Oh, yeah, it's definitely worth it to avoid spending that extra $100. After all, the dozens of hours of your time you'll spend rolling your own and fiddling with the setup isn't worth anything. I'm also sure you don't mind a big, noisy, butt-ugly PC as an audio component, and of course, you won't mind paying for all that power the thing sucks down while just sitting there waiting for you to decide what to play. (Or maybe you just won't mind waiting a couple of minutes for your MP3 player to boot before you can listen to anything...) REally, using a PC for this sort of thing is just plain dumb - if ever a net function *needed* to be embedded in an appliance, this is it.
Seriously, anyone griping about the Audiotron because of its *price* has got rocks in their head - it's a fair deal for what it does. I'd have designed it differently (and better), but it's by far the best network MP3 player out there now. (Have a look at the Diamond Rio/Dell equivalent for a lesson in how NOT to build such a device - thiers requires Windows and specially modified MusicMatch software, which I'm *sure* they'll still be happy to support in five years, right?)
The Audiotron has some minor flaws, but it's by FAR the best implementation out there of a real network audio component, and the price isn't too bad, although I'd prefer a cheaper version with no local or even web "UI" per se, just some way to pass it the next song or playlist to run with. That way, I could code the UI however I like in any old web server...
Actually, there are no really good points there. This is just another attemt by the pro-hydrogen people to capitalize on catastrophe to push their inane agenda.
Reasons hydrogen is stupid:
1. To get enough of it in a small space, you need high-pressure tanks. These are heavy, expensive, and hard to build. It is far from certain that we could produce mass-produce them and ensure a reasonable useful life, too.
2. Hydrogen makes a pretty spiffy fuel-air bomb, too. Remember the Hindenburg? (Or the Challenger, for a more apt example of what *liquid* hydrogen does when vented near a flame...)
3. The ONLY source of hydrogen suitable for the production of such large quantities is natural gas, one of the best and cleanest fuels known anyway. If we're going to deal with the problems of gaseous fuels, why not use LNG directly and save the HUGE additional costs of converting to and dealing with hydrogen?
4. Hydrogen, being the smallest and most rapidly spreading elment in the universe, is notoriously hard to keep confined. Gas-tight selas for such a tiny molucule are NOT trivial, and the cost of screwing up is rather high.
In short, it would be tough to come up with a stupider proposal. It's more likely that those proposing this were on nitrous oxide than hydrogen...
Actually, both - Not a huge movement today, but growing like mad, and meeting a real need in today's society. Although still small (I'm guessing perhaps a couple of hundred schools here in the US), Classical Christian Education is growing very rapidly, and is one of the most powerful forces behind the extremely rapid rise in popularity of private schools. (Not to mention, it's becoming the methodolgy and curriculum of choice amongst many new home schoolers, too.) Have a look at the ACCS web page and look at the members page - then realize that many (most?) of those schools didn't even exist just a few years ago, and many more have changed their direction as a result of the credibility the method is gaining. ACCS conferences draw large crowds from all over the country - and that's just the people that care enough to travel to the conference site. Many that can't make the conferece trips catch up by listening to the conference sessions on tapes or MP3's available on the web.
Parents are now painfully aware that even the best of the public schools are not capable of producing graduates that would have been considered literate even 75 years ago. They're taking the matter into thier own hands, as they should. The education "professionals" had their chance (for 75 years or more!) and they blew it. It's time to take back our children.
Congratulations, you've just (almost) described the ultimate in today's educational curricula (which is really that of the medeival period rediscovered) - it's called "Classical Christian Education", and is taking the country by storm, first in private lower schools, where the curruculum is based on the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric), then in College (or University, a term which can have no real meaning outside of a Christian context...) where this was traditionally followed with the Quadivium of geometry, astronomy, music, and arithmetic.
And yes, there are a few places where this sort of thing can be found, although it's taking a while to reclaim these lost and time-proven methods. Read Doug Wilson's excellent book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning for the full story. A few good web resources on the subject:
The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy Sayers classic 1947 essay on the subject, and a large influence on the Classical Christian School movement. Read this!
Credenda/Agenda, sort of the journal of this movement - read, learn, and understand. It's also quite funny at times - the writing is usually quite good, and often excellent.
Finally, at the college level, this methodology is just beginning to appear, check out New St. Andrews College for details on a college designed for incoming high-school graduates who are already better educated than many 4-year liberal arts college grads.
And of course there's the old joke about Stallman finally finding a version of Unix he could live with: "vmunix.el".
(Joke repeated here because it seems there are many on/. these days that miss the humor in old jokes entirely...)
Of course, without those fudge factors the Earth would be somewhere around -40C most of the time, so you can't just throw them out.
I'm sure you must have meant -40F not -40C, right?:-)
Real engineers don't use the metric system! (For those of you that are only CS geeks, -40F and -40C are the same...)
