Anyone been to Mammoth (Calif. Ski resort in the Sierra Nevada). They built a monorail a while back to link their lodges (I mean, the place is called Mammoth). First year, lots of breakdowns. Nope, the train never comes. Now it's just a rust bucket. OK. Now lets sing the Simpsons refrain (one more time!).
I must have missed that Visual Basic Enterprise accounting system:)
Even in your own C++ example citing, you did explicitly change the type. Something not necessary in Perl. You can multiply an integer by a float and it's a float -- even if you thought the float was an int but somewhere in there...
I gotta say, I don't think I would trust an accounting system written primarily in Perl (though I love Perl and use it all the time). Perl's weak data typing and "magic" data type conversions (with no warning) make it fast to program, but very difficult to program with the kind of penny precision you need for accounting. A small change to one line of code, the use of floating point where integers are required, etc. can lead to small, hard to notice, creeping errors. I'm sure the designers were conscious of that sort of thing, but it only takes one sloppy update...
In fact, G3 hasn't been successful in Japan, but it's not the fault of the "technology crazy" Japanese consumer.
In addition to the cost of deployment limiting availability to a few areas, there have been big technical problems. Really, other than voice, none of the snazzy features (video, pictures, raygun) have been working. Who wants to pay 2x as much for a voice-only system that only works in a couple cities, weighs a brick, and sucks juice like a two-year old on a sugar binge?
Maybe they'll work the bugs out before this stuff gets deployed in the US (3G ~ 2004 depending on the FCC +/- $80 Billion)
This press release is just a way of hyping Cingular and Nokia.
The FCC has not authorized ANY frequency band for 3G yet. Plans to re-allocate military spectra fell through.
3G deployment is years in the future in the US because no standard can be set till the Government gives up some useable range of frequencies.
So this is just GSM with the added benefit of a hyped up press release. GSM can be upgraded to EDGE (3G) in the future (though it will require more towers and different equipment on them), but it ain't happening now (we're talking about now, aren't we?)
APL (A Programming Language) sure is an oddball that just keeps on going (and it's my favorite language ever). It was originally developed as a mathematical notation - and it used every Greek letter plus a whole raft of special symbols (some requiring "double strikes" -- two bytes. IBM used to sell special terminals/keyboards with all those characters. That kind of limited its wide spread adoption.
It was used for early computer graphics terminals (e.g. Techtronics) because of its powerful matrix manipulation tools and by a bunch of Investment banks and Insurance companies (many still use it!) because of its rapid facility at modeling cash flows and complex financial instruments.
IBM Still Sells it and there's still an APL culture.
Remember: 1394/Firewire drives are FAKE
on
Firewire and Linux?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
At the moment (unfortunately) there is no such thing as a native 1394/Firewire harddrive. All available 1394 drives are ATA = IDE drives going through an adapter (several adapters are available).
That means these drives are performance limited by the ATA interface. The best performance I've seen reported is about 90% of what the drive could do directly plugged in to an IDE cable.
I have found no analysis of how the other Firewire characteristics of these adapted drives hold up (low cpu usage, numerous drives, how robust when hot swapping).
There are native firewire CDRWs (Sony makes one I think) and firewire tape backup systems. But not hard drives. Seagate has been threatening to make one for a year or so, but where's the bits?
Proxim has been really hot on 802.11a technology because, even though they were the first with the old 1.5Mbps tech, they were last with 802.11b.
The big question: Does anyone know? Is Intel just an OEM for Proxim's 802.11a product? (Proxim also had new product announcements today) Intel OEMs other wireless stuff from Proxim.
Maybe Proxim will be the big player in 802.11a.
BOTH Intel's and Proxim's new products are based on the ATHEROS 802.11a chipset.
Proof The Screen Shots are FAKE!
on
First Review of Halo
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The simple fact is the screenshots are about 1280x965 pixels. I TV has a theoretical maximum of 525 horizontal dots of resolution (and somewhat fewer vertical lines).
That means these are not screenshots. They're manufactured by some other means. Only MSFT knows for sure. Certainly not the reviewer.
