As a ballpark figure, 1 watt turned on all year costs you $1. Maybe double that if you are in a continuously air conditioned environment like a machine room.
The savings may not be too large. I checked an Athlon system with an ammeter recently. It came in at 120W with one drive in it while doing its server tasks. So, they at least are in the same ballpark. (The measurement techniques are surely different, I would not claim one was higher than the other based on this data. Just that they are near each other.)
Power is one of the reasons I suggest people not use that crappy old 486 or pentium as a NAT/firewall box in their house unless they are doing it for joy. In about a year or so of electricity savings you can pay for one of the new integrated appliances and enjoy increased reliablity and savings in the following years.
carmack is not a computer programmer. Programming the computer can not be his goal. This should be clear to anyone who has read his code. I believe Mr. Carmack programs as a means to fulfilling his vision. You will find very little if anything in there that is done for the art of programming or to fulfill anyone's vision of how programming should be done.
What he does, and brilliantly, is bring his vision to reality.
I say he should follow his vision, where ever it goes and regardless what anyone tells him he can and can not do.
And no. I would not put my life in the hands of anyone's vision of a rocket ship. Show me the real rocket and then we can talk.
I should disclaim... I have never met the man, but I have read his code.
Human effects on bridges is hardly a surprise. Recall in 1981 when the Kansas City Hyatt's skywalk collapsed, killing 114, because the pedestrians were dancing (and the design was altered to ease construction). You'd think that would have been enough of a wake up call to the millenium designers to consider human motion. more info
Armys break cadence when marching across bridges, at least as far back as Napoleon's time. Presumably they learned that the hard way.
On a more personal note, I have participated in the unintentional destruction of a gymnasium. 80 or so people crowded together in the middle, bouncing up and down, and then "down and down". We fractured the engineered wooden joists. Fortunately it failed gracefully. Just sagged down about 4 feet in the middle.
What I'm trying to say, not particularly directly, is "don't give the designers of the bridge a pass because this new phenomenon struct their bridge". Chastise them for risking people's lives and wasting resources by neglecting the loads placed on bridges.
Perhaps you should be using the testing release instead of the unstable release?
Unstable has whatever packages the developer built and uploaded. Odds are they have only been checked on one or two machines of a single architecture by a single person. It is being uploaded to be more widely tested.
After a period of time without horrible bugs the package will be moved to testing for wider testing. You are relatively safe from show stopping problems with this release.
I was wondering if I should order a new VXA-1 tape in the black, white, or translucent case. Can someone help me make that decision?
I suppose I'll a wee bit constructive just in case the author really does need help...
Are your machines of such limited function that you can encode it in two letters? What about when you have more than one function to a machine? What about when you have more than one customer to a machine? If you swear you'll never do that you are either lying to yourself or will be driven out of business by your competitors.
Long random names are just silly for encoding 4000 machines into 8 characters. TLAs give you 17000 names. Everyone can remember three letters. That is why there are TLAs.
Themes are fatally flawed in large systems. There are no easily remembered themes for 4000 machines, so you use a bunch of smaller ones. But then someone either outgrows their theme or wastes a bunch of names by sparsley populating a theme. Plus not everyone will know how to spell cthulhu correctly after hearing it on the phone.
If you encode physical site in the name, what will you do when you fold two data centers into one? Make your weekend of hell even worse?
And anyone that needs more than one computer to run Joe's Deli should be cast out.
And Hey! Since slashdot is written by the community, shouldn't we be able to put our OWN inline ads into our content? Why does taco and company get to put ads in my content?
This comment is Copyright 2002 by Jim Studt. It may not be altered or republished with advertisements without his express permission.
I have to give a big thumbs up to buttonless mice. I've been fighting an RSI in my mouse hand for a couple of years. Since I've switched to a buttonless mouse it has cleared up entirely. I highly recommend anyone with mouse hand problems try one.
It is an apple mouse. You don't miss the buttons under Mac OS, I run about half the time in X and I've just learned to use the extra modifier keys to get the other buttons. It becomes automatic after a day.
