You have to give up the act of smoking (which is roughly 50% of the addiction usually) and then simultaniously ween yourself from the nicotine at the _same_ time.
Mmm, I call denial. While smoking is the act that is reinforced, Nicotine is the reinforcer. I smoked a cigar with a girlfriend a year and a half ago, and could feel my brain being rewired as I did. It seemed a rather odd, exotic, thing to do at first.. then something twigged in my brain and it felt *right*. Ever since there's been a part of my brain that has really, really wanted to do more of that thing that I were doing that time that made me feel that way.. brr, scary.
It's the nicotine. Commercial cigarettes may well have chemicals that increase the absorption and effectiveness of the nicotine, but don't kid yourself that the nicotine is incidental.
Netscape started with new, clean code. They did start with many of the University of Illinois personnel who had created Mosaic, but the code base was a from-scratch restart.
It's only scary if you don't understand why Microsoft keeps so much money available. For one thing, they operate without any debt. As in $0 debt. They owe nothing. That means they can save money above and beyond operating expenses and reinvesting. Second, and most importantly, Mr. Gates has said a number of times that his plan is to keep enough accessible "cash" available to be able to run Microsoft for at least one year without any income at all. Think about that. With around 40,000 employees worldwide, and an average salary of probably $100,000 (to keep things nice and round. it's probably a bit lower), you're talking $4billion just to pay payroll for a single year. Plus benefits (insurance, 401K matching, taxes, etc), plus operating costs (rent, power and utilities, bandwidth, taxes, etc), and so on. Before you know it, that $40bil is eaten up very quickly when there's nothing coming in.
That seems more like public commentary designed to justify their cash position, rather than reasoned business logic.
It is literally inconceivable to imagine Microsoft's revenue dropping to zero for a quarter, let alone a year. And if it did, then it would be appropriate for Microsoft to do what Dell, IBM, and Sun do.. lay people off.
The scary thing about Microsoft is that $40 billion in cash they've got burning a hole in their balance sheet. That's probably enough scratch to buy all gaming developers other than Sony and Nintendo themselves, and they've apparently tried to pick up Nintendo.
The industry is better off so long as there is strong competition.. as Microsoft is currently in third place with X-Box, it probably won't hurt things too much to have them pick up Vivendi Interactive. If they were to pick up Vivendi, Sega, and Konami, say, and to still look hungry, then I'd be pretty worried.
I'll still be pissed if I can't get StarCraft: Ghost on my new PS2, tho.
Since everything in Texas is controlled by good ol boys, I'm sure the decision to use this software was anything but objective.
Microsoft has made a practice of sending Bill Gates and Steve Balmer to take to the CEO's of large companies to persuade them mano-a-mano to use Microsoft's stuff, regardless of technical details like licensing, cost, and what-not that low level tech folk (peons) might kvetch about.
Microsoft is a good technology company but a great marketing company. The entire notion that a city (or anyone) NOT using Microsoft software is cause for a front page news story demonstrates how much they have created and maintained the image of being the only choice.
I'd say Houston was more objective than most. How many audit threats, after all, should it take to encourage one to find a different software vendor?
We do on several of our servers. The main reason is that it's much, much easier to build an Apache server with SSL support on Apache 2 than it is on Apache 1.x, particularly if you're adding additional modules on top.
As the owner of UNIX, SCO probably has rights to a lot of patents from AT&T, USL, and Novell pertaining to UNIX. Those patents presumably wouldn't be recorded as being registered by SCO, even if SCO owns them now.
Oh, I don't deny that one can reason about human perception and thinking, and that such reasoning is by necessity much more high-level and abstract than for things like physics, chemistry, etc.
Feelings are absolutely appropriate for describing the internal state of a mind. Indeed, feelings are even a fairly reliable way to learn about the internal state of other's minds, as well.. non-verbal communication, and etc.
Sure.
The laws in the Hebrew Bible. Clearly an attempt to reign in human passion. Or even better, many of Jesus' parables which are counter-intutitive.The point being that sometimes god has to overrided human feelings.