Re:You're way off... (if only you said TTCP)
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WAP Bashing
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· Score: 2
I agree that protocols should be different to accomodate intermittent connections, but WAP went way overboard in thier approach. If they had only set out to provide a more reliable datagram delivery layer, thet wouldn't have been so bad.
WTP is better, but is it enough better to justify adding a terribly proprietary and unproven protocol as part of the infrastructure? Probably not, especially since the reliability of the underlying wireless transport can reasonably be expected to get much better in the 3G world we'll actually be using this stuff in...
HTTP is simply a poorly designed protocol, period. Wireless or not, it's an ungainly pig. (The Gopher protocol is a much better design, and there were those of us pushing for it or others as alternatives to HTTP when Mosaic first came out. It was quickly too late, though, and we've been stuck with a turkey ever since.
And WML, as you state, is pretty much without any redeeming qualities whatsoever...
I've done set-top box work, too, and agree they're some of the thinnest clients you'll find. (Although this thinness is more an artifact of the cable industry's bizarre business model (which has no way to accomodate the user buying better hardware if he wants it) than it is any real architectural requirement.
I've been through this argument with many of the big names in the cable and satellite business. Any set-top that weak is not going to be worth buying in the first place, as it will be insufficiently flexible in the future. We sure don't need Pentium IV set-tops, but we do need something that isn't obsolete when it hits the market. And "thinness", I'd argue is more a property of the platform (hw & sw) than the protocols.
The economics don't even work - Moore's law pretty much demands that throwing hardware at the problem is cheaper in the long run than developing goofy proprietary protocols.
David Clark of MIT told me first-hand that the only reason there are seven layers in the OSI model is because there were seven subcommittees sent off to study the problem - when they came back together, in true ISO fashion, they couldn't agree on where the layer divisions should be, so they just stuck with the arbitrary divisions of the subcommittees themselves. Ugh.
For a far better take on the William Wallace story, try reading "The Scottish Chiefs" by Jane Porter. Although it is a work of fiction, it is reasonably in accord with history in most regards, and a far better story than Braveheart. It explores Wallace's motivations and strength much better as well, and paints him as the complex character that he really was, insisting on servanthood all the while he was the strongest leader in Scotland.
Warning: The themes of this work are honor, humility, and the importance of always honoring God by one's actions, so many/. readers won't have the guts required to read this, since it will grate with their self-centered worldview (much like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which I expect many slashdotters can't handle for similar reasons.)
BTW: If you do read it, get the version illustrated with the beautiful N.C. Wyeth paintings - They're a 20th century addition, of course, but so perfect a fit that it's hard to imagine the book without them.
WAP isn't just stupid, it's a bad thing: At it's core, it's very important to recognize that WAP is nothing less than an attempt to replace all open standard Internet protocols with proprietary (and not particularly well-designed) W-equivalents.
There is absolutely no reason why standard HTML, HTTP, and TCP can't work in the wireless world - WAP is a waste of time and money, these protocols aren't necessary today (except for terminally crippled cellphone browsers that people generally refuse to use), and as handheld devices gain more compute power, they start to need the real protocols anyway, so WAP is more of a hindrance than a help.
Oh, and there's that whole ugly proprietary problem, too.. Sadly, WAP is the OSI of this decade. It too will yield to the unstoppable juggernaut of open Internet protocols, but not before countless millions of dollars and man-hours are spent trying to force another bad idea on the world.
If you're not familiar with OSI, go back and read about it - OSI was a suite of "elegant" protocols (as opposed to the crude but effective IP) that most of the academics and digerati viewed as "the right way" to do networking in the 80's and 90's. There was one problem they overlooked: IP worked well and was interoperable, OSI could claim niether of these attributes. Marshall Rose has written that OSI can be quite instructive in illustrating the way things should NOT be done.
I think the same is very much true of WAP. The death of WAP, when it finally comes, will be a good thing.
There are a lot more supercharged cars than that, and they began appearing decades before the first turbos (the 1962 Chevy Corvair Monza Spyder and Olds Jetfire.)
For more info on superchargers and their advantages over turbos in many circumstances, check out:
Jackson Racing's Supercharger Info Page (Talks about the advantages of supercharging over turbos in many apps. Check out the rest of the site for info on their kits, which have received rave reviews for value, performance, and reliability.)
Paxton Superchargers (The one that popularized production superchargers in Studebakers and 1960's Mustangs and Shelbys.)
Vortech superchargers (Hybrid type - turbo-style compressor driven by a gearbox. Persoanlly, I think this combines the worst features of both, but some people really like these...)
I don't recall the amount (I think it was about half of what you state), but it was significant. It's worth noting that Sun, IBM, and Compaq are the only computer companies on the planet that own enough of their own core technologies to be at least somewhat immune from extortion at the hands of the likes of Intel and Microsoft. *Everyone* else is vulnerable and not fully capable of controlling of their future.
