FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, TALK TO LEGAL COUNSEL. WHY THE FSCK ARE YOU ASKING LEGAL QUESTIONS ON `ASK SLASHDOT', ANYWAY?! DO WE LOOK LIKE HARVARD LAW GRADS?!
Oh come on, we know why the question was put. It was a snarky little jibe whose only purpose was to claim that HIPPA prevented the use of Windows.
It is kind of like a 'proof' that 1 = 2. We are not meant to agree with the conculsion, we are meant to admire the devious application of logic.
It is quite obvious to anyone but a moron that MSFT is not going to enforce license agreements that prevent sale of their product for use regulated by HIPPA.
It should also be obvious that the EULA term was written very broadly by a lawyer who was attempting to minimize the probability of a lawsuit if someone complained about auto-update or the like.
And it should be completely obvious that Microsoft as a US corporation is obliged to comply with HIPPA. Microsoft is one of the few US companies that actually has a privacy policy and has agreed to be regulated under the EU privacy directive.
The other fact to consider is that the Clinton era HIPPA act has since gbeen gutted by the Bush administration who have issued 'guidance' that essentially negates the whole act. Under the Bush guidelines you lose the right to opt-out. Hospitals can refuse service if you don't waive all your rights to patient confidentiality which they can do in small print. So while the act may require hospitals to install firewalls etc. etc. none of it will make any difference because the hospitals can now sell all your confidential data to the people you least want to have hold of it.
I'm really glad that not that many countries have jumped that US "you can patent everything, including algorithms and IP" train even yet.
I am less bothered by the subject matter as the clueless examiners and corrupt review process.
EU examiners spend twice as long on each application. They also publish the applications before a patent is granted. This means that applicants are much less willing to try their luck with a completely bogus one-click type patent since they know that they are going to be challenged. It also means that completely corrupt applications where someone claims the work of a working group as their own 'invention' despite having nothing to do with the work are going to be rejected.
The USPTO system is only good for the scam artists. Not only does it allow scam artists to extort money from legitimate businesses, it devalues genuine patents. If 95% of a currency is counterfeit the value of the genuine stuff is reduced.
The use of MP3 wasn't low profile. People weren't using the patents without the patent holders knowlege.
Actually the Fraunhofer institute did make it clear that their software was patented from the very start. The Mp3 phenomena started when someone took code that was clearly marked as proprietary, for non commercial use only and married it to a CD ripper.
The basic problem we have here is that the whole MP3 world started with people who were pretty careless about intellectual property in general. They wanted free music and they just saw MP3 as a way to get it. Napster wanter to make billions by helping consumers rip off the record labels, their due dilligence and understanding of IP turned out to be as naive as their understanding of business models.
Much as I would love to say this is a GIF type submarine patent issue, unfortunately it is not. MP3 is a part of the MPEG standard and the fact that a license was required was spelled out in advance. All you had to do was read the specification.
As a general principle the GIF situation is indefensible. The designers of GIF should have had available to them the fact that a patent had been applied for. It is only the corrupt rules of the USPTO that allowed this information to be kept secret.
Maybe if Napster and the rest of the MP3 scene had been a bit more concerned about IP issues in general then they would have realized that using a proprietary scheme would risk giving control over the technology to a private interest. In effect a non-essential patent was converted into an essential patent that every hardware vendor now has to license.
I would prefer to use Ogg or WMA simply because they are better schemes, fewer bits for the same quality. But my Archos device only supports MP3 so that is what I rip to.
]]]Ok, let's get this straight -- an IDE drive is Storage media, not Backup media. If you use it as such, great; but I hope you don't EVER call yourself an IT person, and don't EVER touch any of my client's servers.
For my purposes shutting down the machine to mount and dismount backup media is perfectly OK. And yes I would use the same strategy in a production environment, only I would use a couple of high end EMC storage cluster devices. Thing is that tape backup is even worse value when you go to the real high end stuff. I have used multi-million dollar tape robot systems and they tend to suck.
I believe the drive caddy makes it so you can plug the "backup drive" in and out without rebooting the server
Well you can get a caddy that does that but why the drive manufacturers can't get a clue and just fix it is beyond me.
What I want is a 120Gb removable drive in my PVR. Then I will store all my movies on it.
Pardon my ignorance, but how can the BBC be conceived a TV broadcasting when
television was not invented [ideafinder.com] (patented) till 1927.
In those days you had to actually invent something before you were granted a patent. So the patent came after the research and inventing was done rather than after which is the more common model today. Also it was not possible to patent mere notions such as 'broadcast of moving pictures', you had to actually build the thing and demonstrate that it worked.
Copies of Hansard from the 1920s are not online. However it is not exactly an obscure publication, pretty much every university library in the UK has a set.
I just looked at dirtcheapdrives and they are quoting $450 for the low end DVD-RW drives and $700 for the higher end ones. Media is $125 for 20 disks.
In comparison I have seen CD-RW drives for $80 and media for under $1 a disk. The price differential is simply not justified by a mere ten-fold increase in capacity. It is pretty obvious that the price of the drives will be slashed to reasonable levels before they catch on on a scale large enough to make the media affordable.