Whatever else is faked is left to our imagination...
Game boxes will be very quiet in the future because they're going to have PVR functions and what not, and you don't what your box drowning out the T-vision.
I'd like to see some actual work put into researching a quiet box. How about using Seagate's U series drives which is actually designed for home entertainment applications?
(By the way -- how exactly does aluminum dampen noise? Gotta dig out that physics book again dammit...)
I just think it's a shame when this kind of quote is posted without a credible reference. Too many inflamatory blurbs like this are spread as Gospel without any kind of legitimation (except for a "5" from the/. moderators)
peacepilgrim has the quote, but who the heck are they?
The quote doesn't appear in the standard references so far as I can figure. It might be (probably is) real, but...
AT&T even allows commercial PORN servers...
on
Broadband Crackdown
·
· Score: 1
I have AT&T (formerlyl mediaone, formerly roadrunner) and was one of their original test subscribers for their cable modem service in Venice/Culver City, CA. Not only have they always allowed webservers, but they even allow commercial webservers. Not only that, they allow commercial Porn webservers.
I complained about porn server mirrors running on my little cable node. (Not a moral objection, but a bandwidth hog objection). Not only did AT&T/Mediaone/Roadrunner tell me that that was tough cookies for me (Porn/Commercial webservers are fine unless higher powers decide otherwise on a case by case basis -- e.g. no kiddie porn), but I got nailed for doing the port scan to find the servers! One more port scan and I'm booted...
Public Service note: AT&T (roadrunner/mediaone) has by default filtered port 80 and other lower port numbers for some time. You just have to ask them to switch off the filtering: send an email to netbios@mediaone.net making the request. (netbios is in the name because MSFT file sharing on port 139 was one of the first filters they put in place).
Just as a matter of courtesy to your readers...
"Sen. Charles Schumer of New York..." ought to read "Sen. Charles Schumer(D) of New York"
It's just nice to see those little (D)'s and (R)'s after their names to help with mental geography...
Don't take the bait. Is it a coincidence that these small groups are suddenly coming into prominence at the same time the energy companies and Bush are under attack for the environmentally abusive "energy policy." This stuff is being fed to the mainstream media by the FBI. They decide whether this month it will be Bin Ladin or China that will be the boogy man.
Think about how large the environmental terrorist movement is versus other national threats and it's obvious somebody is playing somebody.
The white elephant that isn't being discussed here is that Sony is doing this for TAX purposes.
The need the Playstation 2 to be classified as a computing device rather than as a consumer electronics/entertainment device (For Great Britain - I don't know about the European Community as a whole).
This was discussed in Slashdot before. Where's that group memory thing (or I guess I'm one cell of it...)
For a long time now Informix's core database business has been sinking into the sludge. Their customer base growth dropped to 0 and was heading the wrong way from there. On the other hand, they have built an impressive business intelligence/warehousing business that is growing well and recently announced that they were (finally!) going to divorce those tools from their database so they could work with the rest of the world.
So this deal makes sense for IFMX.
BUT WHY is IBM doing it??????
The informix database doesn't offer a huge leap in technology over DB2.
Could they simply want to expand their customer base? Are they just buying clients?? Very strange.
Apple has shown us what the minimum requirements for a Desktop OS are. After all, they nearly sold the ranch to make sure the new MSFT Office got ported. They have also agressively sought the latest 3d acceleration hardware and porting of the lastest games.
(As a matter of disclosure, I'm a big FreeBSD fan, and use it for my servers).
Games and Office apps just haven't been the biggest priority for FreeBSD devlopers or for application developers considering which OS's are worthy of ports.
At best Quake 3 A will run somewhat awkwardly with no acceleration.
I don't think Word perfect was ever ported.
That said, if MSFT office were ever ported to BSD, BSD would overnight become the premiere open source desktop OS. Period. I think that's obvious to all of us.
(By the way, on the server side, BSD has two major league limititations: SMP is still a work in progress. It has a ways to go before it's as efficient as (gulp) WinNT (or the new Linux kernel even).
