I worked with a Russian programmer of very few words, who willingly ran AIX as his desktop OS. When asked why, he said "I enjoy the strict confines of AIX."
We've got a fair number of SSDs here. Failures have been really rare. The few that have:
#1 just went dead. Not recognized by the computer at all. #2 Got stuck in a weird read-only mode. The OS was thinking it was writing to it, but the writes weren't really happening. You'd reboot and all your changes were undone. The OS was surprisingly okay with this, but would eventually start having problems where pieces of the filesystem metadata it cached didn't sync up with new reads. Reads were still okay, and we were able to make a full backup by mounting in read only mode. #3 Just got progressively slower and slower on writes. but reads were fine.
Overall far lower SSD failure rates than spinning disk failure rates, but we don't have many elderly SSDs yet. We do have a ton of servers running ancient hard drives, so it'll be interesting to see over time.
DHL is probably another good one - their fees are pretty reasonable (similar to Canada Post's), but very few American companies support DHL as a shipping option (probably because it sucked inside the US - despite being close or is the #1 worldwide carrier).
DHL ended US-to-US delivery in 2009. They have a service where they'll use the USPS for local delivery, but it's expensive and slow. They also don't do pickup service (for any destination country) in many parts of the US now, so they've made it really hard for US companies to use them. Not all of it is their fault, but it's hard to use DHL if you're in the US now.
I worked at Williams/Bally/Midway/Atari/etc in the late 90's. I worked in the coin-op video game division, where Steve was across the street in the pinball division. Occasionally he'd swing by our building, and had a fondness for the game system I was working on, so he'd sit at the test machine outside my office and play for quite a while. He always had this knack for making what sounded like the simplest suggestion, yet it actually being a profound change that took it to the next generation.
He'd walk into my office and say "You know, I like (game X) a lot. Have you thought about adding (feature Y)? It's probably a lot of work, but maybe worth it?" and an hour later we were smacking our foreheads as to why we hadn't thought of that ourselves. There's no doubt in my mind how he could look at something like a flipperless pinball machine and figure out how to take it to the next level. It's something I really wish I could do more often myself.
He was a great guy, and one of the most patient people I've known. He'll be greatly missed.
AT&T's commercials that ran in 1993 (skip to about 2:00 to see) had something similar, too. But both of these seem more like what we'd use RFID for than scanning items one at a time.
The narrator for Mythbusters is an Australian guy named Robert Lee. He uses a mostly American sounding accent for what he does for the show, but he pronounces most words the Australian instead of American way when there's a difference.
While I've known some Australians to pronounce it "meth-ane", I've also known some to say "mee-thane" like he did there.
Just so this doesn't become a whole sub-topic of its own... I'm the guy who suggested to Billy that he do an interview on Slashdot, and hooked him up with Roblimo.
Billy and I had some doubts if you guys would believe it was really him answering the questions or not. So, I got him to call me, record his voice through some Asterisk fun over our T1 PRI, and quickly edited what he did into something that didn't have as many noticeable dropouts or crackles since he had to call me on a cell phone due to the very short notice. (This is why the audio quality is so bad.) I whipped it up, added a few second of the theme, and gave it to Roblimo. So, don't blame Billy for the use of the theme song.
However, I believe this would fall under fair use. And even if it didn't, I think it's unlikely that the company that owns the rights to the theme (which I really doubt is an RIAA member) would go after someone for using a few seconds of a song in connection of directly promoting the show when one of the cast members is directly involved.
Good question, but nothing to do with Billy I'm afraid.:)
So, you're upset someone is using something you created without giving you credit or asking permission, but you copied the gameplay and name from another company's game without crediting them in any way or getting permission?
Wherever a form ends, the browser inserts vertical space in many situations, some of which are unavoidable.
You're kidding, right? If you don't want a bottom margin, say so with CSS. This is basic FAQ newbie stuff.