(Not that I'm a clicking fiend, the injury probably originated while playing a string of shows with a bluegrass band. 240 notes/minute, 80/finger/minute on the right hand for three hours a day is a lot of finger pulling for a bass player. I had to stop doing that, but the hand didn't heal until I switched mice.)
Re:Language neutrality - not
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I was surprised how often the main article preached.NETs language neutrality..NET is certainly not language neutral. Heck, Microsoft had to neuter their own primary development languages in order to get them into it.
I can understand why they would restrict their framework to a single inheritance, single dispatch in order to be easily used from more languages, but they forbid both multiple inheritance and multiple dispatch in the virtual machine.
I suspect we are seeing the "language-neutral" lie pushed so heavily right now in order to convince people to choose.NET. I mean, you can't be making the wrong decision if it supports all languages equally, right?
I'm sure this is normal industry practice. Here in St. Louis we have to go to odd meausures to dodge Charter Cable's buggy transparent proxy. (It doesn't handle the case where you are deliberately using an authenticated proxy.) Fortunately it only looks at certain ports so you can dodge with proxies on non-standard ports.
Say Charter, if you are reading you could reimburse me for the two hours I spent figurng out this defect in my Charter user's internet service.
You might like to add function invocation or at least some sort of goto.:-)
Not to pick on you, but I suspect this is a case of your tool shaping your mind. I'm sure back in the 1960's when "if...then...else" was some new whacked out concept from the lisp guy that got rammed into the Algol specification everyone thought it was just silly bloat. I mean, they had conditional goto already. Why would you need some froo-froo syntactic sugar (<--deliberatly loaded term) to wrap around that?
What I have found on my path, Basic, assembly, Pascal, C, C+-, C++, Dylan, objective-c (plus the usual side tracks into icon, prolog, php, and domain specific languages) is that at each step I am happily using a programming language that does everything ever needed by a programming language. I look ahead at the next language in my list and didn't learn it because it was just funny syntax and some silly features that I didn't really need. After I learned the new language and how to use its 'silly features' I couldn't imagine returning to the previous language. tragically, that last language is out of order. there are implementation reasons why I don't use Dylan. I am shopping for a new language, but making do with objective-c.
The readers of this thread will find anwsers from speakers at many points along the continuum. The farther removed the speaker from the listener, the more the remark will sound like ideological rubish.
In the field of software, the USPTO has a track record of granting patents on the obvious. The explantion I've heard is that evaluating the applications is hard so they grant them and let the courts and companies sort it out.
There is also the issue of patenting mathematics. That is not allowed. Many software patents are really patents on a machinewink wink that happens to produce the same results as a mathematical formula.
And I can't tell if you woke up in a socialist country or not. I woke up in one that is nominally capitalistic, but more socialist for the lowest castes.
Just curious about people's opinions here. Google gets covered fairly regularly on slashdot. Usually when a company that uses software patents to protect its business from competition comes up on slashdot they get reamed along with the USPTO.
slashdot talked about this in 1999 when the patent came up. Its 2+ years later now. google has mostly crushed the competing search engines because the results of their algorithm are preferred to other algorithms. Their revenue sources are not public, but I believe I read recently that half of their revenue is from advertisements and half from technology licensing.
So, the point for discussion...
The world's favorite search engine exists because of its software patent. This patent has caused great harm to the competing search engines. Is this ok because...
the software patent system is just fine
many software patents are silly, but this one is worthwhile.
it is a silly patent, but google is good enough that we forget about that.
no one cares how google got where they are. It is just good that they work well.
I would like a history book. It should cover in detail...
The rise of free software.
The economic benefit gained by removing the software rent gatherers. Consider a rent gatherer to be a company which holds a protected place in the software economy and collects revenues vastly beyond its expenses by virtue of that position.
The evolution of some rent gatherers into productive companies and the whitering away of the rest.
But I expect it will take more than a year to write that...
I'm still working on providing material for chapter one.
