Naw, the government would love this. It would give them a reason to apply GPS tracking to everybody. That's just because you're not filing enough detail ("I've decided to travel across the room to adjust the thermostat on the aircon, so I thought I'd better file a full report with the TSA", followed by "Following the successful journey as described in previously mentioned filing XYZ-1230467361-Q, I'll be making a return journey via the plant in the window which needs a bit of water"). And remember, those filings have got to be hand-written (in your best and most cursive style) in red pen on paper. With as many cross-references (I recommend GUIDs as great cross-reference IDs!) to previous filings as possible. Now, while the tinfoil hat brigade might think the spooks will love this, the reverse is actually true, especially when multiplied by millions of "concerned and helpful" citizens. Can you say "data entry problem from hell"? And that's before they start trying to analyse a single bit of it.
[F]iltering IMAP messages by body text. I've tried half a dozen other email programs and none of them seem able to filter IMAP messages this way. I can't see any valid explanation why other clients refuse to do this./quote>It's computationally quite complex. To do it sanely, you need a fairly sophisticated text-processing database engine on the backend, and they've not been available for that long. But I do think you'll see that feature more in the future now that there's OSS DBs that can tackle this so that everyone doesn't have to reinvent it. The future's bright!
The problem is not the practice of lobbying, but the endless need for money to campaign with. Since we don't have any effective spending limits and flimsy donation rules, the problem can only get worse. In other words, this is transforming a Representative Democracy into a Plutocracy (and an Oligarchic one at that, though that doesn't follow from what you said).
Look at Microsoft use BSD code in its operating system, Which is one of the things that is supposed to be possible with BSD code. Really.
not provide access to it, Like the BSDers care. After all, their code is still available for all to use.
and at the same time try to destroy free software with the money it makes. Pass that man a tinfoil hat!
Re:What is good for GM is good for America
on
The 700MHz Question
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· Score: 1
I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about in terms of the citizens of new orleans mortgaging their homes to pay for levees. It's probably because the most logical method of funding the continuance of the city - surtaxing the oil and goods flowing through it - might impact him as someone who lives somewhere else.
It seems like since CS covers such a broad range of stuff some, rubbishy universities are constantly trying to remove material in order to make the degree easier to obtain. There, fixed that for you.
All the EU are doing is checking if that's really the case or if the market is still open for consumers to shop around. In this case you need to distinguish between "consumers" (i.e. you or me) and "customers" (i.e. people wishing to advertise online). And the question (that the EU will be asking) is whether people (in the EU) wanting to advertise or host advertising online will get screwed over by this deal.
No idea what the outcome of this investigation will be though. One question I'd have would be whether the online market be considered to be distinct from the real-world market? And would scale effects online prevent other companies from becoming new advertising servers in this space? (Guess that's two questions...)
You could try getting multiple phone lines put in and then having a router that can use the aggregate bandwidth for routing packets. I seem to recall reading somewhere about kit that can do this. On the other hand, it's probably expensive as it the sort of trick that companies pull when they want to expand their network a bit without shelling out for a major external pipe.
It probably is simpler and cheaper to move. Or accept that you're in the slow lane; I worked for years over 14k4, and that was good enough for text-only stuff (e.g. most email, basic HTTP, SSH). Forget dealing with anything much larger though unless you're really not in a hurry (I have used Framemaker on an X11 display over that 14k4 connection, and it could have sucked worse...)
For software related issues, it's hardly worth talking about until Leopard is out as it's pretty clear at this point that the iPhone was originally intended to be released in a post-Leopard world and is not "all that it was meant to be" at the moment. For hardware related stuff, GPS, G3, better camera, and second camera are too obvious to really mention (over and over again). I'll tell you what would be a monster hit of a feature to add: a haptic layer for that screen so that you can feel where the buttons (etc.) are. Right now, you have to look much more at an iPhone than other phones with real buttons since with the other ones you can use your sense of touch, and this matters because humans really are touchy-feely creatures. With some haptic stuff (and no, I don't know how to do it; if I did, I'd be applying for a license to print money^W^W^W^Wpatent right now) that could all change. It doesn't even need to be very fancy; just enough so that you can feel the buttons' locations (better yet, feel them responding to being pressed). I'm more and more sure that this is the way, and I'm not entirely sure that it's not already been invented in some lab somewhere...
Can I claim that my email address is my "copyrighted intellectual property" and sue spammers under DMCA?:-) No. Nobody would believe you. Trademark is more suited to that (but costlier to maintain).