If you say so. I agree that the Torah and Bible were (and are) defining characteristics of civilization, and that there's lots in them that might be counter to what one individual might like to do at any given time. That doesn't mean that the accepted validity of those books isn't due to people's emotional acceptance of them. Guilt and shame are human feelings, too.
Religions are memes in culture; someone (a jesus, a joseph smith, a mohammed, a l. ron hubbard, a david koresh) somewhere starts a religious idea (or, extremely commonly, mutates an earlier religious idea), and spreads it around. Those religious traditions that appeal to people more spread more efficiently, and become dominant in the thinking of those people infected by it, such that one's spiritual feeling (and that of one's co-religionists) is taken as affirmative evidence for the dogma in question. It doesn't matter that other people believe other things upon equal evidence, as they are simply considered 'other'.
That's one scientific (or at least rationalist) description of religion. Nice and reconciled, makes perfect sense.
You can go the other way as well.. Jehovah/Jesus Christ/Allah/Xenu created the world and set everything up as a test to see if the little people on the ground would believe the right thing and live forever minus their bodies/pay money and get Clear. Skeptics are nothing but cynics, trying to ruin a beautiful thing for everyone, hell-bound, forces of the devil, whose greatest trick was convincing people that lack of evidence for him might imply that he didn't exist, and etc.
That's also reconciliation of a sort.. certainly anyone who holds that sort of belief has a place for skeptics (cynics), and is happy with that place for them.
Asking the scientist/rationalist to accept that feelings are a reliable basis for making factual statements about the world is asking too much. Asking the religious to accept that feelings are not a reliable basis for making factual statements about teh world is often asking too much as well.
That's The Register's editorial voice you're hearing. They regularly refer to Intel as Chipzilla, Microsoft as The Beast, and what-not. All good cheeky British fun.
Sounds a bit like Bitkeeper, the commercial, decentralized source code control system being used by Linus and a bunch of the Linux kernel hackers these days.
You're talking about the The Middleware Company's "shootout" between their "optimized" PetStore implementation and their.NET version.
Laying aside that Sun never put the PetStore demo forward as a benchmark, The Middleware Company did a lot to optimize the.NET version that they did not do for the Java version. The fact that Microsoft was paying for the comparison may have had something to do with this.
Read Rickard Öberg's analysis of the comparison to learn all of the ways in which the comparison was flawed. To name just one, The Middleware Company announced that it took fewer lines of code in the.NET version to do the same thing, but they left methods in their Java version that were never even called anywhere in the code.
In addition, the.NET version did aggressive caching in memory, in such a way that it would be impossible to scale the code across more than one server, while the J2EE version was implemented using BMP, which robs an application server of the ability to do any caching whatsoever.
It goes on and on and on. Read the analysis for yourself.
iControl is not a PVR. Some Time Warner outlets (like Time Warner Austin) are deploying the new Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 box, which comes with a (nominal) 80 gigabyte hard drive, and can function as an honest PVR.
Time Warner Austin is deploying the same box. It's a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000; they can come with different sized hard drives. Time Warner Austin markets these as having 50 hours worth of storage, but it uses variable bit-rate compression for the digitization, so you never know for sure just how much you can store.
The Explorer 8000 hardware is very nice. Two tuners, so it can be simultaneously recording two separate shows on two separate channels (either analog or digital) while you're watching something in playback. I can't tell any difference between playback and live quality, which is better than you get with a (non satTV) Replay or TiVo, where the compression is generally quite noticeable. The 8000 works better as well than the SA Explorer 2000 digital cable box.. changing channels is faster, etc.
Unfortunately, the firmware in the box is pretty crappy still. They have been improving it, but even with the latest firmware release, there are a whole lot of issues.. The experience of using it is not nearly as nice as a TiVo, and it is completely lacking anything like the TiVo 'Season Pass' or 'Recommendations' functions, so if you tell it to record every episode of the Daily Show, it will do so.. four times a day as Comedy Central shows repeats three times a day. At other times, the box seems to simply forget to record a show you told it you wanted, usually if the show changed times after the 8000 initially made a note as to the time and channel to record. The SAE 8000 uses Time Warner's standard cable guide, seemingly, and it appears that the cable guide provided by the cable system doesn't provide enough data to do the kind of smart tricks a TiVo can do.