If I understand turbo correctly, all it does is take some of the pressure from the exhaust gas and uses that to force more air into the intake, consuming more fuel but also providing more power.
Correct. A turbocharger (technically, they're called turbosuperchargers, the nomenclature you'll find in older literature) simply captures kinetic energy and heat energy (via gas expansion) from the hot exhaust gasses and uses that energy to stuff more air into the engine's intake. This results in a denser fuel/air charge and volumetric efficiency of over 100%. Plain old superchargers do the same thing, but are driven directly by the engine rather than by the exhaust. Now that they can be made cheaply, superchargers are gaining in popularity (check out some of Mercedes new motors) since they avoid the "turbo lag problem, and also provide a cooler intake charge (the centrifugal compressors in most turbos put a lot of paddle wheel work into the air.)
As an aside, high performance normally aspirated engines (no turbo or supercharger) can also exceed 100% volumetric efficiency, but not by a whole lot. A good turbocharger or supercharger system does *amazing* things to the performance and efficiency of a car, and if you take good care of them (use really good oil and change it religiously), they aren't a significant maintenance problem.
I'm always surprised that we don't have more multidisciplinary hackers here on/. that are also capable of mech hacking. It's a different, but very similar art.
I woul dnever think of handing someone a binary alone and saying "here you go, just run this, trust me".
You conveniently gloss over the fact that for 99.99(9?)% of the world's computer users, being handed a binary is far preferable to being handed the source and being told, "Here you go, you'll have to compile this, after figuring out which libraries it needs, then getting those and installing them, resolve obscure dependencies, and then install and configure the app itself while adjusting for the idiosyncracies of the particular distribution and environment you have. Trust me, this way is better. No Really. Hey, put down that stick! Ow! Ouch!"
Some things aren't better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick...
This is an interesting observation, and bears out my long-held belief that free/open source software has succeeded in spite of the FSF at least as much as because of it. (FWIW, Russ Nelson's excellent comment here about the FSF alienating more people than it converts is right on the money.)
. Reading Mr. Drepper's article, it appears that RMS has acted democratically and ethically at every turn. Mr. Drepper himself admits that there was no effort to displace him from his position.
Excuse me, were you reading the same thing I was? If so, I'm not sure how you square the assertion above with what Drepper actually wrote, to wit:
Stallman recently tried what I would call a hostile takeover of the glibc development. He tried to conspire behind my back and persuade the other main developers to take control so that in the end he is in control and can dictate whatever pleases him.
Property, in many ways, is a European concept, that justifies the actions of the powerful and allows for some interesting innovations. Property implies ownership and legal facts, which means that the government , by force, will defend those "facts".
Property is in NO way a European concept, and your assertion is base slander (or even racism) of the worst sort. Nearly *every* society has a concept of property, and it's quite easily demonstrable that property was a well-established and understood concept historically literally *thousands* of years before there was any civilization to speak of in Europe. (If you doubt me, look up the Code of Hammurabi, which deals with property issues at considerable length.)
Finally, any one belonging to one of the three largest religions in the world, Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, recognizes that the concept of property is one that has been implicit in God's covenants with man since the very beginning: Go back and read the Ten Commandments (or better yet, Proverbs) with an eye toward property rights - you'll find that any possible rational interpretation presupposes both the existence and the validity of property rights.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to slight Europeans, but you couldn't be more wrong! BTW, other than from a factual point of view, I couldn't care less if you insult Europeans, as I consider myself to be ethnically Texan.:-)
I believe strongly that all published software should be Free Software.
It's exactly this sort of intolerance of other licenses and needs that has made me less and less supportive of the FSF and the GPL as time goes on. At least the BSD crowd acknowledges that users' needs differ and doesn't try to impose (and yes, "impose" is> the correct word) its worldview on all software universally. It's interesting that his very first words are so revealing of the FSF philosophy on this point.
BTW, I encourage you to thank the GNU project by reminding people that the system so often called "Linux" is actually the GNU system with Linux as its kernel
No, it's not. This is true for most distributions, but many of us prefer real Unix-flavored (usually derived from BSD) versions of the utilities for good reasons: 1) they're more compatible, and work as expected, 2) they are free from ridiculous GNU-isms like the hideous "--" options, and 3) they are also sometimes considerably more stable. I'm getting a little tired of the GNU/FSF folks trying to take all the credit for Linux. It's a crock, and they know it - there is not a single piece of GNU software that is completely essential to Linux - it would be a pain to replace it all (especially the compilers and thier ilk), but it *could* be done. Linux is Linux, GNU is a set of mediocre Unix utility ripoffs.
Let people know the threat that software patents have for small software businesses and Free Software.
