Anyone with experience in networking knows that while repeaters can be used to extend the maximum length of an Ethernet run, you can only repeat the signal so many times (4, for Ethernet, IIRC) before data error become an issue
That's got nothing to do with data error, it's to do with propogation of the preamble that's sent before every packet. The preamble exists so that all nodes on a given segment will have a chance to spot a collision before the start of the actual data transmission. Repeaters extend the preamble to overcome the extra delay in transmission that they impose.
Secondary point - digital systems contain useful things like error checks and even error correction codes. Your logic seems to apply to analogue systems, but doesn't have to apply to digital systems, especially packet-based systems with transport-layer protocols.
Well, call me a heretic (and some will!) but I've recently moved back to Windows XP from Mandrake for almost exactly this reason; I could find no way to run any sort of decent sequencing/audio recording package on Linux. And I tried them all, every single OSS program I could find via Google, via Freshmeat... It seems that lots of people appreciate the basics of audio work, (I'd hate to give up sox, even under Windows) but when it comes to: * support for a *decent* soundcard, with multiple channels and digital I/O. * low-latency audio monitoring during record * sync of MIDI and audio * up to 24 tracks * plug-in realtime effects * automation ...etc, there's nothing that comes close to Logic Audio. So reluctantly, I now have a completely XP-based desktop.
Now, another possible response to me is; "don't send complaints, send source code!". First, I'm not complaining, just observing. Second, yes, I could probably write such a package BUT, I'd need to work around the myriad of Linux audio systems, to research low-level drivers for the specialist hardware that decent cards use... it would take me years. By the time I had something usable I would have forgotten how to play guitar!
Coding is not an art. Take your favorite piece of code, hang it on the wall next to your favorite painting - does your code inspire you the way the painting does?
No, you're missing the point. The code is merely a representation of the real artwork; the structures of the code and the data. The elegance of the design, the patterns in the object interactions, the simplicity of a solution to a problem. These are the art. The source code... is just toner on paper.
Your argument is like saying that because I'm inspired and uplifted by a piece of music, hanging the sheet music on the wall should also inspire me. It doesn't. Again, the sheet music is just the "source code".
This is no surprise - after all, if you never install anything except Windows9x, your computer will never need rebooting. It's when you install all the other cruft that things get flaky. And you can't do that to a UTV.
Um, not that I want to bash MS needlessly, but that isn't true. Honestly. There's a couple of bugs in Win98 that mean that if you leave it running longterm it will just lock up. Counters that wraparound, etc.
Discrimination falls into two areas, that which you could legally do something about and that which you can't. But it's all an illusion; frankly, people are *always* going to be able to find some way to put down those against whom they discriminate. If it gets legal, you've already lost.
However, I'd argue that it's an important life skill to just live with it. I'm 37 and a CTO now, but I've done my time and come up through the ranks and many of my former colleagues would be astonised to know that I'm not only bi but a TV as well; if I'd told them it might have cost me promotion or caused me other problems so I just *lived* with it.
Now I'm the boss I can do what I damn well please and not get sacked... though again I make compromises for the sake of business. You won't get me wearing a skirt to the office;-)
ben / anna (depending on the time of day)
Well, it's probably a little late to post this, but what the hey...
I saw the movie twice over the last week - first with my wife and 6-year old and then with a 95-year old (my great-aunt - loves the books, loves movies, you'd wish you were as alive as her when you hit 95). During the second viewing, I had more time to think about the story and what hit me is that Wizards and geeks have a fair amount in common.
Consider; Harry finds that there is a subculture of people who have access to hidden powerful knowledge that most people don't know about. Technology geeks likewise understand How Things Work that gives us abilities that "muggles" don't have. How often have you been asked to "just look at my computer" by someone who treats it as a "magical box" and operates it by rote?
Similarly, spells are based (in the HP world) in incantations; understanding the right words (yes, and the right pronunciation, Hermione) is the key to successful spell casting. COnsider the accuracy of language used in good engineering documents, let along source code.
Ok, it's not a sociology thesis, but I think it's an interesting comparison.:-)
...a text mode console. Surely the lack of video RAM, bandwidth etc should save some power?