The big problem is that there is absolutely no backup media on the market that is as cost effective as an IDE hard disk drive! An IDE drive with a capacity of 120Gb can be bought for just over $1 per GB and requires only a $20 caddy to make it into a removable medium. If they would make them hot swappable there would be no reason to use anything else. They are faster than and have a higher capacity than tape drive systems costing tens of thousands. Best of all even if a drive fails entirely you have a chance at recovery - try that with a mag tape that has been chewed in a faulty drive.
I tried to explain this idea to the Iomega investors some time ago when they were convinced that everyone would be queuing up to buy Jaz and the clik! disk would be taking over the world. DVD-RW still suffers from the same sort of economics as the Jaz drive - media too expensive to use as a backup, drive system too expensive.
Actually, this statement is incorrect. The BBC sold more than one million licenses before its first radio broadcast [bbc.co.uk] on 14 November 1922. Its first television broadcast [bbc.co.uk] wasn't until 2 November 1936, when there were only a few thousand television receivers. Obviously, the BBC license fee was not created to protect newspaper advertising revenues from TV.
That is where you are wrong. The BBC was from the very start conceived as a television and radio broadcasting company. Considerable sums were spent on research into television and a substantial amount of the technology used in modern TV was developed by the BBC.
The BBC was formed as a corporation in 1922 and received its royal charter in 1927. The first television signals were broadcast in 1936. The Hansard records of the House of Commons debates demonstrate that the potential of television was fully understood.
It does not take a great leap of imagination to realize the potential of combining the movies and radio. The newspaper barons understood correctly that TV would threaten both their power and their revenues.
Actually the BBC license fee was created as a crony-capitalist protection measure, so that TV did not take advertising revenue from the newspapers.
Granted that in 'libertopian capitalism' protectionist measures of this sort never never exist, just like libertopian capitalism itself. But in the real world the US today has heaps more protectionist measures of this sort than the UK has - the $190 billion farm bill, the steel tarifs and the trillions spent on military boondogles like Crusader, Start Wars, etc.
The comercial driven US model of network television is entirely a creation of government. As Ithiel Pool noted in technologies of freedom the US government got control of TV by controlling access to the airwaves. The network TV model suits politicians because it allows them direct access to their constituents in TV adverts. Individual politicians don't have campaign ads in most countries for a simple reason, the TV systems are national, the coverage areas are too large to be used for an individual politician's campaign.
Fortunately the network model is already collapsing under pressure from satelite and cable. Cable TV in theory offers the possibility of targetted local ads but in practice this only works well on the older analog systes with a small number of channels. When we had AT&T cable the 45 theoretical channels became 8 in practice once you eliminated the home shopping channels, religious channels run by child molesters, Fox NAZI news etc. So a politician could still get an audience with a buy on a small number of channels. With 100 odd channels that gets harder.
When TV goes digital, there will prolly be a new encryption or something or other that makes them unskippable to the general public
Call me a philistine but if it is a choice between high definition and my PVR I will keep my PVR. I would much rather watch commercial free TV than high definition TV with commercials.
I pay $55 a month for my satelite TV, which is already digital so the only thing HDTV would give me is slightly higher resolution.
The only content for which High Definition is relevant is the type of content I would watch on DVD or HBO anyway. I really don't care if CNN or CNBC is high definition, I pretty much only listen anyway. And even for BBC America digital is irrelevant because much of the good stuff was done 20 odd years ago.
Fact is that HDTV has been plugged for ten years now and has minimal presence. You can't buy a real HDTV in most stores and the HDTV 'ready' TVs are often just a standard analog TV with a different aspect ratio. PVRs on the other hand have been around for only a few years and are already ubiquitous.
The way I look at it, people will always opt for a major functional improvement over a minor aesthetic improvement. People didn't move to CD because the sound was better, they really moved because vinyl records were bulky, scratched easily and could not be played in a car.
general public, having never bought a TiVo in the first place won't notice any changes and it will return to buisness as usual.
The general public is not the early adopter market for technology. And the fact is that analog TV is going to be with us for at least another 20 years, regardless of what fantasies Congress concocts for their budget forecasts (selling off the analog bandwidth in 2006 is planned to partially offset Bush's tax cut for the mega mega rich). OK so I have bought 3 TVs over the past 6 years, an average of one TV every two years, but that is not because I only expect my TV to last 2 years, it is because I have a large house and I want to be able to watch TV in several rooms. I expect my Vega to have at least 10 years of useful life, Congress or no Congress.
What folk do not appear to understand is that restricting.org to bona-fide non-profits would jack up the cost of running the registry significantly. It certainly could not be done for $0.25 a name and probably could not be done well for less than $100 to the retail customer.
And what would this achieve? Only some mindless beureaucrats idea of consistency and correctness. There are plenty of registered non-profits that are out and out commercial organizations sheltering behind the tax code. A non profit can pay its CEO whatever it likes so quite a few 'non-profits' are actually worth millions to the people who control them.
If you want a high reliability Internet you cannot do the DNS system on the cheap. At present.org is hosted in multiple data centers spread arround the world. $625K would not come close to covering costs for rent and connectivity.
The problem with multi-millionaire hippies like Gilmore is that they have absolutely no understanding of money. It is not a constraint to them so they don't understand that it could be a constraint to anyone. The folk pontificating on the cost of running the DNS system are the same type of people who get into a state when they are told that it costs several million dollars to paint the golden gate bridge. After thinking about the issue for ten seconds they will assert that it should cost no more than $25,000 and if pressed will claim to have based their estimate on how much it cost to paint their house ten years ago. If told that it would cost more than $250K for the paint alone they will give a flat denial.