This is just a flat-out lie. I know patents aren't popular here because so many in the community have learned from the FSF to hate them. The reality is that patents of *any* kind are a huge factor in levelling the playing field with the "big corporations" Kuhn so likes to demonize. A world without patents simply guarantees that companies like Microsoft will have total domination. (I do think that patents in fast-moving technology areas should have a much shorter term, say five years, but eliminating patents is NOT the answer - see my letter to LWN last year on this subject for a full explanation.)
Sometimes, people get confused and think that Emacs really is a religion. It's not a religion, even if it is a way of life for some of us.;)
I'm not really sure he's joking here, despite the smiley...:-)
I also should mention that it was only a partial victory for freedom in January 2001 when Apple released APSL 1.2. They
came much closer to a Free Software license than the APSL 1.0, but they fell short by continuing to require that "deployed"
versions in an organization be published. Thus, they still restrict the important freedom of private modifications.
An alternative view held by many would be that Apple has explicitly preserved the freedom of private modifications. In reality, the APSL is less restrictive and more free than the GPL in this regard.
Recently, I changed my mode of dress to be a bit more traditional, and I cut my long hair. I did this in part because my fiancee wanted me to, but also in part because I realize that non-hackers are sometimes threatened by the "typical hacker style."
This is very interesting to those of us that have long held that despite their protestations to the contrary, the free software movement is indeed inextricably tied to a communist worldview. RMS and others routinely deny this even though it's the only logical conclusion one can reach upon reading and thoughtful consideration of their positions on the issues. The fact that they are more aggressively pursuing subversive tactics should come as a sharp warning to those that are "a bit uncomfortable" with GPL/FSF/GNU.
Even though Java's turned into a flop both for standalone client apps (erm, where are they?)
There are actually a lot of them, although I'll grant that they're not widely used. That doesn't mean that they're not good, though. Look at ThinkFree Office for a good example: 100% Java, runs beautifully on all kinds of machines, and is good. I think you can make a credible case that the ThinkFree Office components are far better and more usable than almost all of the "free" office alternatives out there, including all the Gnome and KDE office apps. ThinkFree Office has far better and more bulletproof Microsoft file capabilities than those types of competitors. In fact, except for lacking support for a few advanced things in Excel, like cell notes, conditional formatting, and autofilters, it interoperates flawlessly with the MS world. It's also quite speedy on an old P75 laptop that is otherwise incapable of running office apps.
(BTW: for those that will inevitably gripe that ThinkFree requires a subscription - you're wrong. ThinkFree Office is freely downloadable and usable locally: you only have to pay the subscription fee if you want to use thier backend services, which are good, but a bit overpriced, I think...)
Actually, there are a very large number of people that advocate teaching the biblical account of Creation in schools. (And in fact, many of us are more than willing to pay $15,000 a year for private school to make sure it gets taught!)
There are indeed very good scientific reasons to consider young earth or catastrophism theories as scientifically valid. I also usge you to open your mind a little, if you're really not afraid of what you'll find. In fact, if one takes an objective look at the data, it quickly becomes obvious that Darwinian evolution is built on some of the worst "science" ever to walk under that banner. Whether you are for or against evolution, you owe it to yourself to understand some of the real scientific problems raised by the current evolutionary dogma. For a very fair assessment of how science undermines rather than supports evolution, I suggest uber-hacker Do-While Jones' excellent site devoted to the subject: www.scienceagainstevolution.org - you'll find a ton of mostly excellent articles that raise important issues in the archives of Disclosure, their monthly newsletter. Spend some time reading these - I particularly recommen Teenage Mutant Mammal Turtles, Let's Talk About Lucy, and the series on radiocarbon/radioactive dating methods. I think you'll be surprised...
If you're impressed enough to want to send money to the developers of the incredibly flaky and unstable Cygwin, I imagine you'd want to make yourself an indentured servant to David Korn and the rest of the U/Win team. (For those that don't know, U/Win is a lot like Cygwin, except 1) it works, 2) it's faster, and 3) it works like real Unix instead of GNU crap.)
(f I sound bitter over this, it's because I was badly bitten by a series of very fundamental and inexcusable bugs in Cygwin only the week before last. None of them should have ever seen the light of day. For a bit of hair-pulling agony, try using Cygwin's expr to divide sometime. Hint: It can't!
The question is what makes a fax more legally reliable than an e-mail. Maybe its simply because it is harder, for the sender, to falsify the originating phone number?
No, it's the same thing that makes any other paper document legal: the signature. They may be far from perfect, but they've been the basis of all legal transactions for the past several hundred years.
It's "than" NOT "then" - this is about the fortieth time I've read this grammatical mistake on/. this week. Did *everyone* here sleep through English class?
Meanwhile, the IETF has put on hold its work toward an internet fax standard, as Adobe and Xerox squabble over a file format.