Also, despite little newsgroup burps to the contrary, Oracle hasn't really been ported to BSD. Some have tried, and some have claimed they could boot it, but nobody is claiming a production Oracle running under BSD.
Certainly not Oracle 8-9x.
Actually the word is quash: to suppress or extinguish
(def 2 - websters).
Squelch would be OK, but I think he was thinking of quash - which is what people usually say when they're talking about some mega-company trying to hide an embarrassing fact.
You are missing something.
If you have non-volatile MRAM that doesn't require power to keep its memory content intact (unlike DRAM which requires constant refresh), you can just flip off the juice and come back to a nice happy (the way you left it) system.
320MB isn't that big anymore, in a world where 256MB costs about $100.
(And I use Win2k. It's not too bad. Better than Win98 for sure).
I don't know why Moto is getting all this Press when IBM/Infineon made a virtually identical announcement a month ago. There was astory in EETIMES just last week where the joint venture IBM/Infineon team projected 2004 (same as MOT) for a commercial product.
http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20010110S1009
They also said they saw no reason why it could have essentially the same interface as conventional memory. Motherboard architectures would be basically the same.
But... Monsanto gave away the rice genome
on
Rice Genome Mapped
·
· Score: 3
Monsanto, the biggest developer of genetically modified crops in the world, made the rice genome freely available last year.
Press Release:
href="http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto/media/00/00 aug4_goldenrice.html
You need to register (on paper!) but the genome itself is available here:
http://www.rice-research.org/>Rice Genome site.
Much hoopla about this at the time.
So what's the deal?
(golden rice in the press release refers to rice with extra beta carotene for developing countries. They're offering the regular rice genome plus assistence in developing golden rice crops).
I appreciate your checking some numbers yourself, but I have to say, your tone is kind of surly.
But, anyway, what I had read
about optimizing mod_perl said in the first sentence:
CGI.pm is a big module that by default postpones the compilation of its methods until they are actually needed.
On the other hand, if you're running mod_perl (which you would to speed up that CGI lag you mentioned), as that page points out, you would want to
use CGI;
CGI->compile(':all');
And that would increase the memory for each child process (apache) you might be running.
Of course, if you're running a nice fat system without heavy demands on it, who cares?
If you're optimizing a system and really aren't making heavy use of CGI.pm's convenient features, you might care. CGI is the only game in town for a lot of things, and for the most part, apache/mod_perl makes it pretty efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone been to Mammoth (Calif. Ski resort in the Sierra Nevada). They built a monorail a while back to link their lodges (I mean, the place is called Mammoth). First year, lots of breakdowns. Nope, the train never comes. Now it's just a rust bucket. OK. Now lets sing the Simpsons refrain (one more time!).
I always kind of wondered... Why did Scotty even need the aluminum to be transparent? They could've carried the whale in a regular aluminum tank. :)
I must have missed that Visual Basic Enterprise accounting system :)
Even in your own C++ example citing, you did explicitly change the type. Something not necessary in Perl. You can multiply an integer by a float and it's a float -- even if you thought the float was an int but somewhere in there...
I gotta say, I don't think I would trust an accounting system written primarily in Perl (though I love Perl and use it all the time). Perl's weak data typing and "magic" data type conversions (with no warning) make it fast to program, but very difficult to program with the kind of penny precision you need for accounting. A small change to one line of code, the use of floating point where integers are required, etc. can lead to small, hard to notice, creeping errors. I'm sure the designers were conscious of that sort of thing, but it only takes one sloppy update...
In fact, G3 hasn't been successful in Japan, but it's not the fault of the "technology crazy" Japanese consumer.
In addition to the cost of deployment limiting availability to a few areas, there have been big technical problems. Really, other than voice, none of the snazzy features (video, pictures, raygun) have been working. Who wants to pay 2x as much for a voice-only system that only works in a couple cities, weighs a brick, and sucks juice like a two-year old on a sugar binge?
Maybe they'll work the bugs out before this stuff gets deployed in the US (3G ~ 2004 depending on the FCC +/- $80 Billion)
This press release is just a way of hyping Cingular and Nokia.
