is agreeable. Remember, this is *your* code. If they can't agree to it, then maybe you should not be giving it to them.
1. This is primarily a legal matter. Having said that, there are an infinite number of contracts that can be created. Find out what they really want and why, then decide what would make you feel comfortable with giving that to them. This may represent essentially free money for your company.
2. I suggest that you be both paranoid and trusting.
(As a side note: we once had a corporate-wide contract with HP. Five years after signing it, they were licensing manufacturing rights to the machine to a Japanese company. The contract wording was unfortunately vague on this point and could have been read that HP already had the rights to give our code to the other company. We reluctantly said as much, but noted that that had not been our intention. HP decided that that since it was not what we had *intended* when we made the contract with them, then they owed us some more money. The next week a check for twice the original contract amount was hand-delivered to us. Amazing. This happened 17 years ago and it still represents the classiest thing I have ever seen a company do. But you can't count on HP being on the other side of your contracts.)
3. We had a clause in one of our contracts we called the 'Microsoft clause', that gave us significant auditing rights if the other party developed a product or service that was significantly similar to the code being licensed. If they suddenly annouced a TurboCharged Toaster, 6 months after licensing our Competition Toaster, then we had broad rights to examine the code of the competing product.
4. More than likely, their having your code will actually bind them *more* tightly to you. This is especially true if you have a plug-in archetecture and most of their mods are in the plugins. They may also find that they benefit by their people helping to strengthen your product. I don't know your details, but it could happen.
5. Make sure that the contract covers what happens if they are acquired by someone else -- someone you might not have wanted to do business with directly. Say, for example, Microsoft (this *is*
Good Luck,
Peter
Ansonmont said, "but you are probably better off doing something to help your business than spending a lot of time reading how to help your business."
I can't comment on the value of the book being reviewed, but I can say that techies have a tendency to blowoff "the other 80%" of the business of being in business. In particular, techies are notoriously weak at marketing. I am speaking from direct, personal, and expensive experience here.
There is a book, "Crossing the Chasm". Had I read and understood it when it first came out 1991(?), I might still have a company. My company made the error described in paragraph 3, page 40 (first edition numbering). I did not understand (and claimed I didn't need to) the difference between Early Adopters and Visionaires (early part of the adoption curve) and the Early Majority.
Was I a smart guy? Absolutely! Did I need anyone telling me how my product was only a piece of the solution to the customer's problem? Hell no! This is hubris before the fall. It's bad enough when you are doing it with Other People's Money, but it's a lot worse when you are funding product 2 with the profits from product 1. Can you say crater? I knew you could.
My point is that no matter how high your IQ is, or how uber-geek you are, you don't know everything. Reading business books at home won't tend to impact your productivity on the project and it just might prevent you driving a good idea off a cliff you never even knew was there.
Diversity? It looks more like careening towards homogeneity to me. First they bought Innobase, giving them the ability to cut MySQL's transaction nuts off, then they buy another open-sourece-friendly DBMS which has transaction capability.
Now, if you were the largest commercial DBMS vendor in the world and you were worried about the OSS people moving into your space, what would you buy in order to stop them cold? Me? I'd keep them out of atomic transaction space.
Do keep in mind we are talking about Larry Ellison here. Just google on "larry ellison greed" to see what some other people think of this champion of diversity.