Internet Fax standards have already existed for years: Check out www.tpc.int for more info. You'll note that the entire TPC.INT system is based on several RFCs that were released years ago: see RFCs 1528, 1529, and 1530. (And 1703, which extended tpc.int to radio paging....)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah, it's definitely worth it to avoid spending that extra $100. After all, the dozens of hours of your time you'll spend rolling your own and fiddling with the setup isn't worth anything. I'm also sure you don't mind a big, noisy, butt-ugly PC as an audio component, and of course, you won't mind paying for all that power the thing sucks down while just sitting there waiting for you to decide what to play. (Or maybe you just won't mind waiting a couple of minutes for your MP3 player to boot before you can listen to anything...) REally, using a PC for this sort of thing is just plain dumb - if ever a net function *needed* to be embedded in an appliance, this is it.
Seriously, anyone griping about the Audiotron because of its *price* has got rocks in their head - it's a fair deal for what it does. I'd have designed it differently (and better), but it's by far the best network MP3 player out there now. (Have a look at the Diamond Rio/Dell equivalent for a lesson in how NOT to build such a device - thiers requires Windows and specially modified MusicMatch software, which I'm *sure* they'll still be happy to support in five years, right?)
The Audiotron has some minor flaws, but it's by FAR the best implementation out there of a real network audio component, and the price isn't too bad, although I'd prefer a cheaper version with no local or even web "UI" per se, just some way to pass it the next song or playlist to run with. That way, I could code the UI however I like in any old web server...
Actually, there are no really good points there. This is just another attemt by the pro-hydrogen people to capitalize on catastrophe to push their inane agenda.
Reasons hydrogen is stupid:
1. To get enough of it in a small space, you need high-pressure tanks. These are heavy, expensive, and hard to build. It is far from certain that we could produce mass-produce them and ensure a reasonable useful life, too.
2. Hydrogen makes a pretty spiffy fuel-air bomb, too. Remember the Hindenburg? (Or the Challenger, for a more apt example of what *liquid* hydrogen does when vented near a flame...)
3. The ONLY source of hydrogen suitable for the production of such large quantities is natural gas, one of the best and cleanest fuels known anyway. If we're going to deal with the problems of gaseous fuels, why not use LNG directly and save the HUGE additional costs of converting to and dealing with hydrogen?
4. Hydrogen, being the smallest and most rapidly spreading elment in the universe, is notoriously hard to keep confined. Gas-tight selas for such a tiny molucule are NOT trivial, and the cost of screwing up is rather high.
In short, it would be tough to come up with a stupider proposal. It's more likely that those proposing this were on nitrous oxide than hydrogen...
Actually, both - Not a huge movement today, but growing like mad, and meeting a real need in today's society. Although still small (I'm guessing perhaps a couple of hundred schools here in the US), Classical Christian Education is growing very rapidly, and is one of the most powerful forces behind the extremely rapid rise in popularity of private schools. (Not to mention, it's becoming the methodolgy and curriculum of choice amongst many new home schoolers, too.) Have a look at the ACCS web page and look at the members page - then realize that many (most?) of those schools didn't even exist just a few years ago, and many more have changed their direction as a result of the credibility the method is gaining. ACCS conferences draw large crowds from all over the country - and that's just the people that care enough to travel to the conference site. Many that can't make the conferece trips catch up by listening to the conference sessions on tapes or MP3's available on the web.
Parents are now painfully aware that even the best of the public schools are not capable of producing graduates that would have been considered literate even 75 years ago. They're taking the matter into thier own hands, as they should. The education "professionals" had their chance (for 75 years or more!) and they blew it. It's time to take back our children.
Congratulations, you've just (almost) described the ultimate in today's educational curricula (which is really that of the medeival period rediscovered) - it's called "Classical Christian Education", and is taking the country by storm, first in private lower schools, where the curruculum is based on the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric), then in College (or University, a term which can have no real meaning outside of a Christian context...) where this was traditionally followed with the Quadivium of geometry, astronomy, music, and arithmetic.
And yes, there are a few places where this sort of thing can be found, although it's taking a while to reclaim these lost and time-proven methods. Read Doug Wilson's excellent book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning for the full story. A few good web resources on the subject:
The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy Sayers classic 1947 essay on the subject, and a large influence on the Classical Christian School movement. Read this!
A good interview with Wilson about Classical Chrisitan Education.
The Association of Classical and Christian Schools, the accrediting body and nerve center of sorts for Classical Christian Schools.
Credenda/Agenda, sort of the journal of this movement - read, learn, and understand. It's also quite funny at times - the writing is usually quite good, and often excellent.
Finally, at the college level, this methodology is just beginning to appear, check out New St. Andrews College for details on a college designed for incoming high-school graduates who are already better educated than many 4-year liberal arts college grads.
And of course there's the old joke about Stallman finally finding a version of Unix he could live with: "vmunix.el". /. these days that miss the humor in old jokes entirely...)