Incidentally it is the same type of thinking that is preventing the deployment of DNS Security. An IETF faction is trying to make the protocol as expensive to deploy as possible in the large zones by blocking required engineering changes. The fact that all the registries and all the people who maintain the major DNS codebases support the changes is ignored.
However, the GNU GPL'd code requires that other code mixed with it is released as GPL.
So what? A contract restriction is civil law, not criminal law. The courts are not going to do anything unless someone brings an enforcement action.
It is far from clear who if anyone has standing to bring an enforcement action besides the original contributors to the code. And if people did start to bring that type of action on a regular basis the commercial users of Linux would quickly move to BSD. It does not matter whether you are right or wrong, if someone brings a lawsuit against you it will cost a lot of money.
It is somewhat noticeable that the GPL enforcement freaks are most often the first to explain why Napster was not abetting theft and music copyrights should not apply on the net. Henceforth the only copyright license that will count is the GPL...
Like the recording industry the legal technicalities may be on the side of folk who want to read the source. However just like in the case of the recording industry the best way to achieve the desired outcome is probably not to start threatening people that to paraphrase Pulp Fiction, you intend to get medi-legal on their ass.
I would not go that far yet. I agree that Palm loses. However that stil leaves Handspring and the Sharp Zaurus.
OK the fact that I am the only person to mention Zaurus so far in the thread view probably says it all, even though I am quit happy with my SL 5000D now that I have got the ROM update installed (before the update was a different story)
I think that Palm is out because they are doing an Apple, they are sticking resolutely to the initial 'vision' of a pinhead who cannot understand the difference between an advantage in the introductory phase and a long term advantage. Apple folk still get upset about my comment on their one button mouse, but the fact is that Apple still has not realised that the approach appropriate in 2002 is not necessarily the one that worked in 1984 when a 16 bit machine was high tech and a hard drive super luxury class.
Palm has the same problem, they are going after the filofax market. Problem is that only 5% of the population is super organized Martha Stuart types who compulsively enter every appointment into their calendar... Not only don't I care, I don't want to care. I have a handheld to browse the web while I am in the hot tub, to play solitaire and to do the odd bit of email.
One problem with the Windows 2000/XP Pro encryping file system that you should consider is that if you have an encrypted volume and you are forced or required to reinstall Windows for any reason you will loose access to that volume because the keys will not match. With PGP disk you simply need to enter the password.
If you are using the encrypting file system for files of that type you should export your EFS certificate and private key from your profile and store it in a safe place (like a safe). You should also do this with the administrator's master certificate, only this time delete the private key off the machine completely and make several backup copies of the cert.
The best solution in an enterprise context is to use a commercial key recovery system. While key escrow is not a great idea when John Ashcroft is going to hold everybodys keys, some form of key recovery is essential if you are going to have a system of that type work in an enterprise setting. The better commercial key managers provide dual control through cryptographic threshold or similar techniques. So although a key can still be recovered the sysadmin can't do so and cover up their tracks.
The question is, how long until the XP version of PGP is released? PGP has been my "killer app" for sticking with Win2k - how can you own a notebook computer without an encrypted filesystem?
Windows XP Professional includes an encrypted file system. Have you considered using that?
Outlook, Netscape, Notes etc. all support S/MIME encryption and signature, so adding PGP is not adding crypto capability, it is adding a particular crypto protocol. Now you may argue that you prefer the PGP implementation of that functionality but don't raise a preference to the level of a requirement unless you want to risk that when you give the world a choice of PGP or nothing that they go off and choose nothing.
The problem we have in the industry is that PGP/X.509 has become a Betamax/VHS battle. The costs of incompatibility are much greater than the specific benefits of either protocol.
The reason that PGP Inc mk I failled commercially is that they were pushing Betamax while the rest of the industry had standardized on X.509v3 with cross certificate extensions to provide Web of trust type capability.
There was also a good deal of personal animosity between some of the principals of the X.509 and PGP worlds. At this point however the industry is pretty much been driven by a different group of people and the standards issue has moved beyond the certificate format question. The XKMS protocol is designed specifically so that the client does not need to know whether the underlying PKI is PGP, S/MIME or whatever based.
Well that's basically my point. Stop programming in 25x80 text mode and this will cease to be a problem.
I have an 18" LCD monitor, I woud prefer to be able to fit more than one or two routines on the screen at once.
Admittedly the folding in Visual Studio helps a lot, but the half baked XML documentation scheme could have been better thought out.
I would much rather have the lanugage define documentation constructs outright. If the documentation is important it should be part of the structure of the language.
e.g. be very careful when typing variable names because if you misspell a variable, the compiler will just create a new one for you.
Since I had Tony Hoare as my college tutor I pretty much had to read his Turing award lecture on the need for required variable declaration. Of course now he works for Microsoft so do the C# designers...
The fact is, research into the way programmers read code has shown that the statement
Can you cite the paper? What was the sample trained to use?
The advantage of dropping the braces is that you can get a lot more code onto a screen at once.
The advantage of dropping semicolons is you don't have to type them.