Feel free to mod me down into oblivion. I'm just cranky and unproductive today.
Which OS has more security problems is an interesting question, but I would not use ntbugtrack's data to answer it for the following reasons...
Having one of the OSes embedded in their name immediately makes my wonder about bias.
They have an aggregate data column for `all linux distributions' where they overcount the same bugs. Despite breaking windows OSes into two columns, they don't aggregate these together.
They do not attempt to quantify either theoretical severity of a problem or actual real world impact of the problem. The linux community tends to have more bug reports for theoretical problems that are fixed before they are exploited.
The statistics from ntbugtrack have been stale since August. This is an abandoned site. I suspect anyone doing a serious analysis would start with current data.
It is possible that MS bugs are under reported. All Debian security bugs are fully reported by policy. Microsoft has a policy (recently at least) of supressing minor bug reports and quietly fixing them.
Your typical linux distribution is OS, plus OS utilities, plus all of the applications. Application level bugs will show up in the linux distributions, but not in the windows columns. Consider the recent rsync bug. That should be a bug for all of the major linux distributions, but will not appear in the windows column even though rsync can be installed and run on windows. (This is an example, I have not verified that the bug affects windows. I believe it does from the description. Don't flame me over this one.)
So, how about we do a serious analysis? I'll put up a system that lets people rate the various bugs by severity along a couple of continuums. (Like theoretical impact and actual impact.) Then people can use this data to draw more accurate conclusions. If at least 10 people respond to this post, and two thirds of them think it is a good idea, I'll put one up and link it here.
Once you have released the computer from its fruity prison, you can then give it a proper rectangular computer case with the iRack 1U rack mount box. Sadly, it only handles rev A through D, so you will get topped out at 333MHz, still for many network applications thats way too much CPU anyway.
I'm still hoping Apple will make G3/G4 computers in a form factor similar to briq. Something I can cram in 3 or 4 to the U. As long as I'm dreaming, no video hardware, just Quartz over ethernet and a discovery protocol that lets me connect by MAC address from my management station.
This only applies to the deposition gathering process. This is the normal way such things are done. Allowing public access, as was done in the DOJ proceedings, is the exception.
Thats what I meant by client subscribes to aa[sic] set of content. I didn't mean to imply that the sets were predefined.
Very similar to usenet actually. At least the push model.
Re:It is another assinine patent - even worse
on
AvantGo Gets a Patent
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, you can search the PTO by primary examiner.
Maung also granted a patent on Melodic alerts for communications device.
Not as broad as it sounds, but they have managed to patent their protocol for sending a snippet of song as numeric digits. I suppose the business model here is to get companies to adopt this specific tune encoding and then be able to collect royalties.
I could certainly encode a melody more compactly without infringing this patent, so innovation can't be the driving force behind this one.
My personal favorite of Maung's Greatest Hits is Internet weight reduction system. It involves dieting by sending pictures of yourself to a computer to analyze your outline to verify the information you enter into the computer run diet plan.:-)
Re:It is another assinine patent - It is worse
on
AvantGo Gets a Patent
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I should add that it took eight people to invent this and most of their references are their own press releases.
Zarni Maung should be ashamed of himself.
I wonder if we can query the patent database by primary examiner? God knows what else this guy is letting by.
Claim 1: The client subscribes to aa set of content, the server gathers this content and later sends instructions to the client to transfer the content.
Claim 2: As above, but use a single message for the request and a single message for the transfer.
Claim 3: As 1, but also identifies "information that is of interest" during the sync.
Claim 4: Claim 1 where it happens over http. victim: I may become ill and stop typing this.
Claim 5: Claim 4 but transfer some XML on the HTTP. Yep, that's it. I can't go on. I mean no one would ever have considered transfering XML over HTTP! My GOD these people are geniuses!
There is nothing in this patent that a handful of competent engineers wouldn't come up with in their first brainstorming session.
I propose that the US Patent Office has so badly mismanged software patents that ALL software patents should be vacated and the patent examiners held personally liable for any damages claimed by the affected patent holders.