(Joke repeated here because it seems there are many on
Of course, without those fudge factors the Earth would be somewhere around -40C most of the time, so you can't just throw them out.
:-)
I'm sure you must have meant -40F not -40C, right?
Real engineers don't use the metric system! (For those of you that are only CS geeks, -40F and -40C are the same...)
I agree that protocols should be different to accomodate intermittent connections, but WAP went way overboard in thier approach. If they had only set out to provide a more reliable datagram delivery layer, thet wouldn't have been so bad.
WTP is better, but is it enough better to justify adding a terribly proprietary and unproven protocol as part of the infrastructure? Probably not, especially since the reliability of the underlying wireless transport can reasonably be expected to get much better in the 3G world we'll actually be using this stuff in...
HTTP is simply a poorly designed protocol, period. Wireless or not, it's an ungainly pig. (The Gopher protocol is a much better design, and there were those of us pushing for it or others as alternatives to HTTP when Mosaic first came out. It was quickly too late, though, and we've been stuck with a turkey ever since.
And WML, as you state, is pretty much without any redeeming qualities whatsoever...
I've done set-top box work, too, and agree they're some of the thinnest clients you'll find. (Although this thinness is more an artifact of the cable industry's bizarre business model (which has no way to accomodate the user buying better hardware if he wants it) than it is any real architectural requirement.
I've been through this argument with many of the big names in the cable and satellite business. Any set-top that weak is not going to be worth buying in the first place, as it will be insufficiently flexible in the future. We sure don't need Pentium IV set-tops, but we do need something that isn't obsolete when it hits the market. And "thinness", I'd argue is more a property of the platform (hw & sw) than the protocols.
The economics don't even work - Moore's law pretty much demands that throwing hardware at the problem is cheaper in the long run than developing goofy proprietary protocols.
David Clark of MIT told me first-hand that the only reason there are seven layers in the OSI model is because there were seven subcommittees sent off to study the problem - when they came back together, in true ISO fashion, they couldn't agree on where the layer divisions should be, so they just stuck with the arbitrary divisions of the subcommittees themselves. Ugh.
For a far better take on the William Wallace story, try reading "The Scottish Chiefs" by Jane Porter. Although it is a work of fiction, it is reasonably in accord with history in most regards, and a far better story than Braveheart. It explores Wallace's motivations and strength much better as well, and paints him as the complex character that he really was, insisting on servanthood all the while he was the strongest leader in Scotland.
/. readers won't have the guts required to read this, since it will grate with their self-centered worldview (much like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which I expect many slashdotters can't handle for similar reasons.)
Warning: The themes of this work are honor, humility, and the importance of always honoring God by one's actions, so many
BTW: If you do read it, get the version illustrated with the beautiful N.C. Wyeth paintings - They're a 20th century addition, of course, but so perfect a fit that it's hard to imagine the book without them.
WAP isn't just stupid, it's a bad thing: At it's core, it's very important to recognize that WAP is nothing less than an attempt to replace all open standard Internet protocols with proprietary (and not particularly well-designed) W-equivalents.
There is absolutely no reason why standard HTML, HTTP, and TCP can't work in the wireless world - WAP is a waste of time and money, these protocols aren't necessary today (except for terminally crippled cellphone browsers that people generally refuse to use), and as handheld devices gain more compute power, they start to need the real protocols anyway, so WAP is more of a hindrance than a help.
Oh, and there's that whole ugly proprietary problem, too.. Sadly, WAP is the OSI of this decade. It too will yield to the unstoppable juggernaut of open Internet protocols, but not before countless millions of dollars and man-hours are spent trying to force another bad idea on the world.
If you're not familiar with OSI, go back and read about it - OSI was a suite of "elegant" protocols (as opposed to the crude but effective IP) that most of the academics and digerati viewed as "the right way" to do networking in the 80's and 90's. There was one problem they overlooked: IP worked well and was interoperable, OSI could claim niether of these attributes. Marshall Rose has written that OSI can be quite instructive in illustrating the way things should NOT be done.
I think the same is very much true of WAP. The death of WAP, when it finally comes, will be a good thing.
There are a lot more supercharged cars than that, and they began appearing decades before the first turbos (the 1962 Chevy Corvair Monza Spyder and Olds Jetfire.)
For more info on superchargers and their advantages over turbos in many circumstances, check out:
Jackson Racing's Supercharger Info Page (Talks about the advantages of supercharging over turbos in many apps. Check out the rest of the site for info on their kits, which have received rave reviews for value, performance, and reliability.)
Paxton Superchargers (The one that popularized production superchargers in Studebakers and 1960's Mustangs and Shelbys.)
Vortech superchargers (Hybrid type - turbo-style compressor driven by a gearbox. Persoanlly, I think this combines the worst features of both, but some people really like these...)