The only research I am aware of is the Kernighan and Richie exercise where they looked at Fortran's use of a continuation character and pascal's use of semicolon as a statement separator. I agree with their conclusions, however they are not definitive and certainly don't support the claims you make.
In occam that would be (with dots to get through the crappy slashfilter:
IF
. x
. . y
. TRUE
. . SKIP
I tend to think that occam goes too far, particularly since parallel process composition is raised to the same level as sequential. The multicase if statement is pretty cute however and entirely removes the if-then-dangling else problem which is the source of confusion with braces.
Removing the comp sci lunacies from occam would give something like:
First: There is something called design, code maintenance and code structure. If you want to use a gibberish-language, go use perl. Java is 100% Object Oriented so is designed to "design" software, not just write programs.
I thought we were discussing C#, not perl. As for the sun marketroid speak you are spouting, it does not appear that critical thinking is your strong point (except where the evil empire is concerned). I certainly cannot see how you equate the use of braces and semicolons which were originally introduced by Wirth as a crutch for his crappy LR(1) parser with object oriented programming or design. It is prefectly possible to have a programming language which requires neither and those that do not tend to be languages like occam which have very strong comp-sci credentials, occam was the first commercial language that had a formally defined semantics.
That same principle applies to C# "smart" getter/setters. If you have a big project you will have a lot of trouble knowing if some statement is a direct variable access or a hidden setter/getter call.
It is hardly a problem, Visual Studio shows you whether a field is a property or a field as you are typing it. And just why would you care?
The advantage of the notation is that it is very easy to change a field to a property without having to rewrite code. This is very useful if during developmenht you decide to reorganize a piece of code so that a public field that used to exist is removed or changed somehow.
Somehow I don't think you have very much understanding or experience of programming language design, still less a doctorate in the subject. Pascal had many problems, not least being the fact that Wirth was an idiot and designing a language to support one pass compilation was rejected as a waste of programmer time over a decade before he reintroduced it. Not to mention the fact that his idea that int [2] is an intrinsicaly different type to int [3] and that therefore there is no legitimate need for a parameter of type int [*] is just plain wrong.
Returning to you tirade, I think that the real thing here is that whenever C# has a feature that Java lacks you feel compelled to rant about why the feature is completely unnecessary etc.
I fear that you are talking gibberish, and random references to Occam, Python and semicolons may not be sufficient to restore your credibility.
I don't think a low level hack such as yourself working for Dresdener whose main contributions have been to the CORBA fiasco should be assuming that people who disagree with you do so because they are idiots.
The code you provide is useless as an XML encoding because simply serializing the data structure is not sufficient to produce output that validates against a given XML Schema. There is no way to provide information as to what data elements are to be encoded as elements and which as attributes.
Please check the java.lang.reflect package in the standard J2SDK and come back to this thread.
You still don't get it.
Java has reflection. C# has meta data and reflection. You can reflect an annotated data structure. This is exactly what you need if you are going to generate ASN.1 or XML direct from a data structure.
People who have only used one language and are prejudiced against the other are going to completely ignore the significance of mata-data tagging. I have used more than 20 languages and I have designed several compilers and translators for custom languages.
Of course strictly speaking you can also use the meta data tagging in Java since it is an extension in J#.
I would like someone to explain us what's about the getter and setter structure in C#, it's like Minority Report: Spielberg couldn't get rid of the whole AI crap completely... and MS can't get rid of the VB crap either.
A property is a method that uses the same syntax as an attribute. Since attributes only support get and set operations I fail to see the VB connection, although the not so secret agenda of C# is to unify Basic and C++ by providing the features of both.
Properties are actually quite useful. They allow an effective means of sub typing so that an integer that is limited to a specific range can be validated on assignment. They also allow read only properties that are calculated from attributes. So an objects with attributes length and width could define a read only property for area which syntacticaly would look like an attribute.
It is only in the prejudiced 'MSFT bad' 'Sun good' world of Slashdot that people can denounce C# for lack of innovation while praising Java for being the most momentous thing ever. Both languages are merely incremental improvements on their predecessors. Java only looks so good because it is compared to C++, compare it to Objective C and the improvement is not so great.
Both C# and Java have several defects compared to languages like occam or python. First off what is it with the semi-colons and braces? Lets get rid of them, the only reason they were ever needed was people misapplying Chomsky to develop parsers. Secondly neither language has an adequate model of parallel programming, and yes I do know all about pthreads and the like.
From the point of view of control, I suggested to Gosling that they work with formal methods people early on in the development of the language, advice that was completely ignored - as was the advice of every other person outside at the time. After the lawsuit I lost all interest in Java, Sun clearly intend to control the language absolutely to suit the needs of their company as they lose market share to Linux.
And besides, usually you don't need that kind of functionnality, unless you're doing academic research on such languages, and then you'd probably use Scheme or Smalltalk anyway...
And Waterloo would be what type of institution?
The.NET framework makes very extensive use of reflection with arbitrary meta-data tagged to the data structures. This is how all the.NET code for XML serialization and parsing is done.
Basically you call an instance of the Serializer, pass it the type of the data structure you want to serialize and poof! out comes a delegate routine that will serialize and parse that data structure.
Relevant to what? How much production code out there uses C#? How many people will still be programming in C# 20 years from now?