The FCC has not authorized ANY frequency band for 3G yet. Plans to re-allocate military spectra fell through.
3G deployment is years in the future in the US because no standard can be set till the Government gives up some useable range of frequencies.
So this is just GSM with the added benefit of a hyped up press release. GSM can be upgraded to EDGE (3G) in the future (though it will require more towers and different equipment on them), but it ain't happening now (we're talking about now, aren't we?)
APL (A Programming Language) sure is an oddball that just keeps on going (and it's my favorite language ever). It was originally developed as a mathematical notation - and it used every Greek letter plus a whole raft of special symbols (some requiring "double strikes" -- two bytes. IBM used to sell special terminals/keyboards with all those characters. That kind of limited its wide spread adoption.
It was used for early computer graphics terminals (e.g. Techtronics) because of its powerful matrix manipulation tools and by a bunch of Investment banks and Insurance companies (many still use it!) because of its rapid facility at modeling cash flows and complex financial instruments. IBM Still Sells it and there's still an APL culture.
At the moment (unfortunately) there is no such thing as a native 1394/Firewire harddrive. All available 1394 drives are ATA = IDE drives going through an adapter (several adapters are available).
That means these drives are performance limited by the ATA interface. The best performance I've seen reported is about 90% of what the drive could do directly plugged in to an IDE cable.
I have found no analysis of how the other Firewire characteristics of these adapted drives hold up (low cpu usage, numerous drives, how robust when hot swapping).
There are native firewire CDRWs (Sony makes one I think) and firewire tape backup systems. But not hard drives. Seagate has been threatening to make one for a year or so, but where's the bits?
Proxim has been really hot on 802.11a technology because, even though they were the first with the old 1.5Mbps tech, they were last with 802.11b.
The big question: Does anyone know? Is Intel just an OEM for Proxim's 802.11a product? (Proxim also had new product announcements today) Intel OEMs other wireless stuff from Proxim.
Maybe Proxim will be the big player in 802.11a.
BOTH Intel's and Proxim's new products are based on the ATHEROS 802.11a chipset.
The simple fact is the screenshots are about 1280x965 pixels. I TV has a theoretical maximum of 525 horizontal dots of resolution (and somewhat fewer vertical lines).
That means these are not screenshots. They're manufactured by some other means. Only MSFT knows for sure. Certainly not the reviewer.
Whatever else is faked is left to our imagination...
Game boxes will be very quiet in the future because they're going to have PVR functions and what not, and you don't what your box drowning out the T-vision.
I'd like to see some actual work put into researching a quiet box. How about using Seagate's U series drives which is actually designed for home entertainment applications?
(By the way -- how exactly does aluminum dampen noise? Gotta dig out that physics book again dammit...)
Fixing my link to the Symbol proposal (pdf)
Also pretty interesting 802.15 task group 1 for WPANs(TM)
In the real world, people have successfully combined bluetooth devices and 802.11b networks on a large scale.
Look at UPS $100MM Project. (CNN.com story)
Symbol Technologies helped them do it and have been working with the IEEE (pdf file) to make sure 802.11b and Bluetooth don't destroy each other.
But the important point here is that co-existence isn't automatic. You've gotta know what you are doing!
I just think it's a shame when this kind of quote is posted without a credible reference. Too many inflamatory blurbs like this are spread as Gospel without any kind of legitimation (except for a "5" from the /. moderators)
...
peacepilgrim
has the quote, but who the heck are they? The quote doesn't appear in the standard references so far as I can figure. It might be (probably is) real, but
I have AT&T (formerlyl mediaone, formerly roadrunner) and was one of their original test subscribers for their cable modem service in Venice/Culver City, CA. Not only have they always allowed webservers, but they even allow commercial webservers. Not only that, they allow commercial Porn webservers. I complained about porn server mirrors running on my little cable node. (Not a moral objection, but a bandwidth hog objection). Not only did AT&T/Mediaone/Roadrunner tell me that that was tough cookies for me (Porn/Commercial webservers are fine unless higher powers decide otherwise on a case by case basis -- e.g. no kiddie porn), but I got nailed for doing the port scan to find the servers! One more port scan and I'm booted... Public Service note: AT&T (roadrunner/mediaone) has by default filtered port 80 and other lower port numbers for some time. You just have to ask them to switch off the filtering: send an email to netbios@mediaone.net making the request. (netbios is in the name because MSFT file sharing on port 139 was one of the first filters they put in place).
