The free market works when participants in the market are rewarded in proportion to the amount of good they contribute. With DRM this proposition is reversed. Society gains less benefit from a protected work, but the owner of the work gets more reward. (Or so they hope.) On top of that, copy protection mechanisms invariably provide a less useful product even to the paying customers.
This simple bit of econ 101 explains why DRM is so universally reviled by consumers. The crux of the problem is that traditional market economics for manufactured goods like cars is based on marginal cost. For digital goods, the marginal cost approaches zero. Normal economics start to break down.
The other issue is that the publishing industry has set itself up as a middleman between the real content providers and consumers. They seek to use legislation to preserve this privileged position. A truely free-market approach would be to allow the middlemen to be made obsolete. This is what will happen eventually, the efforts of our toadying crony capitalist government notwithstanding.
We need to find market mechanisms that more closely align reward with contribution for the real content providers, the creative people. This is a tricky problem with no obvious solutions. For now, we'll have to put up with a lot of stupidity because so few people even clearly understand the problem.
I've been telling clients for years (since about 2000) to give up on any grandiose ideas of a highly interactive web site. Javascript and DHTML were just hype and didn't work worth a shit in the real world.
Ironicly, my main example was Google... a dead simple interface that lived within the limited means of HTML and was still extremely usefull. Nowadays, Google is leading the way into more interactive web applications. So, I guess it's time to change my advice.
Still, AJAX is basically a dirty javascript hack to achieve rich interactivity in today's browsers.
I hope the evolution of interactivity in the browser doesn't stop here. It seems like there's got to be a less hacky way. One good thing is that the use of XML should allow client side technologies to evolve independently without having to rewrite server-side code.
Wow, there's nothing like randomly killing innocent civilians to rally support for your cause. Good job, geniuses.
The violent wingnuts on either side need each other. I'm sure al qaida (or whoever's responsible) just created a bunch of new supporters of the Bush-neoconservative "clash of civilizations" foreign policy.
Violence, especially random violence, for a political cause shows a weakness of ideas and discredits the cause it is meant to support. It takes much more energy and intellect to create something positive than to blow something up. Destructive acts show an inability to create anything worthwhile.
Radical islamists talk about returning to the time of the Caliphate. During that time there was a flowering of mathematics, science, (algebra, algorithms), literature, and scholarship. Anyone trying to prove the worth of their ideas would do well to pursue those kinds of achievements. Blowing up subway cars displays a philosophy consisting of little more than morally deranged and intellectually empty fanaticism.
Intellectual property law ideally should strike a balance between rewarding producers of intellectual property and allowing society to benefit from innovation. Through the efforts of lobbyists, the system has become skewed to benefit technological incumbents, at the expense of the public good.
While a market based means of rewarding producers of intellectual property is essential, its primary goal must be to maximize benefit to society. Intellectual property protection comes with a cost. Protection is an artificial legal monopoly. It is an economic fact that monopolies are anticompetitive, restrict the functioning of the free market, and result in higher costs to consumers and lost opportunity for businesses.
The 20 year duration of a "utility" patent is an eternity in the world of technology. The video cassette, for example, ran its entire course from invention to obsolescence in about 20 years. In software, this cycle is more like 5 years. The 20 year period is entirely inappropriate for software.
The United States granted patentability to software and business methods. The result has been the granting of absurd patents, such as the "one-click" patent awarded to Amazon. There are numerous examples of equally absurd patents for software that are as obvious to a software engineer as the "one-click" idea is obvious to anyone who's ever used a mouse. Billions have been wasted on meritless lawsuits like the SCO lawsuit against IBM. An entire industry of "patent terrorists" has evolved which produce nothing but IP lawsuits. Clearly this is not furthering innovation.
Sadly, the US congress is so controlled by corporate lobbyists that the plain and simple best interest of the public loses out to the narrow, but well financed interests of intellectual property holders. It's nice to see that the EU parliament is not quite so corrupted, yet.
I refer you to Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig and Berkeley professor Stephen M. Maurer for more information on this issue.
The paranoia around cookies is a little overblown. Using cookies for login is fine. Using cookies to maintain application state is crappy design, but also harmless to the user.
