2) Karma needs to weigh much, much more. People with karma over 50 should start posting at 2. People with karma over 100 should start posting at 3. People with karma over 200 should start posting at 4 and people with karma over 500 (if they exist) must be worth reading.
I think people with a karma larger than 25 start posting at 2. Anything above IMHO is exagerated because those people might write something insightful in a direct reply to an article, but in the following discussion, they are not likely to repeat that 'performance' again and again. But they would appear all the time in threaded discussions (if they have a score of 3 or higher). So I'd say 2 is enough.
3) Each post takes exponentially longer to be posted to the system. First post takes one second to reach the forum. The next takes two seconds. The following takes four. Then eight, sixteen and so forth. In the end, if someone really wants to post more than 20 messages in a single day, they'll have to wait until tomorror for people to see them. That way these floods STOP.
But this won't stop anonymous cowards with a dynamic IP...
4) More moderation. I'd much rather see a war of moderation than a war of trolls. Give anyone with karma over 100 permanent moderation status. The only way it gets revoked is if them make a posting, and then it is revoked for twenty-four hours (thought on that article permanently).
I don't think this is a good idea. Such moderators can too easily abuse it. I think the FAQ has more on that topic... With an infinite number of mod. points you could also easily bring other persons to karma 100 by moderating up everything they say. I think the restriction to 5 points (or make it 10 for people with high karma) once in a while is important.
I don't think that was the reason, but it is an interesting question nonetheless (and certainly not flamebait; moderators, please give the original posting an 'underrated' or 'interesting').
I just wanted to point out that we should take all answers of this person with a grain of salt.
Taking into consideration that many of the readers of this forum are voters and pro-open-source (to put it carefully;-)) the answer will probably be accordingly.
What about those gazillions of 'normal user' homepages (Hi, I'm Bob, my hobbies are..., here some links to my friends' pages which are as useless as my own)? They're hardly part of any of your continents...
RealPlayer/is/ installed, but most of the time nothing happens when I click on a link. In the few cases where it works there might be some script code that makes sure RealPlayer is invoked, but that's just a guess...
Frankly, whenever I can choose between Real and ASX I take ASX because it simply works and I have the impression that it looks and sounds better at the same bitrate than Real. Don't know about QuickTime... OTOH, I don't like the fact that ASX becomes predominant although there probably never will be a player for anything but Windows.
I'm using IE 5 right now (note that I'm not the original poster). What I really dislike (apart from the eventual 'an internal error occurred' message box that pops up after program termination) is the fact that sometimes (cannot really say why this happens) I click on the menu bar (e.g. File) and the menu won't come up! All I can do is terminate that instance and start a new one. That's really annoying...
After a very long period of surfing (> 5 hrs) problems arise that will make opening new instances create new windows that never really render and simply have a sand clock in them.
RealAudio and RealVideo work only in few cases. Most of the time, clicking on an RA / RV / RAM link will result in no action at all. ASF / ASX support is great, though;-) Not that surprising!
But with all the problems, IE is way better than Netscape (from my personal experience). Opera, for me, doesn't render certain pages properly. But it has a nice zooming feature...
If Mozilla fulfills only part of what I've heard I will drop every other browser instantaneously...
That article contains a number of claims from a person and no proof at all. The fact that arbitrary unwanted (by the system owner) code can be run on a Unix system (well, Solaris and Linux) is taken for granted, which is total nonsense.
Apart from the wrong statements, the 'journalist' who wrote the article obviously hasn't checked anything, he just provided a forum for that other guy who wants to sell some security-related product. It's a shame everybody can create their own news site without having to fulfill certain standards...
Germany's a bit behind in broadcasting the episodes (now near the end of the sixth season), so yesterday they aired an episode where Scully was working with the three guys in Las Vegas. That show/definitely/ was a lot of fun, even without Mulder. Maybe because Scully was on drugs...
However, I'm not sure if the writers can really come up with enough new story lines. On Anderson's contract, I don't think they can make her work on another show if she doesn't want to.
That pretty much sums up the stereotype, but I think part of it (the attractive young female scientist) works for the X-Files and Scully, because she and Mulder never got involved that way.
It seems that the 1.1.8 RC1 JDK news item (BTW, from January 5th;-)) is not announced here - this page has not been updated for five months. From netbsd.org I can 'only' find FTP links. Is there another 'official' NetBSD JDK page?
In this context, it would be a good idea for them to offer a non-Windows player. Real has Unix players, Apple is considering other platforms than Mac and Windows.
If this is not just a rumour, I guess MS will have to put a lot of money into the development. Porting their Media player to *ix certainly is quite a task...
I agree with most what you say, but there's a difference between standards for network transfer and video compression.
MSN and their proprietary protocols was offering absolutely no advantages, it was done just for strategic reasons.