For 10 bucks a month, it's quite a bit cheaper than a TiVo or Replay, but if you've got one of those, I wouldn't advise ditching it in favor of the Time Warner box. If Time Warner and Scientific Atlanta keep working at it and continue to put out firmware upgrades, it might turn into something quite nice indeed. As it stands, having the Time Warner box is better than not having the Time Warner box, but not as nice as having TiVo or Replay.
It is ironic, you're right. However, a lot of the security problems in Outlook are due to its tight integration with the MSIE ActiveX components. If Mozilla were to allow that kind of tight binding, you'd likely open Mozilla up to a lot of security issues.
That doesn't mean that it might not ought to be done, but I can see why it might not be a terribly high priority for folks on the project.
These days I'm carrying around a Sony SJ-30 model, running PalmOS 4.1. Color, 16 megabytes, hi-res screen.
What do I use it for? My calendar and address book, certainly. As a diabetic, I use it to record all my blood sugar readings. I have a very nice multifunction scientific calculator on it which I use all the time for anything for simple math or better. I have several games on it. I have a dozen e-books on it, which I read whenever I've got an idle moment. I have a dozen of my less-used passwords stored on it in a triple-DES encrypted form using Gnu Keyring. I use Plucker to download and carry around web clippings from national newspapers, and the Austin Chronicle's movie listings and reviews. I have several technical references stored as well, along with some utility calculators for special purpose conversions.
I carry my Sony around with me all the time; I would feel rather naked without it.
Actually, it's Microsoft's customers are that 95% of the market. What *they* say goes, and if folks widely realize that Microsoft is deliberately holding their data hostage, I'd imagine a good portion of them might take action. OASIS is one venue that could allow that.
Doing them in XML wouldn't gain all that much, as different programs have very different needs for configuration files. The point of using ASCII as your greatest common denominator is that you can express whatever linguistic ideas you want. Forcing a tree hierarchy, as XML does, wouldn't necessarily gain all that much, if you're dealing with a sendmail.cf file or the like. It would probably be a step down, in fact, unless you had an m4-like processor (XSLT?) that could do interesting, useful, and efficient transformations to the file.
If the extensibility is so great, then why did such an obvious improvement take so long?
Because until the late 90's desktop UNIX renaissance brought about by Linux, KDE, and Gnome, people figured there was no point in pushing that particular rock uphill. Would you spend years of your life trying to improve the foundations of X so that CDE could do some fancy new graphical thing?
Please.
Since the founding of the XFree86 foundation, X has been improving at a faster rate than it has in fifteen years. It's still got a ways to go, obviously, but X has proven itself rich enough to be extended without breaking backwards-compatibility.
The problem with allowing applications direct access to the card or framebuffer is that you then have to trust all your applications not to ever screw anything up. Putting all the code which communicates with the card in a single privileged process helps prevent malicious or poorly written programs from taking the system down.
That's why DRI apps tend to have to be run as root, incidentally.
You're still arguing that it is X's C-S design alone that is causing the problems you're talking about. The C-S design is an easy thing to single out.. "the other window systems don't support network graphics, and they are faster, so it must be the C-S design causing the problem" is not a valid logical argument. That's not to say that it mightn't be the problem, of course, but it's not to say it is, either.
Having to do context switches between the client and the server all of the time is a real issue, certainly. It is one that can be addressed through means other than simply throwing out 20 years of software developed on Unix, though.
Something like the improvements to the X server's internal behavior mentioned in that presentation (or in the associated paper, see Keith's Publications Page for more), in conjunction with Linux kernels more optimized for low-latency multiprocess scheduling could help the performance issues a great deal without having to junk the whole system.
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You have to give up the act of smoking (which is roughly 50% of the addiction usually) and then simultaniously ween yourself from the nicotine at the _same_ time.
Mmm, I call denial. While smoking is the act that is reinforced, Nicotine is the reinforcer. I smoked a cigar with a girlfriend a year and a half ago, and could feel my brain being rewired as I did. It seemed a rather odd, exotic, thing to do at first.. then something twigged in my brain and it felt *right*. Ever since there's been a part of my brain that has really, really wanted to do more of that thing that I were doing that time that made me feel that way.. brr, scary.