Lyons still refers to "amateur sleuths" as though he's some kind of professional. Remember, being a "professional" just means that you get paid for it. It says nothing in itself about ability (though most people who are good at something will do it professionally, since that optimizes their earning power). On the other hand, I suspect that a good number of the "amateur sleuths" were actually moonlighting professionals.
The water in Farcry and the Exile games was very good. It was a cheat that only looks good close up if nothing much is happening. But why don't you get the wakes from the patrolling boats out there rolling in or making it hard to stay in your own boat? If you blow up a helicopter and the pieces fall in the water, where are the waves from that? That's right, they're not there. And that's because the physics of water is Really Really Hard.
Indeed, two of the problems mentioned in this piece are really the same thing: both Water and Fire are manifestations of Fluid Dynamics. Real supercomputers (not Beowulfs or BOINC nets, but specialist big iron) are mostly used for this sort of thing, and the nature of the problem (non-linear fractal) means that it can soak up every bit of compute power you throw at it and you'll still not really have enough. Indeed, it's going to come down to how good a cheat people can get away with (rather like AI, another of the Really Really Hard problems...)
<?xml version="1.0"?> <posting>
<message mood="sarcastic" level="highly"> I'll get right on that <smiley deprecated="yes" symbol=";-)"/>
</message> </posting> As someone who works on real XML schemas quite a bit, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that your document is still distinctly ill defined. Luckily, it's easy to fix with the aid of some namespaces and URLs, like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ns0:posting xmlns:ns0="http://slashdot.org/comments.pl"
xmlns:ns2="urn:psychology:emotions:level2">
<ns0:message ns1:mood="ns2:sarcastic" ns2:level="5" xmlns:ns1="urn:psychology:emotions:level1" >
I'll get right on that <ns6:smiley ns7:deprecated="true" ns6:symbolDialect="" ns8:mustUnderstand="true" xmlns:ns6="http://schemas.xmlsoap.com/blahblah/emoticons/1983" xmlns:ns7="http://schemas.xmlsoap.com/blahblah/core/2004" xmlns:ns8="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">;-) </ns6:smiley>
</ns0:message> </ns0:posting>
There we go, much more understandable and semantic-web-ish, and so much easier to enter!!!
Kerberos was nice when it came out, but there are better authentication mechanisms available out there. Only in the specific case where you're going across domains in some way, and then only because serious security people (quite reasonably) get antsy about trusting each other Kerberos domain controllers deeply. But within a domain, Kerberos works nicely. (IIRC, it can work in harmony with SSH; if that was the "better authentication mechanism" then shame on you!)
Mind you, I don't use the Kerberized stuff at work that much, mostly because I prefer to keep everything I need local on a laptop so I can continue to work even when there is *no* network available (still annoyingly often when travelling, alas...)
A bunch of geeks build a robot to "play doctor" instead of doing it themselves. When will it end? At least you know none of them are "playing doctors and nurses"...
Guido should concentrate on getting things like the UI, the standard libraries, and package management straightened out Commenting on these as someone who isn't a Python person at all...
For UI, people should be aware that Tk has just had a large injection of new widgets that support theming/styling schemes that make them look just like native widgets. (Actually, they are real native widgets on some platforms...) Now if only the python interface to Tk didn't set the TK_LIBRARY environment variable, things would work even better.
One man's essential standard library component is another man's useless bloat. Really. So suit yourself as to what you put in. It helps though if you try to keep the style of the API consistent, and the number of API patterns small. After all, the big problem with Win32 was always that the API was too often inconsistent with itself, whereas the POSIX API is mostly much cleaner that way.
Package management is hard. Good areas to examine first are "package versioning rules" and "single file packages".
Give it a couple years, and we'll probably all be running 10Gbps networks You mean you aren't already? Time to get with the program, man! Anyone would think you're stuck in 2006 or something like that...
The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which [...] 'determine[s] who is creating "anonymous" content' They've managed to pin a lot of it on this guy called "Anonymous" Coward, who they think is related the playwright Noël Coward...
Another possible avenue is to go via the Consumers Association. Many newspapers (or at least the one I read) have Consumer columns who like to chase this sort of thing down too.
In speed of development, yes. But what about perfomance, scalability, and reliability? How about amount and quality of available documentation? Current evidence (OK, a quick google!) is that Ruby doesn't have real multithreading (i.e. green threads only) and that PHP's is still a painful hack. Since multithreading is a real requirement for performance and scalability these days, (threads scale for performance better than processes, and you can always have more processes too) I have to conclude that Ruby's not at all ready for prime time and won't be for years (I don't even detect agreement within the Ruby community that native threads are a goal worth pursuing) and PHP has got a lot more pain to go through before it gets there (the sheer messiness of PHP makes their job harder) especially when you add the requirement for reliability. Experience (from around 10 years ago with Tcl) indicates that it takes a lot of work to stabilize a good native threading implementation in a language, mostly because of the tendency for problems to only crop up under heavy load and never when you have decent instrumentation attached. Such problems are referred to as Heisenbugs with good reason!