OTOH, there are huge differences from a performance point of view with video codecs. You must regard CPU power necessary to decode, memory requirements and most important, what bitrate does your codec require to deliver a certain quality (with lossy codecs you obviously can reach any grade of compression, so it's more useful to compare quality of two codecs at the same bitrate). MS is doing pretty well here (I think they're using MPEG-4 for low bitrates), and it'll be hard to come up with a free and patent-free decoder that delivers the same quality.
Hi, I really tried to understand Tim's example of virtual classes with model/view and spreadsheets, unfortunately I didn't get it:
This seems like a good design, but it doesn't work well: all the functions in SpreadsheetModel have types indicating they work with an arbitrary View subclass, and vice-versa.
Could someone please explain to me what he means? If the types are not specific enough, maybe the whole design is wrong?! I'd be grateful for an answer...
In Bill Teahan's PhD thesis "Modelling English Text" (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~wjt/), another nice approach for the identification of an author is mentioned (don't remember if Bill came up with it or someone else).
It involves a text compression system that must be trained with text (the more, the better). If you train the system with the works of N different authors and compress the text to be identified with each of the models, it usually gets compressed best with the model of the author that really wrote the text.
This of course requires a sample of the author's work to be available.
It seems chances to see it in Europe are bad, at least according to the weather forecast. I hope someone will take some good pictures of a red moon and make them available soon (digital or not)! That eclipse site only had small GIF's;-(
The performance decrease introduced by a VM can be important for some programs (many GUI style apps will *not* suffer from it). Then you can either use a Source-to-native or a byte-code-to-native compiler. There are commercial and free products available (this list includes some).
Another workaround is the JNI, which lets you include non-Java code (e.g. C). It is used for the ZIP I/O, as an example.
There are lots of numbers out there comparing C++ to Java performance, where C++ has a mere 10 % advantage. I'm not sure if this is always true, but with Sun's 1.3 beta and HotSpot or IBM's VM, you do get pretty decent performance.
Now that Be is concentrating on the Internet, what about the JDK promised here? This press release says: The Java 2 platform and PersonalJava technology are currently being ported to BeOS. Beta versions of the software are expected to be available before the end of the year.
That means no display for non-Windows, non-Mac users. BTW, I got a pretty fast download of the 48-mb-file. In case it is still needed and someone offers space, I can upload it.
Is there any free MOV->MPG converter that works on top of an installed QuickTime library (similar to those AVI-to-MPG tools for Windows)?
For all future video goodies, someone could convert files (AVI, MOV, ASF) under Windows to MPG so that everyone can see it...
This is a real question, no offense meant, no flamebait. Isn't autoconf just there to work around a) the problems of the C programming languages with programming across platform bounds (e.g. sizeof(int) differs) and b) the differences between *ix systems (function call XYZ is not available on some systems, has another name on another system etc.)?
If so, wouldn't it be a better approach to use a standardized high-level programming language that is a bit more away from the operating system? I know C cannot be dropped immediately, but if more and more tools are built to cover its shortcomings...
OTOH, I like make, I'm using it on all kinds of platforms (Linux, Sun OS, Win32) to create programs in different languages or just to rebuild some LaTeX source.
That's right, mixing up layout and structure has caused quite a mess.
I hope website designers (at least of those sites that I care about;-)) start rethinking their appoach. There is a chance with WAP and all kinds of hand-held devices that we will see content providers storing their stuff as XML and creating several versions from it - HTML with fancy graphics, text-only HTML, WML for your cell phone, etc. Not necessarily because it is the _right_ approach (from a W3C point of view), but because it is the easiest solution for them in the long run.
I'm not sure whether you have refuted Eric's theory of the hardness of creating new compression algorithms in the open source community. I'm not one of the PhD-level experts mentioned, so I think I'm relatively objective.
It is, of course, not totally unlikely that somebody comes up with a new idea for a compression algorithm, the idea works, the algorithm can run on modern hardware, somebody creates a C library and públishes it under the GPL or a similar license, the inventor gives the algoritm to the public domain, avoiding patent issues. But how probable is this?
If you create compilers or operating systems, you have a very complex project, but you have many smaller tasks that can be implemented by different people (simplifying a bit). Coming up with a new compression algorithm is a different thing.
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2) Karma needs to weigh much, much more. People with karma over 50 should start posting at 2. People with karma over 100 should start posting at 3. People with karma over 200 should start posting at 4 and people with karma over 500 (if they exist) must be worth reading.
I think people with a karma larger than 25 start posting at 2. Anything above IMHO is exagerated because those people might write something insightful in a direct reply to an article, but in the following discussion, they are not likely to repeat that 'performance' again and again. But they would appear all the time in threaded discussions (if they have a score of 3 or higher). So I'd say 2 is enough.