Marketing, though, is essentially parasitic. I just deleted all my cookies, and deleted the crap out of the Flash data store. Take that, corporate slime.
This misguided attitude is way too common among biologists.
There's a real lack of well engineered bioinformatics software. Most of what's there is quick-and-dirty one-off hackery that got entrenched as standard practice.
Like computer science, though maybe for different reasons, biology attracts personalities that don't play nice with others. That's the real problem. Because, in order to build bioinformatics software that is both well engineered and actually usefull, skills from a lot of disciplines will be needed. And computer science, software engineering, and even us lowly vo-tech coders will be among them.
I totally support websites that want to charge for content. Why? 'Cause I think ads are annoying and favor least-common-denomenator content like stupid network TV sitcoms and vacuous teeniebopper bands.
None of the currently used methods to charge for content are viable because the cost of making the transaction is too high -- either to the user (filling out forms etc) or to the seller (paying 50 cents to process a payment of 50 cents).
So far, free content and donations seems to be the best compromise. I'd love to compare Wikipedia's donations to Britannica's revenue over the past year.
So, here's a thought:
Let's say you subscribe to a payment service which issues you some kind of universal user-id. You put in your info once at the payment service's site. Each pay content site would require you to sign on with your universal user-id. Your total surfing costs would be totalled and billed to you once a quarter or so. The revenue would be divided among the content sites based on total traffic statistics for all users of the payment service.
Essentially, this amounts to aggregating payments rather than aggregating content.
The big drawback I can see is the cost of securing such a system. Anyway, I guess this is not that different than micropayments, except that the payments are aggregated to save on txn costs.
Oh well, I guess we'll just have to watch ads for crappy block-buster movies or useless James Bond cigarette-lighter-cameras or something.
Very true. A thoughtful, informed, and educated electorate is essential to the functioning of a democracy. Too bad, it seems like our country is abandoning reason and replacing it with fear, religion, blind ideology -- all poor substitutes.
The shareholders are already punished under the present system. Know any Enron stockholders? They are not rolling in dough. The problem is that the officers of a miscreant corporation are (usually) not punished, and frequently walk away from a fiasco like Enron with plenty of cash in the bank. The shareholders (especially small-fry) don't have sufficient power to hold the officers accountable.
A corporation cannot, as it exists only on paper, commit a crime. If a crime has been committed, say cooking the books, people did it. The shareholders definitely share some responsibility, but do you really think my 200 shares of WorldCom let me call up the management and say, "Hey make sure earnings aren't wildly overstated, 'cause that would be wrong!" Not really.
I'm hoping that proportional representation will make it onto the national radar screen.
The US should switch to proportional representation for electing the house of representatives. We'd gain representation for minority views not represented by either of the two main parties. Plus we would unburden ourselves from the pathetically gerrymandered system of congressional districts.
Leaving the senate as it is would still provide for representation based in geography (at the state level).
Badnarik's ideas have a lot of appeal, but this point about a popular vote meaning the end of democracy is wrong and self serving. There's a lot more libertarian votes in the sparsely populated areas.
We should elect by popular vote. We need to come up with an auditable, verifiable, election process before "in Diebold we trust" becomes our national motto.
China is taking another "great leap forward". The first attempt was something of a disaster, but you've got to admit their track record has improved a lot.
Capitalism is definitely not the same as a free market.
China's (new) model is very capitalistic, just with all the capital owned by the state or members of the well-connected business class. Thus reducing the potential for increased wealth to lead to increased demands for increased political freedom.
Which is scarily like the crony-capitalism model the United States is moving towards.
It's sad that the post-industrial economy is leading to the loss of political rights in the West, rather than as once was hoped, an increase in freedom in places like China and Russia (where the state is also reasserting its power).
Re:Who would buy intel? Who would use onboard...
on
AMD Desktops Outsell Intel
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As I understand it (which may be fulla holes) the N/S bridge chipset matters a lot. Professional audio apps are notorious for having problems on the PC platform and the problem is that the PC platform was not designed with realtime (or even psuedo realtime) constraints in mind.
