To be fair to Rosen and the RIAA, Lessig debates with a handicap.
And to be fair to practically everyone else in the world, congress legislates with a handicap.
What kind of handicap, you ask? Not exactly sure... some sort of... I don't know, I'm thinking out loud here, bear with me... some sort of set of... limitations on their powers, you know, a sort of... charter or something like that, maybe something that gives them only a few specifically enumerated powers to work with, powers which... er... consistute the government, you know, to limit their ability to enact unreasonable laws....
Anybody ever heard of anything like that? Some Canadians out there, maybe?
He seems to have provoked the speculation, which is irrational and wrong. The press will run with stuff like that, and some politician is going to read this and think it is a good idea.
So you're saying he's a bad person for not speaking in atomic, unambiguous sound bites which have no room for interpretation?
That's depressing. What a society we live in.
I should point out that the press actually did not run with his comments -- they carried forward the sly criticism of his comment into the article very nicely. No, failing to understand and running with that was left for the dingbat who posted this article on Slashdot, and the dingbats who failed to read and/or understand the original.
It's important to remember, when reading Slashdot, that it's not journalism -- the people who submit articles are just random people, typing out whatever they make of things, and the people who select them for the homepage aren't journalists and aren't vetting or fact-checking them as an actual news editor would. And all that is kind of cool, and what makes Slashdot fun -- but forming an opinion based on what the submitter of a Slashdot article wrote, with no other context, is an even worse idea than forming an opinion based on what you read in the newspaper!
RTFA, for heaven's sake, before you trash the man
on
License to Surf, Take Two
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
For pete's sake, this has to be the most elitist article I have seen recently. Because Mr. Schneier knows what to do to keep his computer uninfected, let's blame the users and force them to be certified to be online.
Idiot.
Indeed.
How to read the article:
(1) Click the link. (2) Read. (3) Scroll down when necessary.
Following this simple procedure, you will find the entirety of Schneier's wry little quote, which I will copy and paste here (instructions on that omitted) for your benefit:
It could be a four-year college degree, a one-month course. It might be a good idea. The downside is everybody you know won't be able to have a computer anymore, and I like being able to send e-mail to friends.
For those of you following along at home, I'd say that with "everybody you know won't be able to have a computer anymore", he is suggesting he doesn't actually think it's such a good idea.
You're right though -- software does suck, and we shouldn't blame the users for what is mostly the fault of the software industry itself.
I think the C# language is a big improvement over Java (the language). So many lessons from years of Java experience have been incorporated into C#, that it's absurd to dismiss it as a Java "knockoff".
There are some really excellent improvements in C# that have Java playing catch-up -- lots of syntactic sugar like autoboxing, and of course the metadata.
But there are also some really fundamental design considerations in Java where C# just completely missed the boat -- like virtual. Gads, do I not miss virtual! It's inconceivably stupid to have a modern OO language in which you have to explicitly declare things to be polymorphically typesafe. Blech^3.
In general, I think C#'s designers have been a little eager to include features, and have left the language a little more semantically rough-edged than Java. In that respect, they're ignoring some of what's made Java so great.
That's not to say that I'm not really, really, really eager for the features in Tiger that are already available in C#!
The parent is wrong. Despite all his typos, and Lussarn has it right: LGPL is a recursive license for derived works (e.g. forks). The only difference between LGPL and GPL is for other projects which depend on the licensed one -- if khtml were GPL, then Safari would have to be GPL as well; as it is, Apple only has to release Webkit open source.
However, the big question is -- and this is much bigger than Lussarn gives it credit for! -- why did Apple choose to use khtml at all? They could have written their own rendering engine and kept it completely proprietary. They also could have used Gecko and kept it completely proprietary, since the Mozilla license is, IIRC, a BSD-style non-recursive license. (Anybody know for sure on that one?) Apple had plenty of choices resulting in a completely proprietary Webkit, and they didn't take them.
So saying that "Apple is as much about open source as Microsoft" is just plain wrong. When was the last time Microsoft open sourced anything? Sure, they used open source code in their products -- but they've actively avoided any and all recursive open source licenses.