I don't recall the amount (I think it was about half of what you state), but it was significant. It's worth noting that Sun, IBM, and Compaq are the only computer companies on the planet that own enough of their own core technologies to be at least somewhat immune from extortion at the hands of the likes of Intel and Microsoft. *Everyone* else is vulnerable and not fully capable of controlling of their future.
If I understand turbo correctly, all it does is take some of the pressure from the exhaust gas and uses that to force more air into the intake, consuming more fuel but also providing more power.
/. that are also capable of mech hacking. It's a different, but very similar art.
Correct. A turbocharger (technically, they're called turbosuperchargers, the nomenclature you'll find in older literature) simply captures kinetic energy and heat energy (via gas expansion) from the hot exhaust gasses and uses that energy to stuff more air into the engine's intake. This results in a denser fuel/air charge and volumetric efficiency of over 100%. Plain old superchargers do the same thing, but are driven directly by the engine rather than by the exhaust. Now that they can be made cheaply, superchargers are gaining in popularity (check out some of Mercedes new motors) since they avoid the "turbo lag problem, and also provide a cooler intake charge (the centrifugal compressors in most turbos put a lot of paddle wheel work into the air.)
As an aside, high performance normally aspirated engines (no turbo or supercharger) can also exceed 100% volumetric efficiency, but not by a whole lot. A good turbocharger or supercharger system does *amazing* things to the performance and efficiency of a car, and if you take good care of them (use really good oil and change it religiously), they aren't a significant maintenance problem.
I'm always surprised that we don't have more multidisciplinary hackers here on
I woul dnever think of handing someone a binary alone and saying "here you go, just run this, trust me".
You conveniently gloss over the fact that for 99.99(9?)% of the world's computer users, being handed a binary is far preferable to being handed the source and being told, "Here you go, you'll have to compile this, after figuring out which libraries it needs, then getting those and installing them, resolve obscure dependencies, and then install and configure the app itself while adjusting for the idiosyncracies of the particular distribution and environment you have. Trust me, this way is better. No Really. Hey, put down that stick! Ow! Ouch!"
Some things aren't better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick...
This is an interesting observation, and bears out my long-held belief that free/open source software has succeeded in spite of the FSF at least as much as because of it. (FWIW, Russ Nelson's excellent comment here about the FSF alienating more people than it converts is right on the money.)
Excuse me, were you reading the same thing I was? If so, I'm not sure how you square the assertion above with what Drepper actually wrote, to wit:
Property, in many ways, is a European concept, that justifies the actions of the powerful and allows for some interesting innovations. Property implies ownership and legal facts, which means that the government , by force, will defend those "facts".
:-)
Property is in NO way a European concept, and your assertion is base slander (or even racism) of the worst sort. Nearly *every* society has a concept of property, and it's quite easily demonstrable that property was a well-established and understood concept historically literally *thousands* of years before there was any civilization to speak of in Europe. (If you doubt me, look up the Code of Hammurabi, which deals with property issues at considerable length.)
Finally, any one belonging to one of the three largest religions in the world, Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, recognizes that the concept of property is one that has been implicit in God's covenants with man since the very beginning: Go back and read the Ten Commandments (or better yet, Proverbs) with an eye toward property rights - you'll find that any possible rational interpretation presupposes both the existence and the validity of property rights.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to slight Europeans, but you couldn't be more wrong! BTW, other than from a factual point of view, I couldn't care less if you insult Europeans, as I consider myself to be ethnically Texan.
I believe strongly that all published software should be Free Software.
;)
:-)
It's exactly this sort of intolerance of other licenses and needs that has made me less and less supportive of the FSF and the GPL as time goes on. At least the BSD crowd acknowledges that users' needs differ and doesn't try to impose (and yes, "impose" is> the correct word) its worldview on all software universally. It's interesting that his very first words are so revealing of the FSF philosophy on this point.
BTW, I encourage you to thank the GNU project by reminding people that the system so often called "Linux" is actually the GNU system with Linux as its kernel
No, it's not. This is true for most distributions, but many of us prefer real Unix-flavored (usually derived from BSD) versions of the utilities for good reasons: 1) they're more compatible, and work as expected, 2) they are free from ridiculous GNU-isms like the hideous "--" options, and 3) they are also sometimes considerably more stable. I'm getting a little tired of the GNU/FSF folks trying to take all the credit for Linux. It's a crock, and they know it - there is not a single piece of GNU software that is completely essential to Linux - it would be a pain to replace it all (especially the compilers and thier ilk), but it *could* be done. Linux is Linux, GNU is a set of mediocre Unix utility ripoffs.
Let people know the threat that software patents have for small software businesses and Free Software.
This is just a flat-out lie. I know patents aren't popular here because so many in the community have learned from the FSF to hate them. The reality is that patents of *any* kind are a huge factor in levelling the playing field with the "big corporations" Kuhn so likes to demonize. A world without patents simply guarantees that companies like Microsoft will have total domination. (I do think that patents in fast-moving technology areas should have a much shorter term, say five years, but eliminating patents is NOT the answer - see my letter to LWN last year on this subject for a full explanation.)