3) Each post takes exponentially longer to be posted to the system. First post takes one second to reach the forum. The next takes two seconds. The following takes four. Then eight, sixteen and so forth. In the end, if someone really wants to post more than 20 messages in a single day, they'll have to wait until tomorror for people to see them. That way these floods STOP.
But this won't stop anonymous cowards with a dynamic IP...
4) More moderation. I'd much rather see a war of moderation than a war of trolls. Give anyone with karma over 100 permanent moderation status. The only way it gets revoked is if them make a posting, and then it is revoked for twenty-four hours (thought on that article permanently).
I don't think this is a good idea. Such moderators can too easily abuse it. I think the FAQ has more on that topic... With an infinite number of mod. points you could also easily bring other persons to karma 100 by moderating up everything they say. I think the restriction to 5 points (or make it 10 for people with high karma) once in a while is important.
I don't think that was the reason, but it is an interesting question nonetheless (and certainly not flamebait; moderators, please give the original posting an 'underrated' or 'interesting').
I just wanted to point out that we should take all answers of this person with a grain of salt.
Taking into consideration that many of the readers of this forum are voters and pro-open-source (to put it carefully ;-)) the answer will probably be accordingly.
What about those gazillions of 'normal user' homepages (Hi, I'm Bob, my hobbies are..., here some links to my friends' pages which are as useless as my own)? They're hardly part of any of your continents...
RealPlayer /is/ installed, but most of the time nothing happens when I click on a link. In the few cases where it works there might be some script code that makes sure RealPlayer is invoked, but that's just a guess...
Frankly, whenever I can choose between Real and ASX I take ASX because it simply works and I have the impression that it looks and sounds better at the same bitrate than Real. Don't know about QuickTime... OTOH, I don't like the fact that ASX becomes predominant although there probably never will be a player for anything but Windows.
I'm using IE 5 right now (note that I'm not the original poster). What I really dislike (apart from the eventual 'an internal error occurred' message box that pops up after program termination) is the fact that sometimes (cannot really say why this happens) I click on the menu bar (e.g. File) and the menu won't come up! All I can do is terminate that instance and start a new one. That's really annoying...
;-) Not that surprising!
After a very long period of surfing (> 5 hrs) problems arise that will make opening new instances create new windows that never really render and simply have a sand clock in them.
RealAudio and RealVideo work only in few cases. Most of the time, clicking on an RA / RV / RAM link will result in no action at all. ASF / ASX support is great, though
But with all the problems, IE is way better than Netscape (from my personal experience). Opera, for me, doesn't render certain pages properly. But it has a nice zooming feature...
If Mozilla fulfills only part of what I've heard I will drop every other browser instantaneously...
That article contains a number of claims from a person and no proof at all. The fact that arbitrary unwanted (by the system owner) code can be run on a Unix system (well, Solaris and Linux) is taken for granted, which is total nonsense.
Apart from the wrong statements, the 'journalist' who wrote the article obviously hasn't checked anything, he just provided a forum for that other guy who wants to sell some security-related product. It's a shame everybody can create their own news site without having to fulfill certain standards...
Germany's a bit behind in broadcasting the episodes (now near the end of the sixth season), so yesterday they aired an episode where Scully was working with the three guys in Las Vegas. That show /definitely/ was a lot of fun, even without Mulder. Maybe because Scully was on drugs...
However, I'm not sure if the writers can really come up with enough new story lines. On Anderson's contract, I don't think they can make her work on another show if she doesn't want to.
That pretty much sums up the stereotype, but I think part of it (the attractive young female scientist) works for the X-Files and Scully, because she and Mulder never got involved that way.
/is/ a certain tension...
Of course there
Mr Showbiz had this too: http://mrshow biz.go.com/news/Todays_Stories/204/lonegunmen02040 0.html.
No flamebait meant, but why was this rejected when I suggested it some days ago?
It seems that the 1.1.8 RC1 JDK news item (BTW, from January 5th ;-)) is not announced here - this page has not been updated for five months. From netbsd.org I can 'only' find FTP links. Is there another 'official' NetBSD JDK page?
Microsoft wants to make ASF (their streaming media file format) a standard: http://www.microsoft.com/asf/standards.h tm.
In this context, it would be a good idea for them to offer a non-Windows player. Real has Unix players, Apple is considering other platforms than Mac and Windows.
If this is not just a rumour, I guess MS will have to put a lot of money into the development. Porting their Media player to *ix certainly is quite a task...
There were 3 point that were more or less lies:
The alternative is that he doesn't know what he's talking about. I don't know which is worse.
Isn't Valenti the guy who bores everyone at the beginning of the Academy Awards show?