Um... not really. The thing that eats power for displays is the backlighting of the LCD. You might try looking for a reflected-light LCD display if anyone makes such a thing - would need no backlight but you'd only be able to work in well-lit areas:-)
The Bader-meinhof gang were not Middle Eastern. The IRA or the UDF are not Middle Eastern. Timothy McVeigh wasn't Middle Eastern. This is supposed to be against *terrorism*, not Arabs.
"It will be a long time before i will get on an airplane with a nigger on it. You never can tell... I had to fly home from Phoenix today and had there been one coon on that plane, he would have got off or I would."
"It will be a long time before i will get on an airplane with a queer on it. You never can tell... I had to fly home from Phoenix today and had there been one gay on that plane, he would have got off or I would."
Now, think about the fact that when you label a whole class of people as the enemy based on their religion, sexuality or belief, that is fascism. Fascists exterminated people based on those very criteria. I don't think you want to live in a fascist state, do you?
Not all Arabs/Muslims are the enemy. Not all the enemy are Arabs or Muslims.
Maybe you'd consider this off-topic, but while I don't remember seeing any overtly racist posting on SlashDot (and I'm usually browsing at 1 or 2), it's not *that* unusual to see posts referring to something as "gay" (with negative connotations). It's good to see some of the excellent arguments here against discrimination-by-race, but would be even better to see the same arguments being generalised to also apply to discrimination on any basis.
ben_, bisexual and bloody proud of it, okay?
Books are easier to read than screens. This one is completely subjective, but I find that it's a lot more tolerable to stare at print for 8 hours straight than it is to stare at a CRT or LCD. Actually, it's proven. There are plenty of studies showing that people read more slowly and less well on screen than on paper; every web author should know this! Anyone vaguely interested might find this and this (the latter dates from 1997, so this has been known about for an eon or two in Internet time).
For linux/unix oriented people this language isn't of much use I'm afraid. That's ok. in win32 land, perl is of no use.
Well, that's not true. The ActiveState port of Perl to Win32 is damn useful - I used it just a couple of days ago to reparse a whole bunch of HTML pages. It'll run as a scripting language under IIS or even embedded like VBScript. And it's just Perl as we know and [love|hate] it.
Having said that, whilst your main point (choose the language that fits) is valid, we inevitably will stick with languages with which we're familiar and more productive for many jobs, because learning a new language is annoying for the day or so it takes before you begin to get up to speed in it.
"Political" (for want of a better word) infighting is pretty common in software development, especially in mostly-male software teams. Closed-source developments that I've been on have seen disagreements as fierce as this. The *good* thing about this is that it happens in the open, and all can see the basis on which certain decisions were taken and whether the rationales were technical or to satisfy someone's ego.
In terms of performance, you'll find Zeus (http://www.zeus.com) is considerably faster than Apache but is pretty close to a drop-in replacement for it. It costs real money, but the performance gains are almost certainly worth it for a high-traffic site like/.
Differential GPS. Take a fixed point on the Earth's surface, the position of which you know to whatever degree of accuracy you require. Install a GPS receiver at that exact point. Measure the difference between the position generated by the GPS receiver and the known point. Broadcast that difference to nearby GPS systems which can then use that difference to adjust the positions they get. Definition of "nearby" to be determined by required accuracy. This system is widely used to overcome even the militarily induced errors that GPS has suffered from.
voidzero wrote Shouldn't we get more UI designers to read and use the subtle wisdom of Edward Tufte.... Well, speaking as a UI designer (amongst other things), I have read him and admire his work. So do most other people I know in the UI field. The problem is that UI designers are usually not involved early enough (or at all) in most software projects, and very often not at all in open-source projects. Good UI design is hard, like good software design is hard, but too many hackers (and I'm a hacker too) think that UI is about skins and graphics, not about the deeper considerations of how a user interacts with the software, what controls it affords and how it presents state.
That should be "British", not "English" in the Slashdot submission. England is just one of the four parts of the United Kingdom, or one of the three parts of Great Britain (ignoring odd stuff like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands). Damn Yanks can't even get the geography right - we should never have given the colonies away...