Apple may not be an angel -- they're a corporation, for heaven's sake, and they're beholden to their shareholders and not to the moral compasses of Slashdot readers -- but they've consciously decided to participate some in the take & give back process of open source when they could very well have just stayed out completely.
And don't try to tell me that hasn't done anything useful for anyone. Or has BSD never pulled a patch from Darwin? Has khtml not examined the optimizations Apple made?
So only because Paul Wellstone unfortunately died during the campaigns, Walter Mondale should have won the election? What would be the purpose of voting?
I don't believe that AC said anything of the sort. He seems, rather, to be talking about the contrast in the personalities the two project -- many people see Wellstone as an articulate, moral-bound idealist, always outspoken, no matter how much that alienated half his constituents; and Coleman as the smarmy, amoral climber, who would come out in favor of eating live babies if he thought it would get him a position the next rung up. If you do view the two that way, then it's hard not to feel depressed about the election. Certainly AC's comment had nothing to with polls; discuss what he said, Wolffenstein, not some strawman you concocted.
And, I have to admit, I'm one of the people who's held a view something like this of the two candidates, so I'm surprised to see Coleman taking on an issue that puts him on the wrong side of a powerful corporation. What's he getting at? Perhaps there's more in this for him than we see -- or perhaps he's not really amoral after all. I do like being surprised to find a politician more principled than I'd expected!
But Lisp is the only language so far that allowed adding new concepts in portable ways, without having to modify the underlying implementation. CLOS, the object system, is basically a bunch of functions and macros, and if you don't like its class/generic-function based approach, just load a package that implements a prototype-based one and use that.
Well, yeah, and that's just the thing -- because it's so wonderfully extensible, your ability to reason programmatically about a program is limited. To analyze an object in Lisp, as I understand it, your analysis system would need to know not just about the language, but about the particular functions and macros you've used to build your object system. Because your atoms are so small, your analysis system starts needing an awareness of molecules. You can still feed your code into a Jackpot-style theorem prover, but there's more case-by-case analysis involved to analyze the code at the same level of abstraction.
So I guess my point is really just that Lisp has very small atoms. Objects, at least as I understand them, are definitely not language-level constructs, because you don't need to code any knowledge of them into the compiler or the runtime. Again, I don't mean to say that's a bad thing, because the MOP is insane crazy cool.
Yeah, yeah, OK, I admit, I only actually ever worked in Scheme, and very basic Scheme at that. You know, you're quite the SmugLis-...oh, you already linked it. Never mind.:)
Yes, yes, I had to deal with all the "Lisp did it first" comments when Eidola was on Slashdot.
While it's true that the program is the parse tree in Lisp, that's not a very strong statement. Lisp's elegance comes from the fact that there are so few constructs in the language, and basically everything is a list -- even your programs. But they're basically just lists, that's all. So you have this wonderful flexibility, but the parse tree doesn't actually tell you very much about the program; you have to "parse the parse tree" to recognize higher-level constructs.
Now languages with lots of language-level constructs -- like strong static types, objects, access modifiers, etc. -- tell you a whole lot about high-level structure with their parse trees. (And, for those following along at home, Lisp is not such a language -- not that that's a bad thing, but it isn't. Lisp builds these high-level constructs out of a very few language-level atoms.) To my knowledge, applying the "language is the parse tree" principle to non-functional languages is still largely the domain of research projects like Jackpot, Eidola, and Intentional Programming, and visual languages.
Moral: Lisp is very, very, very cool, but it has not already done everything every other language is doing. So yes, it may sound familiar from you Lisp book, but it's not the same.
If you like this feature in Safari, I highly recommend the simple and elegant SearchGoogle service. The page says "10.1" at the top, but that's 10.1 or higher -- it works fine for me on Jaguar.
The service lets you search Google with selected text in any app supporting services, not just Safari, with just a cmd-shift-G. It's amazing how useful this is! For example, I'll often select some class name in my code to look for online docs.
True, it doesn't integrate with Safari's tabs in any slick way -- it just opens a new window. It's still pretty sweet, though.
I was wondering how this was even remotely reasonable. Here's the answer:
If there is a security manager, its checkPermission method is called with a ReflectPermission("suppressAccessChecks") permission.