It's the nicotine. Commercial cigarettes may well have chemicals that increase the absorption and effectiveness of the nicotine, but don't kid yourself that the nicotine is incidental.
Netscape started with new, clean code. They did start with many of the University of Illinois personnel who had created Mosaic, but the code base was a from-scratch restart.
It's only scary if you don't understand why Microsoft keeps so much money available. For one thing, they operate without any debt. As in $0 debt. They owe nothing. That means they can save money above and beyond operating expenses and reinvesting. Second, and most importantly, Mr. Gates has said a number of times that his plan is to keep enough accessible "cash" available to be able to run Microsoft for at least one year without any income at all. Think about that. With around 40,000 employees worldwide, and an average salary of probably $100,000 (to keep things nice and round. it's probably a bit lower), you're talking $4billion just to pay payroll for a single year. Plus benefits (insurance, 401K matching, taxes, etc), plus operating costs (rent, power and utilities, bandwidth, taxes, etc), and so on. Before you know it, that $40bil is eaten up very quickly when there's nothing coming in.
That seems more like public commentary designed to justify their cash position, rather than reasoned business logic.
It is literally inconceivable to imagine Microsoft's revenue dropping to zero for a quarter, let alone a year. And if it did, then it would be appropriate for Microsoft to do what Dell, IBM, and Sun do.. lay people off.
The scary thing about Microsoft is that $40 billion in cash they've got burning a hole in their balance sheet. That's probably enough scratch to buy all gaming developers other than Sony and Nintendo themselves, and they've apparently tried to pick up Nintendo.
The industry is better off so long as there is strong competition.. as Microsoft is currently in third place with X-Box, it probably won't hurt things too much to have them pick up Vivendi Interactive. If they were to pick up Vivendi, Sega, and Konami, say, and to still look hungry, then I'd be pretty worried.
I'll still be pissed if I can't get StarCraft: Ghost on my new PS2, tho.
Since everything in Texas is controlled by good ol boys, I'm sure the decision to use this software was anything but objective.
Microsoft has made a practice of sending Bill Gates and Steve Balmer to take to the CEO's of large companies to persuade them mano-a-mano to use Microsoft's stuff, regardless of technical details like licensing, cost, and what-not that low level tech folk (peons) might kvetch about.
Microsoft is a good technology company but a great marketing company. The entire notion that a city (or anyone) NOT using Microsoft software is cause for a front page news story demonstrates how much they have created and maintained the image of being the only choice.
I'd say Houston was more objective than most. How many audit threats, after all, should it take to encourage one to find a different software vendor?
We do on several of our servers. The main reason is that it's much, much easier to build an Apache server with SSL support on Apache 2 than it is on Apache 1.x, particularly if you're adding additional modules on top.
As the owner of UNIX, SCO probably has rights to a lot of patents from AT&T, USL, and Novell pertaining to UNIX. Those patents presumably wouldn't be recorded as being registered by SCO, even if SCO owns them now.
Oh, I don't deny that one can reason about human perception and thinking, and that such reasoning is by necessity much more high-level and abstract than for things like physics, chemistry, etc.
Feelings are absolutely appropriate for describing the internal state of a mind. Indeed, feelings are even a fairly reliable way to learn about the internal state of other's minds, as well.. non-verbal communication, and etc.
Sure.
The laws in the Hebrew Bible. Clearly an attempt to reign in human passion. Or even better, many of Jesus' parables which are counter-intutitive.The point being that sometimes god has to overrided human feelings.
If you say so. I agree that the Torah and Bible were (and are) defining characteristics of civilization, and that there's lots in them that might be counter to what one individual might like to do at any given time. That doesn't mean that the accepted validity of those books isn't due to people's emotional acceptance of them. Guilt and shame are human feelings, too.
It's easy to reconcile science and religion.