"Intuitive" in interface terms means only that you can use information you've already gathered to guess what will happen when you're faced with something new. In the case of the first GUIs, such as the MAc circa 1984, that meant using a desktop metaphor to allow a user to extrapolate from a real world desktop to the Mac. Unfortunately, today we haev many users who understand (to some level) and work with Windows and the Mac. Therefore in order for a GUI to be intuitive, it must go some way towards meeting the expectations of those users, who *will* expect it to work the way those other systems do , because in their terms "That's the way computers work". It's inescapable. It doesn't mean that you can't do something new, it just means that you need to think about the way in which a user experienced on existing systems will perceive it.
Hmm. I must say, having written dynamic sites in C and scripting languages, that I would rather have a bigger array of servers running scripted stuff than a smaller array of systems running compiled code. C just doesn't cut it (for me) in terms of maintainability and stability - a segmentation fault that can bring down your entire apache (sub)process vs the slight speed decrease by using a scripting language? Nah. Plus, I dispute your premise; do you have some stats on how many hits/day a mod_perl-driven site can take? On what hardware? How complex a script? Where are the bottlenecks? It seems to me that it's very likely the bottlenecks are disk I/O or database access, in which case the language used doesn't matter a damn.
In this day and age, you gotta hire a retarded monkey to lose a law suit if you are mr. big corporation
Like MS? I think the point is that Lawyers get paid whether they win or lose. So it's far likely that Clueless Management Types decided to fight irrespective of legal opionion. In fact I'd go further - imagine I'm a lawyer, and my client says to me "Should we fight this case, which of course will involve us paying you lots of money?". Exactly which way am I motivated to respond?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone with experience in networking knows that while repeaters can be used to extend the maximum length of an Ethernet run, you can only repeat the signal so many times (4, for Ethernet, IIRC) before data error become an issue
That's got nothing to do with data error, it's to do with propogation of the preamble that's sent before every packet. The preamble exists so that all nodes on a given segment will have a chance to spot a collision before the start of the actual data transmission. Repeaters extend the preamble to overcome the extra delay in transmission that they impose.
Secondary point - digital systems contain useful things like error checks and even error correction codes. Your logic seems to apply to analogue systems, but doesn't have to apply to digital systems, especially packet-based systems with transport-layer protocols.
Well, call me a heretic (and some will!) but I've recently moved back to Windows XP from Mandrake for almost exactly this reason; I could find no way to run any sort of decent sequencing/audio recording package on Linux. And I tried them all, every single OSS program I could find via Google, via Freshmeat...
It seems that lots of people appreciate the basics of audio work, (I'd hate to give up sox, even under Windows) but when it comes to:
* support for a *decent* soundcard, with multiple channels and digital I/O.
* low-latency audio monitoring during record
* sync of MIDI and audio
* up to 24 tracks
* plug-in realtime effects
* automation
...etc, there's nothing that comes close to Logic Audio. So reluctantly, I now have a completely XP-based desktop.
Now, another possible response to me is; "don't send complaints, send source code!". First, I'm not complaining, just observing. Second, yes, I could probably write such a package BUT, I'd need to work around the myriad of Linux audio systems, to research low-level drivers for the specialist hardware that decent cards use... it would take me years. By the time I had something usable I would have forgotten how to play guitar!
ben
When I was a wee lad, we always sang (2nd verse):
:-)
Can he fly?
Can he heck...
See him fall
Break his neck
and then we'd run off laughing. Ah, the simple pleasures of youth
Coding is not an art. Take your favorite piece of code, hang it on the wall next to your favorite painting - does your code inspire you the way the painting does?
No, you're missing the point. The code is merely a representation of the real artwork; the structures of the code and the data. The elegance of the design, the patterns in the object interactions, the simplicity of a solution to a problem. These are the art. The source code... is just toner on paper.
Your argument is like saying that because I'm inspired and uplifted by a piece of music, hanging the sheet music on the wall should also inspire me. It doesn't. Again, the sheet music is just the "source code".