I was discussing some files with my film-making-brother-in-law and he pointed out that it is a very rare film franchise that makes it to IV. Even rarer is the IV that is any good.
I did a quick check on imdb and excluding pornos and slashers there are essentially no decent IV movies. (hmm, odd sentence with that excluding and decent... I'll leave it.)
Rsync is going to want to work on uncompressed tarballs or plain old unpacked source trees. (diffing.gz or.bz2 files doesn't work well, your first change usually causes the entire remainder of the file to be different) That is fine for bandwidth because it will compress the data before sending, but you do need to watch out for CPU use. My very rough estimate is that pumping out 50Mbit/sec of traffic with rsync is going to take something like a pair of top notch ia386 cpus.
I think it would still be a win. CPUs are cheap compared to bandwidth, but it does change the hosting dynamic a bit. You can't just use a nasty old desktop PC or virtual server to soak up the excess bandwidth. You need something with a little meat to it. (Not to disparge virtual servers, but they usually have paying clients that care if their CPU gets saturated.)
Now that you mention it, it is such a good idea that I will set one up today. I can't publish the access to it. I only have 2mbps uncomitted and that won't go far on a slashdotted kernel loader.:-)
I suppose I will settle for rsyncing the tar file around. It is seductive the rsync the unpacked source tree, but if I turn on --delete then it will whack my.o files and header links and I'll always be doing a full build, plus if I need to do a quick 'forgot a module' build my kernel version will have changed. If I do not turn on --delete it would mostly work, but I could accumulate obsolete files and there is a danger of date stamp problems.
The Acrobat format is not proprietary. I have the entire spec in a binder right here. I downloaded it from Adobe and printed it freely, then used it to create code that writes PDF files.
I have written web based programs that generate PDF without using any Adobe code. (When you need to be in control of the exact layout and 75dpi is not good enough, it is a great choice.)
TeX is happy to make PDF files. My Mac is happy to write anything I wish out as a PDF file instead of printing. In linux I have a little program to convert postscript to pdf. No Adobe software required on those systems.
I do tend to use Acrobat Reader for reading them, but I also use xpdf (launches much faster under linux) and, under OS X, Preview to read them.
I don't even understand that part about scanned documents and.ps files. But I can't see spending much time decoding a paragraph that contains the phrase donkey jiz in it.
It is possible that there is another format that provides precise display at high resolution in an easily navigable, on demand downloadable format, but I haven't heard of it. Long live PDF.
How about when they make an API from perl and python to the Windows APIs? How about when these APIs so attactive to the windows python and perl programmers that they depend on them?
Sound like J++ yet?
It won't be about owning the interpreters. Thats just code and anyone with $36B in the bank can have code written. It will be about owning the minds of the developers. They need the bulk of software developers to believe Windows is integral to computing.
[apple] never encouraged tinkering and hacking by individuals
The entire development environment and documentation library for Mac OS-X is both free and pretty darn spiffy. Visual Studio is something like $500 to $1000 depending who you are and how you get it. Heck, my first Apple came with schematics and ROM assembly listings.
At least Microsoft freely release GW-Basic in the early days...
Apple gave away Basic before Microsoft even existed. Never for Macintosh, but I believe that was more for strategic reasons. Apple needed to force the applications to a dramatically higher level of usability. This required the armys of evangelists and much arm twisting. "modern" mid '80s gui applications were not going to be thrown together in the Basic of the days.
Microsoft has also supported the porting of Perl and Python (via Activestate) to the Windows environment.
Yes, now we can see if that was the embrace before the extend.
Microsoft's software has been typically cheaper than Apple's
I have no idea in what universe this is true. Actually, there is very little in the way of good comparisons. Office $400, Appleworks $99. But Appleworks is feature poor compared to Office. It does everything I need, so its a good deal for me (well, $0, I buy low end Macs where it is included). If I needed the extras Office has this would be a worthless comparison. IE? No comparison. Apple is still forbidden from suggesting that there may be other browsers much less making one. iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD? No competition. Likewise there are loads of MS apps with no comparison. OS prices? Upgrades are similarly priced. Development tools? No contest.