Yes, and IE ignores it in some situations, and in some places will size your table even though it had added the space.
here's no way for webmasters to tell the browser not to pop up with the "Are you sure you want to resend the POST action again?" window.
That's not a bug, that's a feature! POST is not idempotent. Resubmitting a POST is something that absolutely needs to be warned about, because it's a fundamentally different action to reloading a page with GET.
Right, but if I want people to be able to hit the back button and deal with the idemotency and side effect issues on the server side, the user is still annoyed with the popups. If I use GETs, I deal with those problems on the server side and bother the user about the problems as necessary. With POST I can't turn that behavior off even when I know it's incorrect.
Even UI issues aside, I don't think it's a correct design that the page containing a link should have to know if what it's linking to has side effects or not. I would have been much happier if it were standard behavior for the client to add a header saying "This is a prefetch/cache-fill/whatever, treat it as such" and the server replying with "This page can't be prefetched, access it only when you want it to do the action associated with it."
GET/<a href> links with actions taken when clicked are EVERYWHERE. I know Slashdot isn't a shining example of HTML compliance either, but look on the left bar of every page here. That "Logout" link has a side effect of going to it, and it's a GET. At the most basic level, even tracking "how many people have seen this page" is an effect of loading it, that is affected by undesired prefetching. Keeping track of which pages are most recently accessed to handle server side caching of dynamic content is an effect of loading a page, even when no data on the page is changed. At what point do you draw the line between when a request changes something or not?
As much as I support what Google is trying to do with this product, it's causing problems that I don't think they fully considered before launching it.
I've got direct involvement with one website who recently had their site performance suffering. A whole lot of investigation revealed that it specifically was because Google Accelerator was being used by a handful of clients. Why? One page frequently used had a tiny list of links on it to generate reports. "Daily"/"Weekly"/"Monthly"/"Yearly"/"All Records(Note: will take several minutes to generate)". GA was following all of those links to prefetch them.
Yes, there are workarounds to this. But any client that is fetching data without being asked to, and nothing in the HTML indicated that prefetching was desired on them... that's broken. There isn't even a way to ask GA not to prefetch certain links other than hiding them in javascript or forms.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple in the real world though.
If you want to POST something, the only way to do that is to use a form. Forms cause a few problems.
IE and Opera render forms slightly "creatively". Wherever a form ends, the browser inserts vertical space in many situations, some of which are unavoidable. This usually makes the page render very strangely. If I want a list of links, and some of them have side-effects and some don't - my choices are to make some of them forms and some regular <a> tags or make all of them forms. If I make some of them forms, the spacing on the page is inconsistent/wrong. If I make all of them forms, I lose a lot of functionality in the pages that don't have side-effects.
If you want a regular text link to submit a form, you have to use Javascript. This creates a dependancy on Javascript for even the most simple of actions, and makes the links unbookmarkable, and uncopy/pasteable into another window/browser.
If you want to avoid javascript you have to use images or rather ugly UI buttons for every link. Images aren't always appropriate (download times, accessability issues, etc) and there's no way to put a TINY submit button on the page for little-used functions if you're using the standard submit buttons the browser provides.
Other issues with form POSTing include the inability to use the back button after POSTing. Even if we can deal with rePOSTing of the same data on the server side and handle it correctly and gracefully, there's no way for webmasters to tell the browser not to pop up with the "Are you sure you want to resend the POST action again?" window.
So, if we choose to follow the HTTP guidelines, we break UI and style guidelines even worse. If we want to use POST we have to give up having the page rendering correctly in major browsers, break the back button, break the ability to bookmark state information (unless you encode variables both in the URL in get fashion AND others in a POST), and make every link either an image(bad for accessability and download speeds) or use some Javascript magic (even worse for bookmarkability and accessability).
<a href="/link.script?a=1&b=2" method="post"> (if the only goal is to use POST instead of GET, forgetting about the other differences)
Things like this aren't clear "bad webmasters not following the spec" issues. When the browsers that all the clients are using don't give you the tools to use POST in any meaningful way, you're kinda screwed no matter what you do.