I would suspect that there is already more C# production code than Modula 3 code. Redmond has been using C# internally for quite a while.
Nobody raised any questions when comp sci courses chucked out Wirthless languaqges like pascal and Modula in favor of Java. And when it comes to proprietary control of a language only a complete slashweenie can pretend that Java is an open language when Sun uses the courts to enforce proprietary control.
C# does have one major feature that Java does not, meta data and reflection. Now those are not features that many programmers who have not used the Lisp machine are familiar with but it is a very powerful way to program.
The point is that in the past five years it has become possible to teach computer programming courses using languages that are both clean in design and relevant commercially. Modula and pascal were botched from start to finish.
But my main point is, when a legislature tells the government what to do, calling it "coercion" is twisting language beyond any credibility. If a state legislature isn't in charge of the government, who the hell is?
According to the Constitution of the State of California the Executive headed by the Govenor has that role.
The Legislative branch has oversight, but legislation is absolutely the wrong vehicle for administrative reforms.
I doubt anyone's seriously proposing an open-source-only law.
Try reading the slashdot thread, that is exactly what people are proposing. In this case the link from the thread to the story is pretty direct.
As you point out there are reasonable folk on both sides, however there are also complete loons and in a political process it is often the one-banana-short-of-a-whole-bunch types that end up writing the legislation. And yes, read the thread, there are plenth of people who read slashdot who just can't wait to tell government employees that from now on "all your desktops are bellong to us".
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on, we know why the question was put. It was a snarky little jibe whose only purpose was to claim that HIPPA prevented the use of Windows.
It is kind of like a 'proof' that 1 = 2. We are not meant to agree with the conculsion, we are meant to admire the devious application of logic.
It is quite obvious to anyone but a moron that MSFT is not going to enforce license agreements that prevent sale of their product for use regulated by HIPPA.
It should also be obvious that the EULA term was written very broadly by a lawyer who was attempting to minimize the probability of a lawsuit if someone complained about auto-update or the like.
And it should be completely obvious that Microsoft as a US corporation is obliged to comply with HIPPA. Microsoft is one of the few US companies that actually has a privacy policy and has agreed to be regulated under the EU privacy directive.
The other fact to consider is that the Clinton era HIPPA act has since gbeen gutted by the Bush administration who have issued 'guidance' that essentially negates the whole act. Under the Bush guidelines you lose the right to opt-out. Hospitals can refuse service if you don't waive all your rights to patient confidentiality which they can do in small print. So while the act may require hospitals to install firewalls etc. etc. none of it will make any difference because the hospitals can now sell all your confidential data to the people you least want to have hold of it.
It is the only time I have found a program that used the file name of the document as the default name for the spelling dictionary.
Stole users you say comrade? What a despicable act of capitalism.
I am less bothered by the subject matter as the clueless examiners and corrupt review process.
EU examiners spend twice as long on each application. They also publish the applications before a patent is granted. This means that applicants are much less willing to try their luck with a completely bogus one-click type patent since they know that they are going to be challenged. It also means that completely corrupt applications where someone claims the work of a working group as their own 'invention' despite having nothing to do with the work are going to be rejected.
The USPTO system is only good for the scam artists. Not only does it allow scam artists to extort money from legitimate businesses, it devalues genuine patents. If 95% of a currency is counterfeit the value of the genuine stuff is reduced.
Actually the Fraunhofer institute did make it clear that their software was patented from the very start. The Mp3 phenomena started when someone took code that was clearly marked as proprietary, for non commercial use only and married it to a CD ripper.
The basic problem we have here is that the whole MP3 world started with people who were pretty careless about intellectual property in general. They wanted free music and they just saw MP3 as a way to get it. Napster wanter to make billions by helping consumers rip off the record labels, their due dilligence and understanding of IP turned out to be as naive as their understanding of business models.
Much as I would love to say this is a GIF type submarine patent issue, unfortunately it is not. MP3 is a part of the MPEG standard and the fact that a license was required was spelled out in advance. All you had to do was read the specification.
As a general principle the GIF situation is indefensible. The designers of GIF should have had available to them the fact that a patent had been applied for. It is only the corrupt rules of the USPTO that allowed this information to be kept secret.
Maybe if Napster and the rest of the MP3 scene had been a bit more concerned about IP issues in general then they would have realized that using a proprietary scheme would risk giving control over the technology to a private interest. In effect a non-essential patent was converted into an essential patent that every hardware vendor now has to license.
I would prefer to use Ogg or WMA simply because they are better schemes, fewer bits for the same quality. But my Archos device only supports MP3 so that is what I rip to.
For my purposes shutting down the machine to mount and dismount backup media is perfectly OK. And yes I would use the same strategy in a production environment, only I would use a couple of high end EMC storage cluster devices. Thing is that tape backup is even worse value when you go to the real high end stuff. I have used multi-million dollar tape robot systems and they tend to suck.
I believe the drive caddy makes it so you can plug the "backup drive" in and out without rebooting the server
Well you can get a caddy that does that but why the drive manufacturers can't get a clue and just fix it is beyond me.
What I want is a 120Gb removable drive in my PVR. Then I will store all my movies on it.
In those days you had to actually invent something before you were granted a patent. So the patent came after the research and inventing was done rather than after which is the more common model today. Also it was not possible to patent mere notions such as 'broadcast of moving pictures', you had to actually build the thing and demonstrate that it worked.