So you still have complete private field sealing, but only if you explicitly turn it on. It's more than a little disturbing that this permission is enabled by default. Still, I suppose if you're writing a security-sensitive server, you'll configure your security manager to be very secure.
Does anybody know if Sun has released a recommended "high security" configuration for a security manager?
There's a lot of confusion on this thread as to why you'd *want* a virtual machine when you can always just run your servers with isolated privileges. Good question. I'll take a stab at that:
The two are both excellent ideas, and are essentially orthogonal. Privileges protect a server's interactions with other processes and the rest of the system. They limit its use of the file system, network ports, and sensitive APIs.
However, permissions can't limit a program's interactions with itself -- and that's where a VM comes in. Obviously, a buffer overflows exploit doesn't instantly get you root if you're using the exploit on a server running as user www. But most buffer overflows don't work that way; instead, one uses that exploit to tweak some part of the system which the server might perfectly well need access to, in order to open a wider door.
No amount of privilege-futzing can prevent buffer overflows, stack smashing, etc. Setting privileges is good because it contains the damage, but a virtual machine may also be good, because it prevents much of the damage in the first place. That's one of the things I like about programming in Java: private members are truly private, and it's physically impossible for other code to access them, except as I expose them. If I design objects with a tight, well-defined contract, then I get automatic closure of that contract over all interactions with all other objects, guaranteed. And of course Java isn't the only language that offers guarantees like this.
So I think the author has a point: why not sacrifice some of the raw speed of C++ for security when 20% slower performance is acceptable?
(Of course, VMs can't fix the logical errors that invariably crop up in messy code; programmers unfortunately still have to think about what they're doing!)
Boris, I'm afraid that I learned what I know from a PBS special -- and alas, one can't link to television. However, it's pretty established history, so it shouldn't be too hard to find stuff.
Good article, although it mischaracterizes the difference as performance vs. elegance; really, what they're talking about is tight vs. loose coupling.
Web services, both.NET's and J2EE's, are inherently loosely coupled. They work well, therefore, in situations which call for loose coupling. Surprise!
But loose coupling is not always what you want -- a more tightly coupled, or more language- or platform-specific, remote communication mechanism can yield better performance and less bandwidth usage, and may allow richer communication between systems and better use of language-specific features. When you don't have language independence or integration of heterogeneous systems as a design constraint, tighter integration may be the better option. Certainly the fashionable mania for web-servicifying everything under the sun is a bit overzealous.
It's a familiar moral: choose a degree of abstraction and decoupling appropriate to the problem at hand.
Well, I though it was funny. These "shootout" reviews with point-by-point ratings always irritate me, since they miss so many of the subjective but extremely important differences between products (like usability). And I'm always amusing at geeks' willingness to buy expensive toys -- I got an 802.11b card & statation because I though it was cool, even though my cables already basically reached all the way across my apartment. I found this article an amusing reductio ad absurdum of both these things: explicitly compare two completely unrelated products on ludicrously unimportant scales to measure their prestige value as geek toys, and call it scientific. Nice satire. It made me smile.
Why not get both? Since one is a camera and one is for playing games...
Last Criteria: Do you need a camera, Or a Gameboy? All those comparison are nice, but you could offer the same comparisons between a lightbulb and a toothbrush.
Game boy's for playing games. The PowerShot's for taking pictures. Functional overlap seems a lot more important for comparing products (as they would actually begin to compete with one another) than this crap.
If this is supposed to be a joke, I think he forgot to add the humor....etc...
Gee, great points, guys. I can't imagine why the author didn't think of any of that. It would be really funny if he had thought of that, because then the article would be a clever lampoon of the geeky habit of buying expensive equipment for the sake of having it, and only inventing practical purposes for it post hoc. Too bad the author wasn't clever enought to think of that.
The posts on this thread remind me of a great invented word...
sarchasm: The gap of understanding between somebody who's being sarcastic and somebody who doesn't get it.
Granted, the word doesn't quite fit here -- this is more of a "deadpanhumorchasm" -- but it's still a great word.