Remember Apple 's sordid attempt to foster clones?
Yes. Apple gave them the hardware reference designs and OS in the delusion that the cloners would make a wider variety of machines and attack niches. The cloners just built the reference designs with minor tweaks and sold them in to apple's highest margin market (early adopters) because the cloners could start selling the newer faster processers while they were still in short supply and Apple with their larger market had to wait for production to ramp up. (I believe at one point Apple was buying all the initial production of higher speed processors at a premium and warehousing them so they could get the fast machines out first. When you have to pay a premium to keep faster processors away from your users in order to promote your platform something has gone wrong.) The media savaged Apple for offering slow machines. Apple lost sales. The platform didn't gain . Apple didn't revoke the cloners licenses (except one, they bought that back) they just raised the OS price so the cloners paid the same per machine for the OS as apple. Without the OS subsidy to pocket the cloners left the business.
I am glad tho that I do not have to pick between the lesser of two evils:)
Me too. I suspect any corporation with a 90%+ market share will be bad for the users. God knows what GPL v9 will look like when free software has 90% of the market.
Slashdot Mirror
As a ballpark figure, 1 watt turned on all year costs you $1. Maybe double that if you are in a continuously air conditioned environment like a machine room.
The savings may not be too large. I checked an Athlon system with an ammeter recently. It came in at 120W with one drive in it while doing its server tasks. So, they at least are in the same ballpark. (The measurement techniques are surely different, I would not claim one was higher than the other based on this data. Just that they are near each other.)
Power is one of the reasons I suggest people not use that crappy old 486 or pentium as a NAT/firewall box in their house unless they are doing it for joy. In about a year or so of electricity savings you can pay for one of the new integrated appliances and enjoy increased reliablity and savings in the following years.
carmack is not a computer programmer. Programming the computer can not be his goal. This should be clear to anyone who has read his code. I believe Mr. Carmack programs as a means to fulfilling his vision. You will find very little if anything in there that is done for the art of programming or to fulfill anyone's vision of how programming should be done.
What he does, and brilliantly, is bring his vision to reality.
I say he should follow his vision, where ever it goes and regardless what anyone tells him he can and can not do.
And no. I would not put my life in the hands of anyone's vision of a rocket ship. Show me the real rocket and then we can talk.
I should disclaim... I have never met the man, but I have read his code.
Human effects on bridges is hardly a surprise. Recall in 1981 when the Kansas City Hyatt's skywalk collapsed, killing 114, because the pedestrians were dancing (and the design was altered to ease construction). You'd think that would have been enough of a wake up call to the millenium designers to consider human motion. more info
Armys break cadence when marching across bridges, at least as far back as Napoleon's time. Presumably they learned that the hard way.
On a more personal note, I have participated in the unintentional destruction of a gymnasium. 80 or so people crowded together in the middle, bouncing up and down, and then "down and down". We fractured the engineered wooden joists. Fortunately it failed gracefully. Just sagged down about 4 feet in the middle.
What I'm trying to say, not particularly directly, is "don't give the designers of the bridge a pass because this new phenomenon struct their bridge". Chastise them for risking people's lives and wasting resources by neglecting the loads placed on bridges.
Perhaps you should be using the testing release instead of the unstable release?
Unstable has whatever packages the developer built and uploaded. Odds are they have only been checked on one or two machines of a single architecture by a single person. It is being uploaded to be more widely tested.
After a period of time without horrible bugs the package will be moved to testing for wider testing. You are relatively safe from show stopping problems with this release.
You can read a bit about the testing release philosophy.
Ok, I've been having a pissy day and venting it on various web forums. But that reponse makes up for all of it. :-)
(For the clue impaired, note that the response is just an altered version of its parent.)
I suppose I'll a wee bit constructive just in case the author really does need help...