Copies of Hansard from the 1920s are not online. However it is not exactly an obscure publication, pretty much every university library in the UK has a set.
Or you could just read a biography of Reith.
In comparison I have seen CD-RW drives for $80 and media for under $1 a disk. The price differential is simply not justified by a mere ten-fold increase in capacity. It is pretty obvious that the price of the drives will be slashed to reasonable levels before they catch on on a scale large enough to make the media affordable.
The big problem is that there is absolutely no backup media on the market that is as cost effective as an IDE hard disk drive! An IDE drive with a capacity of 120Gb can be bought for just over $1 per GB and requires only a $20 caddy to make it into a removable medium. If they would make them hot swappable there would be no reason to use anything else. They are faster than and have a higher capacity than tape drive systems costing tens of thousands. Best of all even if a drive fails entirely you have a chance at recovery - try that with a mag tape that has been chewed in a faulty drive.
I tried to explain this idea to the Iomega investors some time ago when they were convinced that everyone would be queuing up to buy Jaz and the clik! disk would be taking over the world. DVD-RW still suffers from the same sort of economics as the Jaz drive - media too expensive to use as a backup, drive system too expensive.
That is where you are wrong. The BBC was from the very start conceived as a television and radio broadcasting company. Considerable sums were spent on research into television and a substantial amount of the technology used in modern TV was developed by the BBC.
The BBC was formed as a corporation in 1922 and received its royal charter in 1927. The first television signals were broadcast in 1936. The Hansard records of the House of Commons debates demonstrate that the potential of television was fully understood.
It does not take a great leap of imagination to realize the potential of combining the movies and radio. The newspaper barons understood correctly that TV would threaten both their power and their revenues.
Granted that in 'libertopian capitalism' protectionist measures of this sort never never exist, just like libertopian capitalism itself. But in the real world the US today has heaps more protectionist measures of this sort than the UK has - the $190 billion farm bill, the steel tarifs and the trillions spent on military boondogles like Crusader, Start Wars, etc.
The comercial driven US model of network television is entirely a creation of government. As Ithiel Pool noted in technologies of freedom the US government got control of TV by controlling access to the airwaves. The network TV model suits politicians because it allows them direct access to their constituents in TV adverts. Individual politicians don't have campaign ads in most countries for a simple reason, the TV systems are national, the coverage areas are too large to be used for an individual politician's campaign.
Fortunately the network model is already collapsing under pressure from satelite and cable. Cable TV in theory offers the possibility of targetted local ads but in practice this only works well on the older analog systes with a small number of channels. When we had AT&T cable the 45 theoretical channels became 8 in practice once you eliminated the home shopping channels, religious channels run by child molesters, Fox NAZI news etc. So a politician could still get an audience with a buy on a small number of channels. With 100 odd channels that gets harder.
Call me a philistine but if it is a choice between high definition and my PVR I will keep my PVR. I would much rather watch commercial free TV than high definition TV with commercials.
I pay $55 a month for my satelite TV, which is already digital so the only thing HDTV would give me is slightly higher resolution.
The only content for which High Definition is relevant is the type of content I would watch on DVD or HBO anyway. I really don't care if CNN or CNBC is high definition, I pretty much only listen anyway. And even for BBC America digital is irrelevant because much of the good stuff was done 20 odd years ago.
Fact is that HDTV has been plugged for ten years now and has minimal presence. You can't buy a real HDTV in most stores and the HDTV 'ready' TVs are often just a standard analog TV with a different aspect ratio. PVRs on the other hand have been around for only a few years and are already ubiquitous.
The way I look at it, people will always opt for a major functional improvement over a minor aesthetic improvement. People didn't move to CD because the sound was better, they really moved because vinyl records were bulky, scratched easily and could not be played in a car.
general public, having never bought a TiVo in the first place won't notice any changes and it will return to buisness as usual.
The general public is not the early adopter market for technology. And the fact is that analog TV is going to be with us for at least another 20 years, regardless of what fantasies Congress concocts for their budget forecasts (selling off the analog bandwidth in 2006 is planned to partially offset Bush's tax cut for the mega mega rich). OK so I have bought 3 TVs over the past 6 years, an average of one TV every two years, but that is not because I only expect my TV to last 2 years, it is because I have a large house and I want to be able to watch TV in several rooms. I expect my Vega to have at least 10 years of useful life, Congress or no Congress.
And what would this achieve? Only some mindless beureaucrats idea of consistency and correctness. There are plenty of registered non-profits that are out and out commercial organizations sheltering behind the tax code. A non profit can pay its CEO whatever it likes so quite a few 'non-profits' are actually worth millions to the people who control them.
If you want a high reliability Internet you cannot do the DNS system on the cheap. At present .org is hosted in multiple data centers spread arround the world. $625K would not come close to covering costs for rent and connectivity.
The problem with multi-millionaire hippies like Gilmore is that they have absolutely no understanding of money. It is not a constraint to them so they don't understand that it could be a constraint to anyone. The folk pontificating on the cost of running the DNS system are the same type of people who get into a state when they are told that it costs several million dollars to paint the golden gate bridge. After thinking about the issue for ten seconds they will assert that it should cost no more than $25,000 and if pressed will claim to have based their estimate on how much it cost to paint their house ten years ago. If told that it would cost more than $250K for the paint alone they will give a flat denial.