Anyone know how this affects the theroy that Global Warming, might shut down the Gulf stream and plunge the northern Hemisphere into more severe winters?
Before this finding about the Rockies: That theory about the Gulf Stream really sounds like wild speculation.
After this finding about the Rockies: That theory about the Gulf Stream really sounds like wild speculation.
Global warming is fairly strongly established at this point, but its actual effects -- even at macroscopic levels -- still remain terrifyingly unknown. Most scientists aren't managing much better than wild speculation. But it's all a moot question, since we get to find out through a nice fun emperical global experiment over the next thousand years!
If you bought it, you most certainly have the right to resell it, and I have trouble imagining how the law would view that as substantially different from renting it. So yes, I think you have the right to rent any copyrighted work you buy.
Of course I also think the DMCA and the CTEA are unconstitutional, defendants have a right to see evidence used against them, and presidents are elected by the general population. So clearly you should not be taking any legal advice from me.
Leaving personal politics aside -- whether you agree or disagree -- it's certainly the case that Bush's diplomacy and Microsoft's security have been called into question and are the center of heated debate. In situations like these, the actual facts play only a modest role in shaping public opinion, especially when the "facts" are nebulous, subjective, and largely unquantifiable. There are no established objective measures of computer security, and even less of diplomatic success, that do not rely heavily on retrospective data.
In debates like these, perception and politics reign. And one surprisingly effective tactic is to assert the point under debate by calmly behaving as if there were no debate and moving on to the next step. If you simply act as if something is true, and act surprised when people question it, listener tend to build consensus around the confidence you project. Certainly the Bush administrations (and, of course, many previous administrations) have used this tactic extensively, and Microsoft seems to be using it now: If they're teaching a course on security, they must know security, right?
This places those arguing the opposite side (pacifists in the one case, the Slashdot majority crowd in the other) in the awkward position of constantly having to re-establish that the debate is still open, without boring, tiring, or otherwise turning off the only semi-interested public.
Note that none of all that maneuvering has anything to do with who's actually right.
Although people often use the terms interchangably, strictly speaking the Fourier Transform is the mathematical operation (like "sort") and the FFT is a particular way of computing it (like "quicksort").
The FFT is a particularly FAST algorithm for computing Fourier Transforms, with O(n log n) instead of O(n^2) for the naive algorithm -- thus the name. I believe that there is a comparably fast and very similar algorithm for computing the DCT, which doesn't really have a separate name.
You use a FFT anytime you ENCODE a.jpg, or an.mp3, or a DVD. When you view or listen or watch you are using an Inverse FFT.
True, though an inverse Fourier tranform is simply the Fourier transform run through a complex complement and multiplication by a constant. The FFT and the IFFT are essentially the same algorithm.
And to be very specific, I think all your examples use DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and not FFT.
Right... though again, the DCT and the FT are essentially the same operation -- the DCT is just the real part of the FT (the FT is complex).
Bush did not fly planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
My, you're awfully certain.
I don't share your certainty. I believe that it's possible that he was at least complicit in letting the attack happen. I have no evidence for this, and know that it is or isn't true -- I simply believe it's possible.
Does that sound radical?
FDR almost certainly knew about and decided to allow the attack on Pearl Harbor. LBJ was even complicit in fabricating an attack to justify the full escalation of the Vietnam war (do a Google search on "Gulf of Tonkin").
So did Bush actually encourage, or at least complicitly allow, the attacks of 9/11? We won't know for decades. But history's lesson is that, if he is truly "presidential material", then he's capable of such a thing. Certainly, at the very least, we must admit that we don't know now what the truth is.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, one can always hope.
Guess the snow isn't whiter on the other side. (I live in MN.)
To be fair to Rosen and the RIAA, Lessig debates with a handicap.
... some sort of ... I don't know, I'm thinking out loud here, bear with me ... some sort of set of ... limitations on their powers, you know, a sort of ... charter or something like that, maybe something that gives them only a few specifically enumerated powers to work with, powers which ... er ... consistute the government, you know, to limit their ability to enact unreasonable laws....
And to be fair to practically everyone else in the world, congress legislates with a handicap.