Even if you have a pro audio card that does a/d conversion, the data still has to get from the card to HDD fast enough. The system is probably way more than fast enough on average, but you get pops anyway if some other process keeps the cpu busy long enough for a buffer somewhere to fill up.
The chipset is key because audio is much more i/o intensive than compute intensive. So, the bottlenecks are definitely on the i/o bus (or maybe memory bus? I dunno.). I would guess that any pro audio app will have code that's been hand tuned to work with the patterns of latency typical in intel hardware.
But still, cheers to AMD for kicking some flabby, complacent, celeron-crippling, market-segmenting, mhz-is-everything intel ass.
I'd like to the House of Representatives recast away from antiquated and pathetically gerrymandered geographical districts towards a system of proportional representation.
For example, if the Greens got 4% of the vote (nationally) they'd get 4% of the seats in the House. The senate could be left as it is so that the states would have representation -- plus it's harder to gerrymander state borders. The idea that people who live geographically close to each other have the same political interest is just plain silly in this age.
The advantage of this would be better representation of a wider field of political opinion. And, it would mitigate the tendency in a two party system for one party to automatically take the opposite view from the other.
Of course it'll never happen with blood in the streets up to your knees.
Difficult to do very simple OS specific stuff, like opening an html doc in the default browser.
Takes a long time to start up the VM. If your program is trivially simple, the overhead dominates over actaully running the program.
The Swing and AWT mess. It's gotten better, but I think Sun made some fundamental mistakes right at the beginning and they are unable to acknowledge these mistakes and unwilling to start over and do it right. They're a server and OS company. What do you expect.
It's a lot harder than it should be to call natively compiled code from a Java program. JNI is a pain in the ass compared to other languages.
EJBs.
Things that don't suck about Java:
Ability to cleanly express object oriented software designs.
Speed. For applications suitable to the language, (for example high througput server-side apps) Java's speed is very good. For tasks not suitable for this kind of language, don't use it. Dont't write the 'ls' command in Java. Most of Java's reputation for slowness is based on people's experience with applets in 1996. Get some updated information.
Security. Most C programmers think that only crappy C programmers produce code containing buffer-overflow exploits and similar memory allocation bugs. Most C programs do, in fact, contain plenty of these types of bugs. Go figure.
Maintainability and readability. If that's not something you value, fine.
Javadoc. Every language should have something like javadoc. A standard something.
Garbage collection. Run-time optimization. Java's collection classes. Tomcat, Ant, JBoss, log4j, hibernate, JDO, aspectJ, JavaCC, eclipse, IntelliJ, this list could get really long.
What really sucks is senseless language flame wars. If you're smart, (I mean really smart, not just self-agrandizing) it's a matter of choosing a good tool for the job. I would say the right tool, but there's often several good choices, as well as not-so-good choices.
It's interesting to note that Perl and Lisp are a lot alike, not so much in the languages themselves, but in their community. Both feature an intensely loyal following of programmers willing to overlook truely bizarre syntax in exchange for the ability to implement some advanced programming language concepts cleanly and consicely. Both languages are similar in their retention of some very strange artifacts of history: cons, car, and cdr, for example, or the parts of perl adopted from shell scripting languages. Some members of both communities tend to be a little too convinced of their own superiority. But, both languages really do have some cool features.
And remember: If Java is to Cobol what Python is to APL and if Perl is to Linux what Visual Basic is to Windows and James Gosling is to Larry Wall what Elvis is to Hank Williams Jr., can you doubt that we were made for each other?
I used to think compiling java to native machine language would make it as fast as other compiled languages like C or C++. Not so.
In Java you rely on automated garbage collection, which is basically a trade-off of speed for developer convenience. And all calls to (non-static?) methods are "virtual" -- in other words, they incure the penalty of dynamically determining the type of the object. Whenever you do an array access in Java, the index is checked against the bounds of the array, which must take a cycle or two. These are all part of the semantics of the language, and can't be "compiled away". (Optimized away at run time? Maybe somewhat. I dunno.)
The philosophy of the language in general is to favor robustness, convenience, security, and Object Orientation over speed. This was a conscious decision.