Just as a matter of courtesy to your readers... "Sen. Charles Schumer of New York..." ought to read "Sen. Charles Schumer(D) of New York" It's just nice to see those little (D)'s and (R)'s after their names to help with mental geography...
Don't take the bait. Is it a coincidence that these small groups are suddenly coming into prominence at the same time the energy companies and Bush are under attack for the environmentally abusive "energy policy." This stuff is being fed to the mainstream media by the FBI. They decide whether this month it will be Bin Ladin or China that will be the boogy man. Think about how large the environmental terrorist movement is versus other national threats and it's obvious somebody is playing somebody.
The need the Playstation 2 to be classified as a computing device rather than as a consumer electronics/entertainment device (For Great Britain - I don't know about the European Community as a whole).
This was discussed in Slashdot before. Where's that group memory thing (or I guess I'm one cell of it...)
So this deal makes sense for IFMX.
BUT WHY is IBM doing it??????
The informix database doesn't offer a huge leap in technology over DB2.
Could they simply want to expand their customer base? Are they just buying clients?? Very strange.
Apple has shown us what the minimum requirements for a Desktop OS are. After all, they nearly sold the ranch to make sure the new MSFT Office got ported. They have also agressively sought the latest 3d acceleration hardware and porting of the lastest games. (As a matter of disclosure, I'm a big FreeBSD fan, and use it for my servers). Games and Office apps just haven't been the biggest priority for FreeBSD devlopers or for application developers considering which OS's are worthy of ports. At best Quake 3 A will run somewhat awkwardly with no acceleration. I don't think Word perfect was ever ported. That said, if MSFT office were ever ported to BSD, BSD would overnight become the premiere open source desktop OS. Period. I think that's obvious to all of us. (By the way, on the server side, BSD has two major league limititations: SMP is still a work in progress. It has a ways to go before it's as efficient as (gulp) WinNT (or the new Linux kernel even). Also, despite little newsgroup burps to the contrary, Oracle hasn't really been ported to BSD. Some have tried, and some have claimed they could boot it, but nobody is claiming a production Oracle running under BSD. Certainly not Oracle 8-9x.
Actually the word is quash: to suppress or extinguish (def 2 - websters). Squelch would be OK, but I think he was thinking of quash - which is what people usually say when they're talking about some mega-company trying to hide an embarrassing fact.
320MB isn't that big anymore, in a world where 256MB costs about $100.
(And I use Win2k. It's not too bad. Better than Win98 for sure).
http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20010110S1009
They also said they saw no reason why it could have essentially the same interface as conventional memory. Motherboard architectures would be basically the same.
Monsanto, the biggest developer of genetically modified crops in the world, made the rice genome freely available last year. Press Release: href="http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto/media/00/00 aug4_goldenrice.html
You need to register (on paper!) but the genome itself is available here:
http://www.rice-research.org/>Rice Genome site.
Much hoopla about this at the time.
So what's the deal?
(golden rice in the press release refers to rice with extra beta carotene for developing countries. They're offering the regular rice genome plus assistence in developing golden rice crops).
But, anyway, what I had read about optimizing mod_perl said in the first sentence: CGI.pm is a big module that by default postpones the compilation of its methods until they are actually needed.
On the other hand, if you're running mod_perl (which you would to speed up that CGI lag you mentioned), as that page points out, you would want to
use CGI;
CGI->compile(':all');
And that would increase the memory for each child process (apache) you might be running.
Of course, if you're running a nice fat system without heavy demands on it, who cares?
If you're optimizing a system and really aren't making heavy use of CGI.pm's convenient features, you might care. CGI is the only game in town for a lot of things, and for the most part, apache/mod_perl makes it pretty efficient.