Yes, but how many people still have their Quickbasic manuals to reference? If I had said "Look in the 'Data Types' section of your Quickbasic Manual" that would have been useless to almost everyone here.
Actually, I think we both are right here, after looking in my old Quickbasic 4.5 manual.
You are correct, DEFINT casts all variables to 16 bit integers.
DEFLNG casts all variables to 32 bit integers. You also can skip the DEF* instructions and put a & after each variable name to force it to be a 32 bit int.
Unless you DEFLNG things though, intermediary values are still floats... So:
A& = B& + C&
has them all converted to doubles, then back to longs.
But:
DEFLNG AZ
A = B + C
Will do long integer math without the conversions.
I did fully read your post before replying, but I admit my Quickbasic memory is fading a bit.
In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.
Sounded interesting up to that point. Lots of people don't listen to music on their computers. I have a new Powerbook that I bought purely for field work, I'll never listen to a song on it. I"m not paying 1% more for it to support one specific industry who is having trouble adapting to a new era.
Some people use computers to infringe on software copyrights, should there be a tax to help compensate software authors?
Some people use computers to infringe on book copyrights by trading e-books, should there be a tax to help compensate book authors?
What about movies next? I'm sure the MPAA will say they're hurt worse than the music industry by piracy, so they'll want a mandatory tax too.
The fact that there are a large number of people infringing on songs/movies is an indication that the current business model doesn't work for consumers. Right or wrong, I think the vast majority of people out there wouldn't bother with Kazaa and the like if there was a much easier and cheap way to legally buy music.
However, forcing them to pay a tax on computer equipment/internet connections when there's a very good chance that they'd never use their system for such things... No, not going to work.
Konfabulator is what we're using now, but it doesn't really meet his requirements. There's no cycling of what's displayed, we just tried to arrange everything we wanted on the screen. But, unless he buys some massive 40" display, there's no way you can read that unless you're sitting in front of it.
I'm kinda surprised to see this story. I submitted this article about 4 months ago, and just assumed it got rejected....
Anyway...
First page of google, 7 of those are programming examples or toolkits, not actual applications. The others are screensaves that simply scroll RSS text across like a banner. Not what I'm looking for.
Anyone who remembers pointcast knows that these are pretty different. Pointcast had weather maps, images, and looked more like a professionally made TV production instead of a window of scrolling text on the page.
That's what I'm after. I've seen a few businesses that have what look like commercially installed versions of these, but before I ended up writing it myself I wanted to see if there was anything similar already done.
I did google for this pretty extensively.:)
Re:lokitorrent is still illegal
on
LokiTorrent vs. MPAA
·
· Score: 5, Informative
What you're referring to is called "Contributory Infringement". Basically through your actions you're allowing/facilitating copyright infringement to take place by someone else.
Some people seem to think that this is a relatively new "speech impediment".
I don't know either way about this, but here's a video I mirrored before the site hosting it went belly up. It claims to show the difference between Bush's speaking patterns from 10 years ago to today. I'm sure they picked the best examples of each side they could find, but it's still interesting.
Those already exist, kinda. They have regenerative breaking on some models to put power back in the battery when you hit the brakes when going down hill.
None of them actually store energy while you just pedal though, as far as I'm aware.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked with a Russian programmer of very few words, who willingly ran AIX as his desktop OS. When asked why, he said "I enjoy the strict confines of AIX."
I had absolutely no idea how to respond to that.
We've got a fair number of SSDs here. Failures have been really rare. The few that have:
#1 just went dead. Not recognized by the computer at all.
#2 Got stuck in a weird read-only mode. The OS was thinking it was writing to it, but the writes weren't really happening. You'd reboot and all your changes were undone. The OS was surprisingly okay with this, but would eventually start having problems where pieces of the filesystem metadata it cached didn't sync up with new reads. Reads were still okay, and we were able to make a full backup by mounting in read only mode.