Incidentally it is the same type of thinking that is preventing the deployment of DNS Security. An IETF faction is trying to make the protocol as expensive to deploy as possible in the large zones by blocking required engineering changes. The fact that all the registries and all the people who maintain the major DNS codebases support the changes is ignored.
So what? A contract restriction is civil law, not criminal law. The courts are not going to do anything unless someone brings an enforcement action.
It is far from clear who if anyone has standing to bring an enforcement action besides the original contributors to the code. And if people did start to bring that type of action on a regular basis the commercial users of Linux would quickly move to BSD. It does not matter whether you are right or wrong, if someone brings a lawsuit against you it will cost a lot of money.
It is somewhat noticeable that the GPL enforcement freaks are most often the first to explain why Napster was not abetting theft and music copyrights should not apply on the net. Henceforth the only copyright license that will count is the GPL...
Like the recording industry the legal technicalities may be on the side of folk who want to read the source. However just like in the case of the recording industry the best way to achieve the desired outcome is probably not to start threatening people that to paraphrase Pulp Fiction, you intend to get medi-legal on their ass.
OK the fact that I am the only person to mention Zaurus so far in the thread view probably says it all, even though I am quit happy with my SL 5000D now that I have got the ROM update installed (before the update was a different story)
I think that Palm is out because they are doing an Apple, they are sticking resolutely to the initial 'vision' of a pinhead who cannot understand the difference between an advantage in the introductory phase and a long term advantage. Apple folk still get upset about my comment on their one button mouse, but the fact is that Apple still has not realised that the approach appropriate in 2002 is not necessarily the one that worked in 1984 when a 16 bit machine was high tech and a hard drive super luxury class.
Palm has the same problem, they are going after the filofax market. Problem is that only 5% of the population is super organized Martha Stuart types who compulsively enter every appointment into their calendar... Not only don't I care, I don't want to care. I have a handheld to browse the web while I am in the hot tub, to play solitaire and to do the odd bit of email.
If you are using the encrypting file system for files of that type you should export your EFS certificate and private key from your profile and store it in a safe place (like a safe). You should also do this with the administrator's master certificate, only this time delete the private key off the machine completely and make several backup copies of the cert.
The best solution in an enterprise context is to use a commercial key recovery system. While key escrow is not a great idea when John Ashcroft is going to hold everybodys keys, some form of key recovery is essential if you are going to have a system of that type work in an enterprise setting. The better commercial key managers provide dual control through cryptographic threshold or similar techniques. So although a key can still be recovered the sysadmin can't do so and cover up their tracks.
Windows XP Professional includes an encrypted file system. Have you considered using that?
Outlook, Netscape, Notes etc. all support S/MIME encryption and signature, so adding PGP is not adding crypto capability, it is adding a particular crypto protocol. Now you may argue that you prefer the PGP implementation of that functionality but don't raise a preference to the level of a requirement unless you want to risk that when you give the world a choice of PGP or nothing that they go off and choose nothing.
The problem we have in the industry is that PGP/X.509 has become a Betamax/VHS battle. The costs of incompatibility are much greater than the specific benefits of either protocol.
The reason that PGP Inc mk I failled commercially is that they were pushing Betamax while the rest of the industry had standardized on X.509v3 with cross certificate extensions to provide Web of trust type capability.
There was also a good deal of personal animosity between some of the principals of the X.509 and PGP worlds. At this point however the industry is pretty much been driven by a different group of people and the standards issue has moved beyond the certificate format question. The XKMS protocol is designed specifically so that the client does not need to know whether the underlying PKI is PGP, S/MIME or whatever based.
I have an 18" LCD monitor, I woud prefer to be able to fit more than one or two routines on the screen at once.
Admittedly the folding in Visual Studio helps a lot, but the half baked XML documentation scheme could have been better thought out.
I would much rather have the lanugage define documentation constructs outright. If the documentation is important it should be part of the structure of the language.
e.g. be very careful when typing variable names because if you misspell a variable, the compiler will just create a new one for you.
Since I had Tony Hoare as my college tutor I pretty much had to read his Turing award lecture on the need for required variable declaration. Of course now he works for Microsoft so do the C# designers...
Can you cite the paper? What was the sample trained to use?
The advantage of dropping the braces is that you can get a lot more code onto a screen at once.
The advantage of dropping semicolons is you don't have to type them.
The only research I am aware of is the Kernighan and Richie exercise where they looked at Fortran's use of a continuation character and pascal's use of semicolon as a statement separator. I agree with their conclusions, however they are not definitive and certainly don't support the claims you make.
In occam that would be (with dots to get through the crappy slashfilter:
IF
. x
. . y
. TRUE
. . SKIP
I tend to think that occam goes too far, particularly since parallel process composition is raised to the same level as sequential. The multicase if statement is pretty cute however and entirely removes the if-then-dangling else problem which is the source of confusion with braces.
Removing the comp sci lunacies from occam would give something like:
IF
. x
. . y1
. . y2
I thought we were discussing C#, not perl. As for the sun marketroid speak you are spouting, it does not appear that critical thinking is your strong point (except where the evil empire is concerned). I certainly cannot see how you equate the use of braces and semicolons which were originally introduced by Wirth as a crutch for his crappy LR(1) parser with object oriented programming or design. It is prefectly possible to have a programming language which requires neither and those that do not tend to be languages like occam which have very strong comp-sci credentials, occam was the first commercial language that had a formally defined semantics.