The results of this benchmarking are just as bogus as the one from TheServerSide a couple years ago claiming.net was faster than Java. Comparing languages like this is like saying hammer A is 20% faster than hammer B at house building. Other factors have much greater impact.
In fact, it would be great if someone would now do a benchmark showing that C++ is faster than.net. That way we'd complete the loop and have:.net > java > C++ >.net
Plain old HTML is OK. XHTML + CSS is better. But the real future of the web is XML.
Unlike HTML and XHTML, which are essentially document presentation languages, XML (used semantically) gives you complete separation of content from layout, style, and formatting. This gives the browser more freedom to render a given chunk of content in different ways -- radically different visual layout, braille, speech synthesis, etc. This also gives you the ability to write client-server applications using XML over HTTP as the communications protocol.
This is, almost certainly, where Microsoft is heading..Net relies heavily on XML and is strongly oriented towards web services. EI was very early in supporting XML + XSLT (but, of course, not-quite-standard, the pricks!). Microsoft, through VB, has historically been successful in selling tools for client-server style development, and that model is strongly intrenched in the community of corporate developers on the MS platform, (and older platforms like CICS).
This kind of web app has real technical advantages over an html based web app. More work is done on the client. A richer GUI can be used. Smaller downloads per page-hit. There's greater decoupling between the server and the client platform. An XML based web service could support browser based and non-browser based clients. Easier to automate (screen scraping made easy!).
As to rendering XML content on the browser, my feeling so far is that neither CSS (in its current form) or XSLT is an optimal solution. CSS is limiting, and tricky to get basic things to work. (vertical centering, anyone?) More importantly, CSS is tied to the assumption that the thing you're formatting is a document. What if it's not? Think arbitrary XML here -- database records, spreadsheet cells, a stock ticker, a graph of a mathematical formula, whatever. XSLT is more general, but just plain quirky and weird. Functional programming is foreign to most of us who cut our teeth on curly braces.
It's strange to me that no-one on slashdot seems to recognize this. This isn't that far outside the box folks! It's not all div tags vs. table tags. Zoom out to the big picture. Think a little.
Pure math has been described by one friend of mine as "mathturbation", while another observed that the entire field of computer science has a severe case of "Math Envy". I'm more down with the later opinion.
Lots of government (not just china) would probably like to reduce the decentralized nature of the internet.
Who knows, maybe changing the internet into a hierarchical structure of NATs on top of NATs might be a nice way to more efficiently filter or inspect all traffic within a given subnet, or between subnets.
True, the developers deserve credit. I agree. But, does that make it a good idea to legally mandate that credit? That is an entirely differant question.
I think the admiration within the open source community for its star developers goes way deeper than anything a legally required splash screen could produce. I also think anyone who would remove an author's name from his work is a special kind of slime.
But, it's fundamental to the ideas of open source and free software that the authors give the right to use the software with as few restrictions as possible.
I have no problem with a tasteful list of contributors. The problem comes in with corporate sponsorship. Do we want "This Software brought to you by Schwartz's Foot Ointment!!" plastered all over our screens? I think not.
That's no longer free. It becomes just another means of getting consumers to buy stuff. Let's hope things don't go that way.
I haven't looked into monitors for several years, but it used to be that Eizo Nanao made what some considered the best. Of the mass-market brands, Sony and NEC are better to my eyes than Viewsonic, but Viewsonic is probably the best price/performance.
A really good programmer should know at least one lower level so-called "real" programming language and one scripting language. It's even better if the two languages are compatible in that modules for the scripting language can easily be written in the low level language and conversely, the scripting language can be embedding in applications written in the low level language.
Not only does this give you the right-tool-for-the-job advantage, but also allows a large system to be divided in parts suitable for either tool.
Good combinations that I know of are: C and Perl C++ and Python Java and Python
I'm sure there are plenty more.
Best Second Book on Java
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Effective Java
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Effective Java is the best second book for learning to program well in Java. The best first book is Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel, which is just out in its third edition.
p.s. To the many Java-haters on Slashdot: If you think Java sucks, fine. Don't read a Java book review. Don't post dumb comments like, "Hey d00dz, Java sucks!" If you have nothing better to do, try and post something usefull, like a review of the best PERL book you know. (Or C, Python, or BrainFuck, if that's your language of choice.)