And anyone that needs more than one computer to run Joe's Deli should be cast out.
And Hey! Since slashdot is written by the community, shouldn't we be able to put our OWN inline ads into our content? Why does taco and company get to put ads in my content?
This comment is Copyright 2002 by Jim Studt. It may not be altered or republished with advertisements without his express permission.
I have to give a big thumbs up to buttonless mice. I've been fighting an RSI in my mouse hand for a couple of years. Since I've switched to a buttonless mouse it has cleared up entirely. I highly recommend anyone with mouse hand problems try one.
It is an apple mouse. You don't miss the buttons under Mac OS, I run about half the time in X and I've just learned to use the extra modifier keys to get the other buttons. It becomes automatic after a day.
(Not that I'm a clicking fiend, the injury probably originated while playing a string of shows with a bluegrass band. 240 notes/minute, 80/finger/minute on the right hand for three hours a day is a lot of finger pulling for a bass player. I had to stop doing that, but the hand didn't heal until I switched mice.)
I was surprised how often the main article preached .NETs language neutrality. .NET is certainly not language neutral. Heck, Microsoft had to neuter their own primary development languages in order to get them into it.
.NET. I mean, you can't be making the wrong decision if it supports all languages equally, right?
I can understand why they would restrict their framework to a single inheritance, single dispatch in order to be easily used from more languages, but they forbid both multiple inheritance and multiple dispatch in the virtual machine.
I suspect we are seeing the "language-neutral" lie pushed so heavily right now in order to convince people to choose
I'm sure this is normal industry practice. Here in St. Louis we have to go to odd meausures to dodge Charter Cable's buggy transparent proxy. (It doesn't handle the case where you are deliberately using an authenticated proxy.) Fortunately it only looks at certain ports so you can dodge with proxies on non-standard ports.
Say Charter, if you are reading you could reimburse me for the two hours I spent figurng out this defect in my Charter user's internet service.
You might like to add function invocation or at least some sort of goto. :-)
Not to pick on you, but I suspect this is a case of your tool shaping your mind. I'm sure back in the 1960's when "if...then...else" was some new whacked out concept from the lisp guy that got rammed into the Algol specification everyone thought it was just silly bloat. I mean, they had conditional goto already. Why would you need some froo-froo syntactic sugar (<--deliberatly loaded term) to wrap around that?
What I have found on my path, Basic, assembly, Pascal, C, C+-, C++, Dylan, objective-c (plus the usual side tracks into icon, prolog, php, and domain specific languages) is that at each step I am happily using a programming language that does everything ever needed by a programming language. I look ahead at the next language in my list and didn't learn it because it was just funny syntax and some silly features that I didn't really need. After I learned the new language and how to use its 'silly features' I couldn't imagine returning to the previous language. tragically, that last language is out of order. there are implementation reasons why I don't use Dylan. I am shopping for a new language, but making do with objective-c.
The readers of this thread will find anwsers from speakers at many points along the continuum. The farther removed the speaker from the listener, the more the remark will sound like ideological rubish.
In the field of software, the USPTO has a track record of granting patents on the obvious. The explantion I've heard is that evaluating the applications is hard so they grant them and let the courts and companies sort it out.
There is also the issue of patenting mathematics. That is not allowed. Many software patents are really patents on a machine wink wink that happens to produce the same results as a mathematical formula.
And I can't tell if you woke up in a socialist country or not. I woke up in one that is nominally capitalistic, but more socialist for the lowest castes.
slashdot talked about this in 1999 when the patent came up. Its 2+ years later now. google has mostly crushed the competing search engines because the results of their algorithm are preferred to other algorithms. Their revenue sources are not public, but I believe I read recently that half of their revenue is from advertisements and half from technology licensing.
So, the point for discussion...
The world's favorite search engine exists because of its software patent. This patent has caused great harm to the competing search engines. Is this ok because...
But I expect it will take more than a year to write that...
I'm still working on providing material for chapter one.