Religions are memes in culture; someone (a jesus, a joseph smith, a mohammed, a l. ron hubbard, a david koresh) somewhere starts a religious idea (or, extremely commonly, mutates an earlier religious idea), and spreads it around. Those religious traditions that appeal to people more spread more efficiently, and become dominant in the thinking of those people infected by it, such that one's spiritual feeling (and that of one's co-religionists) is taken as affirmative evidence for the dogma in question. It doesn't matter that other people believe other things upon equal evidence, as they are simply considered 'other'.
That's one scientific (or at least rationalist) description of religion. Nice and reconciled, makes perfect sense.
You can go the other way as well.. Jehovah/Jesus Christ/Allah/Xenu created the world and set everything up as a test to see if the little people on the ground would believe the right thing and live forever minus their bodies/pay money and get Clear. Skeptics are nothing but cynics, trying to ruin a beautiful thing for everyone, hell-bound, forces of the devil, whose greatest trick was convincing people that lack of evidence for him might imply that he didn't exist, and etc.
That's also reconciliation of a sort.. certainly anyone who holds that sort of belief has a place for skeptics (cynics), and is happy with that place for them.
Asking the scientist/rationalist to accept that feelings are a reliable basis for making factual statements about the world is asking too much. Asking the religious to accept that feelings are not a reliable basis for making factual statements about teh world is often asking too much as well.
How therefore shall they be reconciled?
That's The Register's editorial voice you're hearing. They regularly refer to Intel as Chipzilla, Microsoft as The Beast, and what-not. All good cheeky British fun.
Sounds a bit like Bitkeeper, the commercial, decentralized source code control system being used by Linus and a bunch of the Linux kernel hackers these days.
And see The Middleware Company's own FAQ in which they respond to the criticisms of their comparison.
You're talking about the The Middleware Company's "shootout" between their "optimized" PetStore implementation and their .NET version.
Laying aside that Sun never put the PetStore demo forward as a benchmark, The Middleware Company did a lot to optimize the .NET version that they did not do for the Java version. The fact that Microsoft was paying for the comparison may have had something to do with this.
Read Rickard Öberg's analysis of the comparison to learn all of the ways in which the comparison was flawed. To name just one, The Middleware Company announced that it took fewer lines of code in the .NET version to do the same thing, but they left methods in their Java version that were never even called anywhere in the code.
In addition, the .NET version did aggressive caching in memory, in such a way that it would be impossible to scale the code across more than one server, while the J2EE version was implemented using BMP, which robs an application server of the ability to do any caching whatsoever.
It goes on and on and on. Read the analysis for yourself.
Just like Microsoft is outspending the Apache Foundation?
Sun/IBM/BEA/Oracle/Apache.. Microsoft may well pull it off, but it's hardly a foregone conclusion.
Mono is some great stuff, but it's going to take some time before .NET matches up with J2EE on Windows, let alone on the UNIX platforms.
Gtk# is more interesting, I think.
iControl is not a PVR. Some Time Warner outlets (like Time Warner Austin) are deploying the new Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 box, which comes with a (nominal) 80 gigabyte hard drive, and can function as an honest PVR.
Time Warner Austin is deploying the same box. It's a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000; they can come with different sized hard drives. Time Warner Austin markets these as having 50 hours worth of storage, but it uses variable bit-rate compression for the digitization, so you never know for sure just how much you can store.
The Explorer 8000 hardware is very nice. Two tuners, so it can be simultaneously recording two separate shows on two separate channels (either analog or digital) while you're watching something in playback. I can't tell any difference between playback and live quality, which is better than you get with a (non satTV) Replay or TiVo, where the compression is generally quite noticeable. The 8000 works better as well than the SA Explorer 2000 digital cable box.. changing channels is faster, etc.
Unfortunately, the firmware in the box is pretty crappy still. They have been improving it, but even with the latest firmware release, there are a whole lot of issues.. The experience of using it is not nearly as nice as a TiVo, and it is completely lacking anything like the TiVo 'Season Pass' or 'Recommendations' functions, so if you tell it to record every episode of the Daily Show, it will do so.. four times a day as Comedy Central shows repeats three times a day. At other times, the box seems to simply forget to record a show you told it you wanted, usually if the show changed times after the 8000 initially made a note as to the time and channel to record. The SAE 8000 uses Time Warner's standard cable guide, seemingly, and it appears that the cable guide provided by the cable system doesn't provide enough data to do the kind of smart tricks a TiVo can do.