That same principle applies to C# "smart" getter/setters. If you have a big project you will have a lot of trouble knowing if some statement is a direct variable access or a hidden setter/getter call.
It is hardly a problem, Visual Studio shows you whether a field is a property or a field as you are typing it. And just why would you care?
The advantage of the notation is that it is very easy to change a field to a property without having to rewrite code. This is very useful if during developmenht you decide to reorganize a piece of code so that a public field that used to exist is removed or changed somehow.
Somehow I don't think you have very much understanding or experience of programming language design, still less a doctorate in the subject. Pascal had many problems, not least being the fact that Wirth was an idiot and designing a language to support one pass compilation was rejected as a waste of programmer time over a decade before he reintroduced it. Not to mention the fact that his idea that int [2] is an intrinsicaly different type to int [3] and that therefore there is no legitimate need for a parameter of type int [*] is just plain wrong.
Returning to you tirade, I think that the real thing here is that whenever C# has a feature that Java lacks you feel compelled to rant about why the feature is completely unnecessary etc.
I don't think a low level hack such as yourself working for Dresdener whose main contributions have been to the CORBA fiasco should be assuming that people who disagree with you do so because they are idiots.
The code you provide is useless as an XML encoding because simply serializing the data structure is not sufficient to produce output that validates against a given XML Schema. There is no way to provide information as to what data elements are to be encoded as elements and which as attributes.
You still don't get it.
Java has reflection. C# has meta data and reflection. You can reflect an annotated data structure. This is exactly what you need if you are going to generate ASN.1 or XML direct from a data structure.
People who have only used one language and are prejudiced against the other are going to completely ignore the significance of mata-data tagging. I have used more than 20 languages and I have designed several compilers and translators for custom languages.
Of course strictly speaking you can also use the meta data tagging in Java since it is an extension in J#.
I would like someone to explain us what's about the getter and setter structure in C#, it's like Minority Report: Spielberg couldn't get rid of the whole AI crap completely ... and MS can't get rid of the VB crap either.
A property is a method that uses the same syntax as an attribute. Since attributes only support get and set operations I fail to see the VB connection, although the not so secret agenda of C# is to unify Basic and C++ by providing the features of both.
Properties are actually quite useful. They allow an effective means of sub typing so that an integer that is limited to a specific range can be validated on assignment. They also allow read only properties that are calculated from attributes. So an objects with attributes length and width could define a read only property for area which syntacticaly would look like an attribute.
It is only in the prejudiced 'MSFT bad' 'Sun good' world of Slashdot that people can denounce C# for lack of innovation while praising Java for being the most momentous thing ever. Both languages are merely incremental improvements on their predecessors. Java only looks so good because it is compared to C++, compare it to Objective C and the improvement is not so great.
Both C# and Java have several defects compared to languages like occam or python. First off what is it with the semi-colons and braces? Lets get rid of them, the only reason they were ever needed was people misapplying Chomsky to develop parsers. Secondly neither language has an adequate model of parallel programming, and yes I do know all about pthreads and the like.
From the point of view of control, I suggested to Gosling that they work with formal methods people early on in the development of the language, advice that was completely ignored - as was the advice of every other person outside at the time. After the lawsuit I lost all interest in Java, Sun clearly intend to control the language absolutely to suit the needs of their company as they lose market share to Linux.
And Waterloo would be what type of institution?
The .NET framework makes very extensive use of reflection with arbitrary meta-data tagged to the data structures. This is how all the .NET code for XML serialization and parsing is done.
Basically you call an instance of the Serializer, pass it the type of the data structure you want to serialize and poof! out comes a delegate routine that will serialize and parse that data structure.
I would suspect that there is already more C# production code than Modula 3 code. Redmond has been using C# internally for quite a while.
Nobody raised any questions when comp sci courses chucked out Wirthless languaqges like pascal and Modula in favor of Java. And when it comes to proprietary control of a language only a complete slashweenie can pretend that Java is an open language when Sun uses the courts to enforce proprietary control.
C# does have one major feature that Java does not, meta data and reflection. Now those are not features that many programmers who have not used the Lisp machine are familiar with but it is a very powerful way to program.
The point is that in the past five years it has become possible to teach computer programming courses using languages that are both clean in design and relevant commercially. Modula and pascal were botched from start to finish.
According to the Constitution of the State of California the Executive headed by the Govenor has that role.
The Legislative branch has oversight, but legislation is absolutely the wrong vehicle for administrative reforms.
I doubt anyone's seriously proposing an open-source-only law.
Try reading the slashdot thread, that is exactly what people are proposing. In this case the link from the thread to the story is pretty direct.
As you point out there are reasonable folk on both sides, however there are also complete loons and in a political process it is often the one-banana-short-of-a-whole-bunch types that end up writing the legislation. And yes, read the thread, there are plenth of people who read slashdot who just can't wait to tell government employees that from now on "all your desktops are bellong to us".
I know RMS, RMS happend to have the office above me at MIT. He told me the license is viral long before Microsoft ever mentioned the word.