Feel free to mod me down into oblivion. I'm just cranky and unproductive today.
So, how about we do a serious analysis? I'll put up a system that lets people rate the various bugs by severity along a couple of continuums. (Like theoretical impact and actual impact.) Then people can use this data to draw more accurate conclusions. If at least 10 people respond to this post, and two thirds of them think it is a good idea, I'll put one up and link it here.
Once you have released the computer from its fruity prison, you can then give it a proper rectangular computer case with the iRack
1U rack mount box. Sadly, it only handles rev A through D, so you will get topped out at 333MHz, still for many network applications thats way too much CPU anyway.
I'm still hoping Apple will make G3/G4 computers in a form factor similar to briq. Something I can cram in 3 or 4 to the U. As long as I'm dreaming, no video hardware, just Quartz over ethernet and a discovery protocol that lets me connect by MAC address from my management station.
This only applies to the deposition gathering process. This is the normal way such things are done. Allowing public access, as was done in the DOJ proceedings, is the exception.
Thats what I meant by client subscribes to aa[sic] set of content. I didn't mean to imply that the sets were predefined.
Very similar to usenet actually. At least the push model.
Yes, you can search the PTO by primary examiner.
:-)
Maung also granted a patent on Melodic alerts for communications device.
Not as broad as it sounds, but they have managed to patent their protocol for sending a snippet of song as numeric digits. I suppose the business model here is to get companies to adopt this specific tune encoding and then be able to collect royalties.
I could certainly encode a melody more compactly without infringing this patent, so innovation can't be the driving force behind this one.
My personal favorite of Maung's Greatest Hits is Internet weight reduction system. It involves dieting by sending pictures of yourself to a computer to analyze your outline to verify the information you enter into the computer run diet plan.
I should add that it took eight people to invent this and most of their references are their own press releases.
Zarni Maung should be ashamed of himself.
I wonder if we can query the patent database by primary examiner? God knows what else this guy is letting by.
Claim 1: The client subscribes to aa set of content, the server gathers this content and later sends instructions to the client to transfer the content.
Claim 2: As above, but use a single message for the request and a single message for the transfer.
Claim 3: As 1, but also identifies "information that is of interest" during the sync.
Claim 4: Claim 1 where it happens over http. victim: I may become ill and stop typing this.
Claim 5: Claim 4 but transfer some XML on the HTTP. Yep, that's it. I can't go on. I mean no one would ever have considered transfering XML over HTTP! My GOD these people are geniuses!
There is nothing in this patent that a handful of competent engineers wouldn't come up with in their first brainstorming session.
I propose that the US Patent Office has so badly mismanged software patents that ALL software patents should be vacated and the patent examiners held personally liable for any damages claimed by the affected patent holders.
I did a quick check on imdb and excluding pornos and slashers there are essentially no decent IV movies. (hmm, odd sentence with that excluding and decent... I'll leave it.)
So, given the odds I see two possibilities...
- They have a killer screenplay.
- They need a project and got funding.
Let's hope it is the killer screenplay.Rsync is going to want to work on uncompressed tarballs or plain old unpacked source trees. (diffing .gz or .bz2 files doesn't work well, your first change usually causes the entire remainder of the file to be different) That is fine for bandwidth because it will compress the data before sending, but you do need to watch out for CPU use. My very rough estimate is that pumping out 50Mbit/sec of traffic with rsync is going to take something like a pair of top notch ia386 cpus.
:-)
.o files and header links and I'll always be doing a full build, plus if I need to do a quick 'forgot a module' build my kernel version will have changed. If I do not turn on --delete it would mostly work, but I could accumulate obsolete files and there is a danger of date stamp problems.
I think it would still be a win. CPUs are cheap compared to bandwidth, but it does change the hosting dynamic a bit. You can't just use a nasty old desktop PC or virtual server to soak up the excess bandwidth. You need something with a little meat to it. (Not to disparge virtual servers, but they usually have paying clients that care if their CPU gets saturated.)