Sometimes, people get confused and think that Emacs really is a religion. It's not a religion, even if it is a way of life for some of us.
I'm not really sure he's joking here, despite the smiley...
I also should mention that it was only a partial victory for freedom in January 2001 when Apple released APSL 1.2. They
came much closer to a Free Software license than the APSL 1.0, but they fell short by continuing to require that "deployed"
versions in an organization be published. Thus, they still restrict the important freedom of private modifications.
An alternative view held by many would be that Apple has explicitly preserved the freedom of private modifications. In reality, the APSL is less restrictive and more free than the GPL in this regard.
Recently, I changed my mode of dress to be a bit more traditional, and I cut my long hair. I did this in part because my fiancee wanted me to, but also in part because I realize that non-hackers are sometimes threatened by the "typical hacker style."
This is very interesting to those of us that have long held that despite their protestations to the contrary, the free software movement is indeed inextricably tied to a communist worldview. RMS and others routinely deny this even though it's the only logical conclusion one can reach upon reading and thoughtful consideration of their positions on the issues. The fact that they are more aggressively pursuing subversive tactics should come as a sharp warning to those that are "a bit uncomfortable" with GPL/FSF/GNU.
Even though Java's turned into a flop both for standalone client apps (erm, where are they?)
There are actually a lot of them, although I'll grant that they're not widely used. That doesn't mean that they're not good, though. Look at ThinkFree Office for a good example: 100% Java, runs beautifully on all kinds of machines, and is good. I think you can make a credible case that the ThinkFree Office components are far better and more usable than almost all of the "free" office alternatives out there, including all the Gnome and KDE office apps. ThinkFree Office has far better and more bulletproof Microsoft file capabilities than those types of competitors. In fact, except for lacking support for a few advanced things in Excel, like cell notes, conditional formatting, and autofilters, it interoperates flawlessly with the MS world. It's also quite speedy on an old P75 laptop that is otherwise incapable of running office apps.
(BTW: for those that will inevitably gripe that ThinkFree requires a subscription - you're wrong. ThinkFree Office is freely downloadable and usable locally: you only have to pay the subscription fee if you want to use thier backend services, which are good, but a bit overpriced, I think...)
Actually, there are a very large number of people that advocate teaching the biblical account of Creation in schools. (And in fact, many of us are more than willing to pay $15,000 a year for private school to make sure it gets taught!)
There are indeed very good scientific reasons to consider young earth or catastrophism theories as scientifically valid. I also usge you to open your mind a little, if you're really not afraid of what you'll find. In fact, if one takes an objective look at the data, it quickly becomes obvious that Darwinian evolution is built on some of the worst "science" ever to walk under that banner. Whether you are for or against evolution, you owe it to yourself to understand some of the real scientific problems raised by the current evolutionary dogma. For a very fair assessment of how science undermines rather than supports evolution, I suggest uber-hacker Do-While Jones' excellent site devoted to the subject: www.scienceagainstevolution.org - you'll find a ton of mostly excellent articles that raise important issues in the archives of Disclosure, their monthly newsletter. Spend some time reading these - I particularly recommen Teenage Mutant Mammal Turtles, Let's Talk About Lucy, and the series on radiocarbon/radioactive dating methods. I think you'll be surprised...
If you're impressed enough to want to send money to the developers of the incredibly flaky and unstable Cygwin, I imagine you'd want to make yourself an indentured servant to David Korn and the rest of the U/Win team. (For those that don't know, U/Win is a lot like Cygwin, except 1) it works, 2) it's faster, and 3) it works like real Unix instead of GNU crap.)
(f I sound bitter over this, it's because I was badly bitten by a series of very fundamental and inexcusable bugs in Cygwin only the week before last. None of them should have ever seen the light of day. For a bit of hair-pulling agony, try using Cygwin's expr to divide sometime. Hint: It can't!
The question is what makes a fax more legally reliable than an e-mail. Maybe its simply because it is harder, for the sender, to falsify the originating phone number?
No, it's the same thing that makes any other paper document legal: the signature. They may be far from perfect, but they've been the basis of all legal transactions for the past several hundred years.
It's "than" NOT "then" - this is about the fortieth time I've read this grammatical mistake on /. this week. Did *everyone* here sleep through English class?
Meanwhile, the IETF has put on hold its work toward an internet fax standard, as Adobe and Xerox squabble over a file format.
Internet Fax standards have already existed for years : Check out www.tpc.int for more info. You'll note that the entire TPC.INT system is based on several RFCs that were released years ago: see RFCs 1528, 1529, and 1530. (And 1703, which extended tpc.int to radio paging....)