This is no surprise - after all, if you never install anything except Windows9x, your computer will never need rebooting. It's when you install all the other cruft that things get flaky. And you can't do that to a UTV.
Um, not that I want to bash MS needlessly, but that isn't true. Honestly. There's a couple of bugs in Win98 that mean that if you leave it running longterm it will just lock up. Counters that wraparound, etc.
Discrimination falls into two areas, that which you could legally do something about and that which you can't. But it's all an illusion; frankly, people are *always* going to be able to find some way to put down those against whom they discriminate. If it gets legal, you've already lost. ;-)
However, I'd argue that it's an important life skill to just live with it. I'm 37 and a CTO now, but I've done my time and come up through the ranks and many of my former colleagues would be astonised to know that I'm not only bi but a TV as well; if I'd told them it might have cost me promotion or caused me other problems so I just *lived* with it.
Now I'm the boss I can do what I damn well please and not get sacked... though again I make compromises for the sake of business. You won't get me wearing a skirt to the office
ben / anna (depending on the time of day)
Well, it's probably a little late to post this, but what the hey...
:-)
I saw the movie twice over the last week - first with my wife and 6-year old and then with a 95-year old (my great-aunt - loves the books, loves movies, you'd wish you were as alive as her when you hit 95). During the second viewing, I had more time to think about the story and what hit me is that Wizards and geeks have a fair amount in common.
Consider; Harry finds that there is a subculture of people who have access to hidden powerful knowledge that most people don't know about. Technology geeks likewise understand How Things Work that gives us abilities that "muggles" don't have. How often have you been asked to "just look at my computer" by someone who treats it as a "magical box" and operates it by rote?
Similarly, spells are based (in the HP world) in incantations; understanding the right words (yes, and the right pronunciation, Hermione) is the key to successful spell casting. COnsider the accuracy of language used in good engineering documents, let along source code.
Ok, it's not a sociology thesis, but I think it's an interesting comparison.
Those interested in this subject will almost certainly find this piece in The Register worth reading.
...a text mode console. Surely the lack of video RAM, bandwidth etc should save some power?
:-)
Um... not really. The thing that eats power for displays is the backlighting of the LCD. You might try looking for a reflected-light LCD display if anyone makes such a thing - would need no backlight but you'd only be able to work in well-lit areas
An axiom that a friend of mine coined, that I've always liked:
Heroic effort is not a sustainable business strategy.
Burn out your best people and you'll crash the company.
The Bader-meinhof gang were not Middle Eastern. The IRA or the UDF are not Middle Eastern. Timothy McVeigh wasn't Middle Eastern. This is supposed to be against *terrorism*, not Arabs.
Let's paraphrase this a few ways, shall we?
"It will be a long time before i will get on an airplane with a nigger on it. You never can tell... I had to fly home from Phoenix today and had there been one coon on that plane, he would have got off or I would."
"It will be a long time before i will get on an airplane with a queer on it. You never can tell... I had to fly home from Phoenix today and had there been one gay on that plane, he would have got off or I would."
Now, think about the fact that when you label a whole class of people as the enemy based on their religion, sexuality or belief, that is fascism. Fascists exterminated people based on those very criteria. I don't think you want to live in a fascist state, do you?
Not all Arabs/Muslims are the enemy. Not all the enemy are Arabs or Muslims.
Cross dressers aren't deviants :-) You may be both, but the one doesn't imply the other...
Anna (sometimes)
How much more black could it be? None. None more black.
Spot-the-quote
Maybe you'd consider this off-topic, but while I don't remember seeing any overtly racist posting on SlashDot (and I'm usually browsing at 1 or 2), it's not *that* unusual to see posts referring to something as "gay" (with negative connotations). It's good to see some of the excellent arguments here against discrimination-by-race, but would be even better to see the same arguments being generalised to also apply to discrimination on any basis.
ben_, bisexual and bloody proud of it, okay?
Books are easier to read than screens. This one is completely subjective, but I find that it's a lot more tolerable to stare at print for 8 hours straight than it is to stare at a CRT or LCD.
Actually, it's proven. There are plenty of studies showing that people read more slowly and less well on screen than on paper; every web author should know this!