Slashdot Mirror
The free market works when participants in the market are rewarded in proportion to the amount of good they contribute. With DRM this proposition is reversed. Society gains less benefit from a protected work, but the owner of the work gets more reward. (Or so they hope.) On top of that, copy protection mechanisms invariably provide a less useful product even to the paying customers.
This simple bit of econ 101 explains why DRM is so universally reviled by consumers. The crux of the problem is that traditional market economics for manufactured goods like cars is based on marginal cost. For digital goods, the marginal cost approaches zero. Normal economics start to break down.
The other issue is that the publishing industry has set itself up as a middleman between the real content providers and consumers. They seek to use legislation to preserve this privileged position. A truely free-market approach would be to allow the middlemen to be made obsolete. This is what will happen eventually, the efforts of our toadying crony capitalist government notwithstanding.
We need to find market mechanisms that more closely align reward with contribution for the real content providers, the creative people. This is a tricky problem with no obvious solutions. For now, we'll have to put up with a lot of stupidity because so few people even clearly understand the problem.
Rich web applications... what a great idea.
I've been telling clients for years (since about 2000) to give up on any grandiose ideas of a highly interactive web site. Javascript and DHTML were just hype and didn't work worth a shit in the real world.
Ironicly, my main example was Google... a dead simple interface that lived within the limited means of HTML and was still extremely usefull. Nowadays, Google is leading the way into more interactive web applications. So, I guess it's time to change my advice.
Still, AJAX is basically a dirty javascript hack to achieve rich interactivity in today's browsers.
I hope the evolution of interactivity in the browser doesn't stop here. It seems like there's got to be a less hacky way. One good thing is that the use of XML should allow client side technologies to evolve independently without having to rewrite server-side code.
Anyway, it's about time!
Wow, there's nothing like randomly killing innocent civilians to rally support for your cause. Good job, geniuses.
The violent wingnuts on either side need each other. I'm sure al qaida (or whoever's responsible) just created a bunch of new supporters of the Bush-neoconservative "clash of civilizations" foreign policy.
Violence, especially random violence, for a political cause shows a weakness of ideas and discredits the cause it is meant to support. It takes much more energy and intellect to create something positive than to blow something up. Destructive acts show an inability to create anything worthwhile.
Radical islamists talk about returning to the time of the Caliphate. During that time there was a flowering of mathematics, science, (algebra, algorithms), literature, and scholarship. Anyone trying to prove the worth of their ideas would do well to pursue those kinds of achievements. Blowing up subway cars displays a philosophy consisting of little more than morally deranged and intellectually empty fanaticism.
Intellectual property law ideally should strike a balance between rewarding producers of intellectual property and allowing society to benefit from innovation. Through the efforts of lobbyists, the system has become skewed to benefit technological incumbents, at the expense of the public good.
s /maurer.htm
While a market based means of rewarding producers of intellectual property is essential, its primary goal must be to maximize benefit to society. Intellectual property protection comes with a cost. Protection is an artificial legal monopoly. It is an economic fact that monopolies are anticompetitive, restrict the functioning of the free market, and result in higher costs to consumers and lost opportunity for businesses.
The 20 year duration of a "utility" patent is an eternity in the world of technology. The video cassette, for example, ran its entire course from invention to obsolescence in about 20 years. In software, this cycle is more like 5 years. The 20 year period is entirely inappropriate for software.
The United States granted patentability to software and business methods. The result has been the granting of absurd patents, such as the "one-click" patent awarded to Amazon. There are numerous examples of equally absurd patents for software that are as obvious to a software engineer as the "one-click" idea is obvious to anyone who's ever used a mouse. Billions have been wasted on meritless lawsuits like the SCO lawsuit against IBM. An entire industry of "patent terrorists" has evolved which produce nothing but IP lawsuits. Clearly this is not furthering innovation.
Sadly, the US congress is so controlled by corporate lobbyists that the plain and simple best interest of the public loses out to the narrow, but well financed interests of intellectual property holders. It's nice to see that the EU parliament is not quite so corrupted, yet.