#3 Just got progressively slower and slower on writes. but reads were fine.
Overall far lower SSD failure rates than spinning disk failure rates, but we don't have many elderly SSDs yet. We do have a ton of servers running ancient hard drives, so it'll be interesting to see over time.
DHL is probably another good one - their fees are pretty reasonable (similar to Canada Post's), but very few American companies support DHL as a shipping option (probably because it sucked inside the US - despite being close or is the #1 worldwide carrier).
DHL ended US-to-US delivery in 2009. They have a service where they'll use the USPS for local delivery, but it's expensive and slow. They also don't do pickup service (for any destination country) in many parts of the US now, so they've made it really hard for US companies to use them. Not all of it is their fault, but it's hard to use DHL if you're in the US now.
Off topic trivia: Rudy's voice in Funhouse was done by Ed Boon, creator of the Mortal Kombat franchise of games/movies/etc.
I worked at Williams/Bally/Midway/Atari/etc in the late 90's. I worked in the coin-op video game division, where Steve was across the street in the pinball division. Occasionally he'd swing by our building, and had a fondness for the game system I was working on, so he'd sit at the test machine outside my office and play for quite a while. He always had this knack for making what sounded like the simplest suggestion, yet it actually being a profound change that took it to the next generation.
He'd walk into my office and say "You know, I like (game X) a lot. Have you thought about adding (feature Y)? It's probably a lot of work, but maybe worth it?" and an hour later we were smacking our foreheads as to why we hadn't thought of that ourselves. There's no doubt in my mind how he could look at something like a flipperless pinball machine and figure out how to take it to the next level. It's something I really wish I could do more often myself.
He was a great guy, and one of the most patient people I've known. He'll be greatly missed.
AT&T's commercials that ran in 1993 (skip to about 2:00 to see) had something similar, too. But both of these seem more like what we'd use RFID for than scanning items one at a time.
Do you mean like these?
The narrator for Mythbusters is an Australian guy named Robert Lee. He uses a mostly American sounding accent for what he does for the show, but he pronounces most words the Australian instead of American way when there's a difference.
While I've known some Australians to pronounce it "meth-ane", I've also known some to say "mee-thane" like he did there.
Just so this doesn't become a whole sub-topic of its own... I'm the guy who suggested to Billy that he do an interview on Slashdot, and hooked him up with Roblimo.
:)
Billy and I had some doubts if you guys would believe it was really him answering the questions or not. So, I got him to call me, record his voice through some Asterisk fun over our T1 PRI, and quickly edited what he did into something that didn't have as many noticeable dropouts or crackles since he had to call me on a cell phone due to the very short notice. (This is why the audio quality is so bad.) I whipped it up, added a few second of the theme, and gave it to Roblimo. So, don't blame Billy for the use of the theme song.
However, I believe this would fall under fair use. And even if it didn't, I think it's unlikely that the company that owns the rights to the theme (which I really doubt is an RIAA member) would go after someone for using a few seconds of a song in connection of directly promoting the show when one of the cast members is directly involved.
Good question, but nothing to do with Billy I'm afraid.
That would be awesome, but unfortunately it doesn't work.
SuSE's implementation of ESR
Oooh, be careful about pushing this one SCO. He's got guns.
So, you're upset someone is using something you created without giving you credit or asking permission, but you copied the gameplay and name from another company's game without crediting them in any way or getting permission?
Wherever a form ends, the browser inserts vertical space in many situations, some of which are unavoidable.
You're kidding, right? If you don't want a bottom margin, say so with CSS. This is basic FAQ newbie stuff.
Yes, and IE ignores it in some situations, and in some places will size your table even though it had added the space.
here's no way for webmasters to tell the browser not to pop up with the "Are you sure you want to resend the POST action again?" window.
That's not a bug, that's a feature! POST is not idempotent. Resubmitting a POST is something that absolutely needs to be warned about, because it's a fundamentally different action to reloading a page with GET.