Anyone vaguely interested might find this and this (the latter dates from 1997, so this has been known about for an eon or two in Internet time).
For linux/unix oriented people this language isn't of much use I'm afraid. That's ok. in win32 land, perl is of no use.
Well, that's not true. The ActiveState port of Perl to Win32 is damn useful - I used it just a couple of days ago to reparse a whole bunch of HTML pages. It'll run as a scripting language under IIS or even embedded like VBScript. And it's just Perl as we know and [love|hate] it.
Having said that, whilst your main point (choose the language that fits) is valid, we inevitably will stick with languages with which we're familiar and more productive for many jobs, because learning a new language is annoying for the day or so it takes before you begin to get up to speed in it.
"Political" (for want of a better word) infighting is pretty common in software development, especially in mostly-male software teams. Closed-source developments that I've been on have seen disagreements as fierce as this. The *good* thing about this is that it happens in the open, and all can see the basis on which certain decisions were taken and whether the rationales were technical or to satisfy someone's ego.
In terms of performance, you'll find Zeus (http://www.zeus.com) is considerably faster than Apache but is pretty close to a drop-in replacement for it. It costs real money, but the performance gains are almost certainly worth it for a high-traffic site like /.
Differential GPS. Take a fixed point on the Earth's surface, the position of which you know to whatever degree of accuracy you require. Install a GPS receiver at that exact point. Measure the difference between the position generated by the GPS receiver and the known point. Broadcast that difference to nearby GPS systems which can then use that difference to adjust the positions they get. Definition of "nearby" to be determined by required accuracy.
This system is widely used to overcome even the militarily induced errors that GPS has suffered from.
voidzero wrote Shouldn't we get more UI designers to read and use the subtle wisdom of Edward Tufte.... Well, speaking as a UI designer (amongst other things), I have read him and admire his work. So do most other people I know in the UI field. The problem is that UI designers are usually not involved early enough (or at all) in most software projects, and very often not at all in open-source projects. Good UI design is hard, like good software design is hard, but too many hackers (and I'm a hacker too) think that UI is about skins and graphics, not about the deeper considerations of how a user interacts with the software, what controls it affords and how it presents state.
That should be "British", not "English" in the Slashdot submission. England is just one of the four parts of the United Kingdom, or one of the three parts of Great Britain (ignoring odd stuff like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands).
Damn Yanks can't even get the geography right - we should never have given the colonies away...
"Intuitive" in interface terms means only that you can use information you've already gathered to guess what will happen when you're faced with something new. In the case of the first GUIs, such as the MAc circa 1984, that meant using a desktop metaphor to allow a user to extrapolate from a real world desktop to the Mac. Unfortunately, today we haev many users who understand (to some level) and work with Windows and the Mac. Therefore in order for a GUI to be intuitive, it must go some way towards meeting the expectations of those users, who *will* expect it to work the way those other systems do , because in their terms "That's the way computers work". It's inescapable.
It doesn't mean that you can't do something new, it just means that you need to think about the way in which a user experienced on existing systems will perceive it.
Hmm. I must say, having written dynamic sites in C and scripting languages, that I would rather have a bigger array of servers running scripted stuff than a smaller array of systems running compiled code. C just doesn't cut it (for me) in terms of maintainability and stability - a segmentation fault that can bring down your entire apache (sub)process vs the slight speed decrease by using a scripting language? Nah.
Plus, I dispute your premise; do you have some stats on how many hits/day a mod_perl-driven site can take? On what hardware? How complex a script? Where are the bottlenecks?
It seems to me that it's very likely the bottlenecks are disk I/O or database access, in which case the language used doesn't matter a damn.
In this day and age, you gotta hire a retarded monkey to lose a law suit if you are mr. big corporation
Like MS? I think the point is that Lawyers get paid whether they win or lose. So it's far likely that Clueless Management Types decided to fight irrespective of legal opionion. In fact I'd go further - imagine I'm a lawyer, and my client says to me "Should we fight this case, which of course will involve us paying you lots of money?". Exactly which way am I motivated to respond?