For 10 bucks a month, it's quite a bit cheaper than a TiVo or Replay, but if you've got one of those, I wouldn't advise ditching it in favor of the Time Warner box. If Time Warner and Scientific Atlanta keep working at it and continue to put out firmware upgrades, it might turn into something quite nice indeed. As it stands, having the Time Warner box is better than not having the Time Warner box, but not as nice as having TiVo or Replay.
It is ironic, you're right. However, a lot of the security problems in Outlook are due to its tight integration with the MSIE ActiveX components. If Mozilla were to allow that kind of tight binding, you'd likely open Mozilla up to a lot of security issues.
That doesn't mean that it might not ought to be done, but I can see why it might not be a terribly high priority for folks on the project.
These days I'm carrying around a Sony SJ-30 model, running PalmOS 4.1. Color, 16 megabytes, hi-res screen.
What do I use it for? My calendar and address book, certainly. As a diabetic, I use it to record all my blood sugar readings. I have a very nice multifunction scientific calculator on it which I use all the time for anything for simple math or better. I have several games on it. I have a dozen e-books on it, which I read whenever I've got an idle moment. I have a dozen of my less-used passwords stored on it in a triple-DES encrypted form using Gnu Keyring. I use Plucker to download and carry around web clippings from national newspapers, and the Austin Chronicle's movie listings and reviews. I have several technical references stored as well, along with some utility calculators for special purpose conversions.
I carry my Sony around with me all the time; I would feel rather naked without it.
Actually, it's Microsoft's customers are that 95% of the market. What *they* say goes, and if folks widely realize that Microsoft is deliberately holding their data hostage, I'd imagine a good portion of them might take action. OASIS is one venue that could allow that.
Doing them in XML wouldn't gain all that much, as different programs have very different needs for configuration files. The point of using ASCII as your greatest common denominator is that you can express whatever linguistic ideas you want. Forcing a tree hierarchy, as XML does, wouldn't necessarily gain all that much, if you're dealing with a sendmail.cf file or the like. It would probably be a step down, in fact, unless you had an m4-like processor (XSLT?) that could do interesting, useful, and efficient transformations to the file.
If the extensibility is so great, then why did such an obvious improvement take so long?
Because until the late 90's desktop UNIX renaissance brought about by Linux, KDE, and Gnome, people figured there was no point in pushing that particular rock uphill. Would you spend years of your life trying to improve the foundations of X so that CDE could do some fancy new graphical thing?
Please.
Since the founding of the XFree86 foundation, X has been improving at a faster rate than it has in fifteen years. It's still got a ways to go, obviously, but X has proven itself rich enough to be extended without breaking backwards-compatibility.
That's pretty much what DRI is, isn't it?
The problem with allowing applications direct access to the card or framebuffer is that you then have to trust all your applications not to ever screw anything up. Putting all the code which communicates with the card in a single privileged process helps prevent malicious or poorly written programs from taking the system down.
That's why DRI apps tend to have to be run as root, incidentally.
Aha, so it is more than just C-S you're objecting to. ;-)
The thing is, writing GUI apps is hard everywhere, and Windows and Mac OS X have tons of libraries as well. You won't win on this one, I fear.
And gvim (vim-on-gtk) doesn't crash either, fwiw.
You're still arguing that it is X's C-S design alone that is causing the problems you're talking about. The C-S design is an easy thing to single out.. "the other window systems don't support network graphics, and they are faster, so it must be the C-S design causing the problem" is not a valid logical argument. That's not to say that it mightn't be the problem, of course, but it's not to say it is, either.
Having to do context switches between the client and the server all of the time is a real issue, certainly. It is one that can be addressed through means other than simply throwing out 20 years of software developed on Unix, though.
Keith Packard wrote a good presentation on this, Efficiently Scheduling X Clients at USENIX 2000.
Something like the improvements to the X server's internal behavior mentioned in that presentation (or in the associated paper, see Keith's Publications Page for more), in conjunction with Linux kernels more optimized for low-latency multiprocess scheduling could help the performance issues a great deal without having to junk the whole system.