I refer you to Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig and Berkeley professor Stephen M. Maurer for more information on this issue.
http://www.lessig.org/
http://violet.berkeley.edu/~gspp/people/affiliate
For those so inclined, consider supporting the EFF:
http://www.eff.org/
The paranoia around cookies is a little overblown. Using cookies for login is fine. Using cookies to maintain application state is crappy design, but also harmless to the user.
Marketing, though, is essentially parasitic. I just deleted all my cookies, and deleted the crap out of the Flash data store. Take that, corporate slime.
Next idea: outsourced programmers in submarines -- 20,000 megabytes under the sea.
This misguided attitude is way too common among biologists.
There's a real lack of well engineered bioinformatics software. Most of what's there is quick-and-dirty one-off hackery that got entrenched as standard practice.
Like computer science, though maybe for different reasons, biology attracts personalities that don't play nice with others. That's the real problem. Because, in order to build bioinformatics software that is both well engineered and actually usefull, skills from a lot of disciplines will be needed. And computer science, software engineering, and even us lowly vo-tech coders will be among them.
I totally support websites that want to charge for content. Why? 'Cause I think ads are annoying and favor least-common-denomenator content like stupid network TV sitcoms and vacuous teeniebopper bands.
None of the currently used methods to charge for content are viable because the cost of making the transaction is too high -- either to the user (filling out forms etc) or to the seller (paying 50 cents to process a payment of 50 cents).
So far, free content and donations seems to be the best compromise. I'd love to compare Wikipedia's donations to Britannica's revenue over the past year.
So, here's a thought:
Let's say you subscribe to a payment service which issues you some kind of universal user-id. You put in your info once at the payment service's site. Each pay content site would require you to sign on with your universal user-id. Your total surfing costs would be totalled and billed to you once a quarter or so. The revenue would be divided among the content sites based on total traffic statistics for all users of the payment service.
Essentially, this amounts to aggregating payments rather than aggregating content.
The big drawback I can see is the cost of securing such a system. Anyway, I guess this is not that different than micropayments, except that the payments are aggregated to save on txn costs.
Oh well, I guess we'll just have to watch ads for crappy block-buster movies or useless James Bond cigarette-lighter-cameras or something.
The 54 million Americans who voted for him.
Ideology and politics. It's easier than thinking
Very true. A thoughtful, informed, and educated electorate is essential to the functioning of a democracy. Too bad, it seems like our country is abandoning reason and replacing it with fear, religion, blind ideology -- all poor substitutes.
The shareholders are already punished under the present system. Know any Enron stockholders? They are not rolling in dough. The problem is that the officers of a miscreant corporation are (usually) not punished, and frequently walk away from a fiasco like Enron with plenty of cash in the bank. The shareholders (especially small-fry) don't have sufficient power to hold the officers accountable.
A corporation cannot, as it exists only on paper, commit a crime. If a crime has been committed, say cooking the books, people did it. The shareholders definitely share some responsibility, but do you really think my 200 shares of WorldCom let me call up the management and say, "Hey make sure earnings aren't wildly overstated, 'cause that would be wrong!" Not really.
I'm hoping that proportional representation will make it onto the national radar screen.
The US should switch to proportional representation for electing the house of representatives. We'd gain representation for minority views not represented by either of the two main parties. Plus we would unburden ourselves from the pathetically gerrymandered system of congressional districts.
Leaving the senate as it is would still provide for representation based in geography (at the state level).
Badnarik's ideas have a lot of appeal, but this point about a popular vote meaning the end of democracy is wrong and self serving. There's a lot more libertarian votes in the sparsely populated areas.
We should elect by popular vote. We need to come up with an auditable, verifiable, election process before "in Diebold we trust" becomes our national motto.
Really good point.
a nyway.com/
China is taking another "great leap forward". The first attempt was something of a disaster, but you've got to admit their track record has improved a lot.
Capitalism is definitely not the same as a free market.
China's (new) model is very capitalistic, just with all the capital owned by the state or members of the well-connected business class. Thus reducing the potential for increased wealth to lead to increased demands for increased political freedom.
Which is scarily like the crony-capitalism model the United States is moving towards.