Now that you mention it, it is such a good idea that I will set one up today. I can't publish the access to it. I only have 2mbps uncomitted and that won't go far on a slashdotted kernel loader.
I suppose I will settle for rsyncing the tar file around. It is seductive the rsync the unpacked source tree, but if I turn on --delete then it will whack my
The Acrobat format is not proprietary. I have the entire spec in a binder right here. I downloaded it from Adobe and printed it freely, then used it to create code that writes PDF files.
.ps files. But I can't see spending much time decoding a paragraph that contains the phrase donkey jiz in it.
I have written web based programs that generate PDF without using any Adobe code. (When you need to be in control of the exact layout and 75dpi is not good enough, it is a great choice.)
TeX is happy to make PDF files. My Mac is happy to write anything I wish out as a PDF file instead of printing. In linux I have a little program to convert postscript to pdf. No Adobe software required on those systems.
I do tend to use Acrobat Reader for reading them, but I also use xpdf (launches much faster under linux) and, under OS X, Preview to read them.
I don't even understand that part about scanned documents and
It is possible that there is another format that provides precise display at high resolution in an easily navigable, on demand downloadable format, but I haven't heard of it. Long live PDF.
How about when they make an API from perl and python to the Windows APIs? How about when these APIs so attactive to the windows python and perl programmers that they depend on them?
Sound like J++ yet?
It won't be about owning the interpreters. Thats just code and anyone with $36B in the bank can have code written. It will be about owning the minds of the developers. They need the bulk of software developers to believe Windows is integral to computing.
... underdogs, and people like underdogs...
:)
I'll agree with this piece.
[apple] never encouraged tinkering and hacking by individuals
The entire development environment and documentation library for Mac OS-X is both free and pretty darn spiffy. Visual Studio is something like $500 to $1000 depending who you are and how you get it. Heck, my first Apple came with schematics and ROM assembly listings.
At least Microsoft freely release GW-Basic in the early days...
Apple gave away Basic before Microsoft even existed. Never for Macintosh, but I believe that was more for strategic reasons. Apple needed to force the applications to a dramatically higher level of usability. This required the armys of evangelists and much arm twisting. "modern" mid '80s gui applications were not going to be thrown together in the Basic of the days.
Microsoft has also supported the porting of Perl and Python (via Activestate) to the Windows environment.
Yes, now we can see if that was the embrace before the extend.
Microsoft's software has been typically cheaper than Apple's
I have no idea in what universe this is true. Actually, there is very little in the way of good comparisons. Office $400, Appleworks $99. But Appleworks is feature poor compared to Office. It does everything I need, so its a good deal for me (well, $0, I buy low end Macs where it is included). If I needed the extras Office has this would be a worthless comparison. IE? No comparison. Apple is still forbidden from suggesting that there may be other browsers much less making one. iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD? No competition. Likewise there are loads of MS apps with no comparison. OS prices? Upgrades are similarly priced. Development tools? No contest.
Remember Apple 's sordid attempt to foster clones?
Yes. Apple gave them the hardware reference designs and OS in the delusion that the cloners would make a wider variety of machines and attack niches. The cloners just built the reference designs with minor tweaks and sold them in to apple's highest margin market (early adopters) because the cloners could start selling the newer faster processers while they were still in short supply and Apple with their larger market had to wait for production to ramp up. (I believe at one point Apple was buying all the initial production of higher speed processors at a premium and warehousing them so they could get the fast machines out first. When you have to pay a premium to keep faster processors away from your users in order to promote your platform something has gone wrong.) The media savaged Apple for offering slow machines. Apple lost sales. The platform didn't gain . Apple didn't revoke the cloners licenses (except one, they bought that back) they just raised the OS price so the cloners paid the same per machine for the OS as apple. Without the OS subsidy to pocket the cloners left the business.
I am glad tho that I do not have to pick between the lesser of two evils
Me too. I suspect any corporation with a 90%+ market share will be bad for the users. God knows what GPL v9 will look like when free software has 90% of the market.