If you're serious about a performant scalable reliable rich integrated web server platform, you're probably talking about using JSP, ASP.NET or AOLserver. Of these, the last one is (IIRC) fastest, both when dealing with pages generated from DB queries and when the content is purely non-DB. The AOLserver guys are good (even if AOL users are not so highly respected...)
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No idea what the outcome of this investigation will be though. One question I'd have would be whether the online market be considered to be distinct from the real-world market? And would scale effects online prevent other companies from becoming new advertising servers in this space? (Guess that's two questions...)
You could try getting multiple phone lines put in and then having a router that can use the aggregate bandwidth for routing packets. I seem to recall reading somewhere about kit that can do this. On the other hand, it's probably expensive as it the sort of trick that companies pull when they want to expand their network a bit without shelling out for a major external pipe.
It probably is simpler and cheaper to move. Or accept that you're in the slow lane; I worked for years over 14k4, and that was good enough for text-only stuff (e.g. most email, basic HTTP, SSH). Forget dealing with anything much larger though unless you're really not in a hurry (I have used Framemaker on an X11 display over that 14k4 connection, and it could have sucked worse...)
Indeed, two of the problems mentioned in this piece are really the same thing: both Water and Fire are manifestations of Fluid Dynamics. Real supercomputers (not Beowulfs or BOINC nets, but specialist big iron) are mostly used for this sort of thing, and the nature of the problem (non-linear fractal) means that it can soak up every bit of compute power you throw at it and you'll still not really have enough. Indeed, it's going to come down to how good a cheat people can get away with (rather like AI, another of the Really Really Hard problems...)
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<posting>
<message mood="sarcastic" level="highly"> I'll get right on that <smiley deprecated="yes" symbol=";-)"
</message>
</posting> As someone who works on real XML schemas quite a bit, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that your document is still distinctly ill defined. Luckily, it's easy to fix with the aid of some namespaces and URLs, like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ns0:posting xmlns:ns0="http://slashdot.org/comments.pl"
xmlns:ns2="urn:psychology:emotions:level2">
<ns0:message ns1:mood="ns2:sarcastic" ns2:level="5" xmlns:ns1="urn:psychology:emotions:level1" >
I'll get right on that <ns6:smiley ns7:deprecated="true" ns6:symbolDialect="" ns8:mustUnderstand="true" xmlns:ns6="http://schemas.xmlsoap.com/blahblah/emoticons/1983" xmlns:ns7="http://schemas.xmlsoap.com/blahblah/core/2004" xmlns:ns8="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
</ns0:message>
</ns0:posting>
There we go, much more understandable and semantic-web-ish, and so much easier to enter!!!
Mind you, I don't use the Kerberized stuff at work that much, mostly because I prefer to keep everything I need local on a laptop so I can continue to work even when there is *no* network available (still annoyingly often when travelling, alas...)
Those are yearly figures at the end of each row? Seems (after factoring the fact htat they're private sector) they can't afford me...
I'm free to follow anyone I want. I call that real freedom.
In speed of development, yes. But what about perfomance, scalability, and reliability? How about amount and quality of available documentation? Current evidence (OK, a quick google!) is that Ruby doesn't have real multithreading (i.e. green threads only) and that PHP's is still a painful hack. Since multithreading is a real requirement for performance and scalability these days, (threads scale for performance better than processes, and you can always have more processes too) I have to conclude that Ruby's not at all ready for prime time and won't be for years (I don't even detect agreement within the Ruby community that native threads are a goal worth pursuing) and PHP has got a lot more pain to go through before it gets there (the sheer messiness of PHP makes their job harder) especially when you add the requirement for reliability. Experience (from around 10 years ago with Tcl) indicates that it takes a lot of work to stabilize a good native threading implementation in a language, mostly because of the tendency for problems to only crop up under heavy load and never when you have decent instrumentation attached. Such problems are referred to as Heisenbugs with good reason!
If you're serious about a performant scalable reliable rich integrated web server platform, you're probably talking about using JSP, ASP.NET or AOLserver. Of these, the last one is (IIRC) fastest, both when dealing with pages generated from DB queries and when the content is purely non-DB. The AOLserver guys are good (even if AOL users are not so highly respected...)