It's sad that the post-industrial economy is leading to the loss of political rights in the West, rather than as once was hoped, an increase in freedom in places like China and Russia (where the state is also reasserting its power).
by the way http://www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhim
As I understand it (which may be fulla holes) the N/S bridge chipset matters a lot. Professional audio apps are notorious for having problems on the PC platform and the problem is that the PC platform was not designed with realtime (or even psuedo realtime) constraints in mind.
Even if you have a pro audio card that does a/d conversion, the data still has to get from the card to HDD fast enough. The system is probably way more than fast enough on average, but you get pops anyway if some other process keeps the cpu busy long enough for a buffer somewhere to fill up.
The chipset is key because audio is much more i/o intensive than compute intensive. So, the bottlenecks are definitely on the i/o bus (or maybe memory bus? I dunno.). I would guess that any pro audio app will have code that's been hand tuned to work with the patterns of latency typical in intel hardware.
But still, cheers to AMD for kicking some flabby, complacent, celeron-crippling, market-segmenting, mhz-is-everything intel ass.
-chris
Whaddya mean third world country?
Naaa that'll never happen here. This is America!
p.s. in deibold we trust.
I'd like to the House of Representatives recast away from antiquated and pathetically gerrymandered geographical districts towards a system of proportional representation.
For example, if the Greens got 4% of the vote (nationally) they'd get 4% of the seats in the House. The senate could be left as it is so that the states would have representation -- plus it's harder to gerrymander state borders. The idea that people who live geographically close to each other have the same political interest is just plain silly in this age.
The advantage of this would be better representation of a wider field of political opinion. And, it would mitigate the tendency in a two party system for one party to automatically take the opposite view from the other.
Of course it'll never happen with blood in the streets up to your knees.
p.s. Plutocracy sucks. Bring back democracy!
p.p.s. http://www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhim- Difficult to do very simple OS specific stuff, like opening an html doc in the default browser.
- Takes a long time to start up the VM. If your program is trivially simple, the overhead dominates over actaully running the program.
- The Swing and AWT mess. It's gotten better, but I think Sun made some fundamental mistakes right at the beginning and they are unable to acknowledge these mistakes and unwilling to start over and do it right. They're a server and OS company. What do you expect.
- It's a lot harder than it should be to call natively compiled code from a Java program. JNI is a pain in the ass compared to other languages.
- EJBs.
Things that don't suck about Java:What really sucks is senseless language flame wars. If you're smart, (I mean really smart, not just self-agrandizing) it's a matter of choosing a good tool for the job. I would say the right tool, but there's often several good choices, as well as not-so-good choices.
It's interesting to note that Perl and Lisp are a lot alike, not so much in the languages themselves, but in their community. Both feature an intensely loyal following of programmers willing to overlook truely bizarre syntax in exchange for the ability to implement some advanced programming language concepts cleanly and consicely. Both languages are similar in their retention of some very strange artifacts of history: cons, car, and cdr, for example, or the parts of perl adopted from shell scripting languages. Some members of both communities tend to be a little too convinced of their own superiority. But, both languages really do have some cool features.
And remember: If Java is to Cobol what Python is to APL and if Perl is to Linux what Visual Basic is to Windows and James Gosling is to Larry Wall what Elvis is to Hank Williams Jr., can you doubt that we were made for each other?
I used to think compiling java to native machine language would make it as fast as other compiled languages like C or C++. Not so.
.net was faster than Java. Comparing languages like this is like saying hammer A is 20% faster than hammer B at house building. Other factors have much greater impact.
.net. That way we'd complete the loop and have: .net > java > C++ > .net
In Java you rely on automated garbage collection, which is basically a trade-off of speed for developer convenience. And all calls to (non-static?) methods are "virtual" -- in other words, they incure the penalty of dynamically determining the type of the object. Whenever you do an array access in Java, the index is checked against the bounds of the array, which must take a cycle or two. These are all part of the semantics of the language, and can't be "compiled away". (Optimized away at run time? Maybe somewhat. I dunno.)
The philosophy of the language in general is to favor robustness, convenience, security, and Object Orientation over speed. This was a conscious decision.