Right, but if I want people to be able to hit the back button and deal with the idemotency and side effect issues on the server side, the user is still annoyed with the popups. If I use GETs, I deal with those problems on the server side and bother the user about the problems as necessary. With POST I can't turn that behavior off even when I know it's incorrect.
Even UI issues aside, I don't think it's a correct design that the page containing a link should have to know if what it's linking to has side effects or not. I would have been much happier if it were standard behavior for the client to add a header saying "This is a prefetch/cache-fill/whatever, treat it as such" and the server replying with "This page can't be prefetched, access it only when you want it to do the action associated with it."
GET/<a href> links with actions taken when clicked are EVERYWHERE. I know Slashdot isn't a shining example of HTML compliance either, but look on the left bar of every page here. That "Logout" link has a side effect of going to it, and it's a GET. At the most basic level, even tracking "how many people have seen this page" is an effect of loading it, that is affected by undesired prefetching. Keeping track of which pages are most recently accessed to handle server side caching of dynamic content is an effect of loading a page, even when no data on the page is changed. At what point do you draw the line between when a request changes something or not?
As much as I support what Google is trying to do with this product, it's causing problems that I don't think they fully considered before launching it.
I've got direct involvement with one website who recently had their site performance suffering. A whole lot of investigation revealed that it specifically was because Google Accelerator was being used by a handful of clients. Why? One page frequently used had a tiny list of links on it to generate reports. "Daily"/"Weekly"/"Monthly"/"Yearly"/"All Records(Note: will take several minutes to generate)". GA was following all of those links to prefetch them.
Yes, there are workarounds to this. But any client that is fetching data without being asked to, and nothing in the HTML indicated that prefetching was desired on them... that's broken. There isn't even a way to ask GA not to prefetch certain links other than hiding them in javascript or forms.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple in the real world though.
If you want to POST something, the only way to do that is to use a form. Forms cause a few problems.
IE and Opera render forms slightly "creatively". Wherever a form ends, the browser inserts vertical space in many situations, some of which are unavoidable. This usually makes the page render very strangely. If I want a list of links, and some of them have side-effects and some don't - my choices are to make some of them forms and some regular <a> tags or make all of them forms. If I make some of them forms, the spacing on the page is inconsistent/wrong. If I make all of them forms, I lose a lot of functionality in the pages that don't have side-effects.
If you want a regular text link to submit a form, you have to use Javascript. This creates a dependancy on Javascript for even the most simple of actions, and makes the links unbookmarkable, and uncopy/pasteable into another window/browser.
If you want to avoid javascript you have to use images or rather ugly UI buttons for every link. Images aren't always appropriate (download times, accessability issues, etc) and there's no way to put a TINY submit button on the page for little-used functions if you're using the standard submit buttons the browser provides.
Other issues with form POSTing include the inability to use the back button after POSTing. Even if we can deal with rePOSTing of the same data on the server side and handle it correctly and gracefully, there's no way for webmasters to tell the browser not to pop up with the "Are you sure you want to resend the POST action again?" window.
So, if we choose to follow the HTTP guidelines, we break UI and style guidelines even worse. If we want to use POST we have to give up having the page rendering correctly in major browsers, break the back button, break the ability to bookmark state information (unless you encode variables both in the URL in get fashion AND others in a POST), and make every link either an image(bad for accessability and download speeds) or use some Javascript magic (even worse for bookmarkability and accessability).
I would love something like:
<a href="/link.script" method="post" variables="a=1;b=2">
or even just:
<a href="/link.script?a=1&b=2" method="post"> (if the only goal is to use POST instead of GET, forgetting about the other differences)
Things like this aren't clear "bad webmasters not following the spec" issues. When the browsers that all the clients are using don't give you the tools to use POST in any meaningful way, you're kinda screwed no matter what you do.