I agree with most what you say, but there's a difference between standards for network transfer and video compression.
MSN and their proprietary protocols was offering absolutely no advantages, it was done just for strategic reasons.
OTOH, there are huge differences from a performance point of view with video codecs. You must regard CPU power necessary to decode, memory requirements and most important, what bitrate does your codec require to deliver a certain quality (with lossy codecs you obviously can reach any grade of compression, so it's more useful to compare quality of two codecs at the same bitrate). MS is doing pretty well here (I think they're using MPEG-4 for low bitrates), and it'll be hard to come up with a free and patent-free decoder that delivers the same quality.
Opera 3.60 / NT, to be more specific. So it seems to be more of a bug in the HTML creation than a browser error.
Hi, I really tried to understand Tim's example of virtual classes with model/view and spreadsheets, unfortunately I didn't get it:
This seems like a good design, but it doesn't work well: all the functions in SpreadsheetModel have types indicating they work with an arbitrary View subclass, and vice-versa.
Could someone please explain to me what he means? If the types are not specific enough, maybe the whole design is wrong?! I'd be grateful for an answer...
Go to this page, it's exactly what you're looking for.
To sum it up, 1.2 for Windows, Linux is supposed to come in Q1 / Q2 2000, 1.3 following soon. It is already available for AIX and OS/400.
In Bill Teahan's PhD thesis "Modelling English Text" (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~wjt/), another nice approach for the identification of an author is mentioned (don't remember if Bill came up with it or someone else).
It involves a text compression system that must be trained with text (the more, the better). If you train the system with the works of N different authors and compress the text to be identified with each of the models, it usually gets compressed best with the model of the author that really wrote the text.
This of course requires a sample of the author's work to be available.
It seems chances to see it in Europe are bad, at least according to the weather forecast. I hope someone will take some good pictures of a red moon and make them available soon (digital or not)! That eclipse site only had small GIF's ;-(
The performance decrease introduced by a VM can be important for some programs (many GUI style apps will *not* suffer from it). Then you can either use a Source-to-native or a byte-code-to-native compiler. There are commercial and free products available (this list includes some).
Another workaround is the JNI, which lets you include non-Java code (e.g. C). It is used for the ZIP I/O, as an example.
There are lots of numbers out there comparing C++ to Java performance, where C++ has a mere 10 % advantage. I'm not sure if this is always true, but with Sun's 1.3 beta and HotSpot or IBM's VM, you do get pretty decent performance.
Now that Be is concentrating on the Internet, what about the JDK promised here? This press release says:
The Java 2 platform and PersonalJava technology are currently being ported to BeOS. Beta versions of the software are expected to be available before the end of the year.
The year being 1999. Does anyone know more?
That means no display for non-Windows, non-Mac users. BTW, I got a pretty fast download of the 48-mb-file. In case it is still needed and someone offers space, I can upload it.
Is there any free MOV->MPG converter that works on top of an installed QuickTime library (similar to those AVI-to-MPG tools for Windows)?
For all future video goodies, someone could convert files (AVI, MOV, ASF) under Windows to MPG so that everyone can see it...
This is a real question, no offense meant, no flamebait. Isn't autoconf just there to work around a) the problems of the C programming languages with programming across platform bounds (e.g. sizeof(int) differs) and b) the differences between *ix systems (function call XYZ is not available on some systems, has another name on another system etc.)?
If so, wouldn't it be a better approach to use a standardized high-level programming language that is a bit more away from the operating system? I know C cannot be dropped immediately, but if more and more tools are built to cover its shortcomings...
OTOH, I like make, I'm using it on all kinds of platforms (Linux, Sun OS, Win32) to create programs in different languages or just to rebuild some LaTeX source.
That's right, mixing up layout and structure has caused quite a mess.
;-)) start rethinking their appoach. There is a chance with WAP and all kinds of hand-held devices that we will see content providers storing their stuff as XML and creating several versions from it - HTML with fancy graphics, text-only HTML, WML for your cell phone, etc. Not necessarily because it is the _right_ approach (from a W3C point of view), but because it is the easiest solution for them in the long run.
I hope website designers (at least of those sites that I care about
I'm not sure whether you have refuted Eric's theory of the hardness of creating new compression algorithms in the open source community. I'm not one of the PhD-level experts mentioned, so I think I'm relatively objective.
It is, of course, not totally unlikely that somebody comes up with a new idea for a compression algorithm, the idea works, the algorithm can run on modern hardware, somebody creates a C library and públishes it under the GPL or a similar license, the inventor gives the algoritm to the public domain, avoiding patent issues. But how probable is this?
If you create compilers or operating systems, you have a very complex project, but you have many smaller tasks that can be implemented by different people (simplifying a bit). Coming up with a new compression algorithm is a different thing.