The results of this benchmarking are just as bogus as the one from TheServerSide a couple years ago claiming
In fact, it would be great if someone would now do a benchmark showing that C++ is faster than
That would be cool.
Plain old HTML is OK. XHTML + CSS is better. But the real future of the web is XML.
.Net relies heavily on XML and is strongly oriented towards web services. EI was very early in supporting XML + XSLT (but, of course, not-quite-standard, the pricks!). Microsoft, through VB, has historically been successful in selling tools for client-server style development, and that model is strongly intrenched in the community of corporate developers on the MS platform, (and older platforms like CICS).
Unlike HTML and XHTML, which are essentially document presentation languages, XML (used semantically) gives you complete separation of content from layout, style, and formatting. This gives the browser more freedom to render a given chunk of content in different ways -- radically different visual layout, braille, speech synthesis, etc. This also gives you the ability to write client-server applications using XML over HTTP as the communications protocol.
This is, almost certainly, where Microsoft is heading.
This kind of web app has real technical advantages over an html based web app. More work is done on the client. A richer GUI can be used. Smaller downloads per page-hit. There's greater decoupling between the server and the client platform. An XML based web service could support browser based and non-browser based clients. Easier to automate (screen scraping made easy!).
As to rendering XML content on the browser, my feeling so far is that neither CSS (in its current form) or XSLT is an optimal solution. CSS is limiting, and tricky to get basic things to work. (vertical centering, anyone?) More importantly, CSS is tied to the assumption that the thing you're formatting is a document. What if it's not? Think arbitrary XML here -- database records, spreadsheet cells, a stock ticker, a graph of a mathematical formula, whatever. XSLT is more general, but just plain quirky and weird. Functional programming is foreign to most of us who cut our teeth on curly braces.
It's strange to me that no-one on slashdot seems to recognize this. This isn't that far outside the box folks! It's not all div tags vs. table tags. Zoom out to the big picture. Think a little.
Bill Gates has more lawyers at his disposal.
Pure math has been described by one friend of mine as "mathturbation", while another observed that the entire field of computer science has a severe case of "Math Envy". I'm more down with the later opinion.
Lots of government (not just china) would probably like to reduce the decentralized nature of the internet.
Who knows, maybe changing the internet into a hierarchical structure of NATs on top of NATs might be a nice way to more efficiently filter or inspect all traffic within a given subnet, or between subnets.
True, the developers deserve credit. I agree. But, does that make it a good idea to legally mandate that credit? That is an entirely differant question.
I think the admiration within the open source community for its star developers goes way deeper than anything a legally required splash screen could produce. I also think anyone who would remove an author's name from his work is a special kind of slime.
But, it's fundamental to the ideas of open source and free software that the authors give the right to use the software with as few restrictions as possible.
I have no problem with a tasteful list of contributors. The problem comes in with corporate sponsorship. Do we want "This Software brought to you by Schwartz's Foot Ointment!!" plastered all over our screens? I think not.
That's no longer free. It becomes just another means of getting consumers to buy stuff. Let's hope things don't go that way.
I haven't looked into monitors for several years, but it used to be that Eizo Nanao made what some considered the best. Of the mass-market brands, Sony and NEC are better to my eyes than Viewsonic, but Viewsonic is probably the best price/performance.
This is right on.
A really good programmer should know at least one lower level so-called "real" programming language and one scripting language. It's even better if the two languages are compatible in that modules for the scripting language can easily be written in the low level language and conversely, the scripting language can be embedding in applications written in the low level language.
Not only does this give you the right-tool-for-the-job advantage, but also allows a large system to be divided in parts suitable for either tool.
Good combinations that I know of are:
C and Perl
C++ and Python
Java and Python
I'm sure there are plenty more.
Effective Java is the best second book for learning to program well in Java. The best first book is Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel, which is just out in its third edition.
p.s. To the many Java-haters on Slashdot: If you think Java sucks, fine. Don't read a Java book review. Don't post dumb comments like, "Hey d00dz, Java sucks!" If you have nothing better to do, try and post something usefull, like a review of the best PERL book you know. (Or C, Python, or BrainFuck, if that's your language of choice.)