Yes, but how many people still have their Quickbasic manuals to reference? If I had said "Look in the 'Data Types' section of your Quickbasic Manual" that would have been useless to almost everyone here.
Actually, I think we both are right here, after looking in my old Quickbasic 4.5 manual.
You are correct, DEFINT casts all variables to 16 bit integers.
DEFLNG casts all variables to 32 bit integers. You also can skip the DEF* instructions and put a & after each variable name to force it to be a 32 bit int.
Unless you DEFLNG things though, intermediary values are still floats... So:
A& = B& + C&
has them all converted to doubles, then back to longs.
But:
DEFLNG AZ
A = B + C
Will do long integer math without the conversions.
I did fully read your post before replying, but I admit my Quickbasic memory is fading a bit.
Google for "qbasic defint" and see something that might have saved you some time.
adding "DEFINT AZ" to the top of your code would have made variables default to integer math instead of floating point.
In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.
Sounded interesting up to that point. Lots of people don't listen to music on their computers. I have a new Powerbook that I bought purely for field work, I'll never listen to a song on it. I"m not paying 1% more for it to support one specific industry who is having trouble adapting to a new era.
Some people use computers to infringe on software copyrights, should there be a tax to help compensate software authors?
Some people use computers to infringe on book copyrights by trading e-books, should there be a tax to help compensate book authors?
What about movies next? I'm sure the MPAA will say they're hurt worse than the music industry by piracy, so they'll want a mandatory tax too.
The fact that there are a large number of people infringing on songs/movies is an indication that the current business model doesn't work for consumers. Right or wrong, I think the vast majority of people out there wouldn't bother with Kazaa and the like if there was a much easier and cheap way to legally buy music.
However, forcing them to pay a tax on computer equipment/internet connections when there's a very good chance that they'd never use their system for such things... No, not going to work.
COWBOYNEAL: BLACKMAIL!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Konfabulator is what we're using now, but it doesn't really meet his requirements. There's no cycling of what's displayed, we just tried to arrange everything we wanted on the screen. But, unless he buys some massive 40" display, there's no way you can read that unless you're sitting in front of it.
I'm kinda surprised to see this story. I submitted this article about 4 months ago, and just assumed it got rejected....
:)
Anyway...
First page of google, 7 of those are programming examples or toolkits, not actual applications. The others are screensaves that simply scroll RSS text across like a banner. Not what I'm looking for.
Anyone who remembers pointcast knows that these are pretty different. Pointcast had weather maps, images, and looked more like a professionally made TV production instead of a window of scrolling text on the page.
That's what I'm after. I've seen a few businesses that have what look like commercially installed versions of these, but before I ended up writing it myself I wanted to see if there was anything similar already done.
I did google for this pretty extensively.
What you're referring to is called "Contributory Infringement". Basically through your actions you're allowing/facilitating copyright infringement to take place by someone else.
2 89 goes into more detail too.
http://www.crblaw.com/GetFAQAnswer.asp?id=49 has a blurb about it.
http://www.chillingeffects.org/piracy/faq.cgi#QID
Some people seem to think that this is a relatively new "speech impediment".
I don't know either way about this, but here's a video I mirrored before the site hosting it went belly up. It claims to show the difference between Bush's speaking patterns from 10 years ago to today. I'm sure they picked the best examples of each side they could find, but it's still interesting.
Coral Cache
My overloaded server
Those already exist, kinda. They have regenerative breaking on some models to put power back in the battery when you hit the brakes when going down hill.
None of them actually store energy while you just pedal though, as far as I'm aware.
I think you've got that backwards. APR requires gmake, automake, autoconf and libtool to build. You can build those things without APR.
apr-0.9.4_9
The Apache Group's Portability Library
Maintained by: rodrigc@crodrigues.org
Requires: autoconf-2.59_2, automake-1.8.5_2, expat-1.95.8, gettext-0.13.1_1, gmake-3.80_2, libiconv-1.9.2_1, libtool-1.5.8, m4-1.4.1, perl-5.8.5