What kind of handicap, you ask? Not exactly sure
Anybody ever heard of anything like that? Some Canadians out there, maybe?
Don't you worry. Microsoft has heard your pleas and is working very hard on this problem.
He seems to have provoked the speculation, which is irrational and wrong. The press will run with stuff like that, and some politician is going to read this and think it is a good idea.
So you're saying he's a bad person for not speaking in atomic, unambiguous sound bites which have no room for interpretation?
That's depressing. What a society we live in.
I should point out that the press actually did not run with his comments -- they carried forward the sly criticism of his comment into the article very nicely. No, failing to understand and running with that was left for the dingbat who posted this article on Slashdot, and the dingbats who failed to read and/or understand the original.
It's important to remember, when reading Slashdot, that it's not journalism -- the people who submit articles are just random people, typing out whatever they make of things, and the people who select them for the homepage aren't journalists and aren't vetting or fact-checking them as an actual news editor would. And all that is kind of cool, and what makes Slashdot fun -- but forming an opinion based on what the submitter of a Slashdot article wrote, with no other context, is an even worse idea than forming an opinion based on what you read in the newspaper!
Idiot.
Indeed.
How to read the article:
(1) Click the link.
(2) Read.
(3) Scroll down when necessary.
Following this simple procedure, you will find the entirety of Schneier's wry little quote, which I will copy and paste here (instructions on that omitted) for your benefit:For those of you following along at home, I'd say that with "everybody you know won't be able to have a computer anymore", he is suggesting he doesn't actually think it's such a good idea.
You're right though -- software does suck, and we shouldn't blame the users for what is mostly the fault of the software industry itself.
I think the C# language is a big improvement over Java (the language). So many lessons from years of Java experience have been incorporated into C#, that it's absurd to dismiss it as a Java "knockoff".
There are some really excellent improvements in C# that have Java playing catch-up -- lots of syntactic sugar like autoboxing, and of course the metadata.
But there are also some really fundamental design considerations in Java where C# just completely missed the boat -- like virtual. Gads, do I not miss virtual! It's inconceivably stupid to have a modern OO language in which you have to explicitly declare things to be polymorphically typesafe. Blech^3.
In general, I think C#'s designers have been a little eager to include features, and have left the language a little more semantically rough-edged than Java. In that respect, they're ignoring some of what's made Java so great.
That's not to say that I'm not really, really, really eager for the features in Tiger that are already available in C#!
Yes, you're right: Apple was under no obligation to open-source Darwin -- it's based on FreeBSD, which uses (of course) the BSD license.
The parent is wrong. Despite all his typos, and Lussarn has it right: LGPL is a recursive license for derived works (e.g. forks). The only difference between LGPL and GPL is for other projects which depend on the licensed one -- if khtml were GPL, then Safari would have to be GPL as well; as it is, Apple only has to release Webkit open source.
However, the big question is -- and this is much bigger than Lussarn gives it credit for! -- why did Apple choose to use khtml at all? They could have written their own rendering engine and kept it completely proprietary. They also could have used Gecko and kept it completely proprietary, since the Mozilla license is, IIRC, a BSD-style non-recursive license. (Anybody know for sure on that one?) Apple had plenty of choices resulting in a completely proprietary Webkit, and they didn't take them.
So saying that "Apple is as much about open source as Microsoft" is just plain wrong. When was the last time Microsoft open sourced anything? Sure, they used open source code in their products -- but they've actively avoided any and all recursive open source licenses.
Apple may not be an angel -- they're a corporation, for heaven's sake, and they're beholden to their shareholders and not to the moral compasses of Slashdot readers -- but they've consciously decided to participate some in the take & give back process of open source when they could very well have just stayed out completely.
And don't try to tell me that hasn't done anything useful for anyone. Or has BSD never pulled a patch from Darwin? Has khtml not examined the optimizations Apple made?
So only because Paul Wellstone unfortunately died during the campaigns, Walter Mondale should have won the election? What would be the purpose of voting?
I don't believe that AC said anything of the sort. He seems, rather, to be talking about the contrast in the personalities the two project -- many people see Wellstone as an articulate, moral-bound idealist, always outspoken, no matter how much that alienated half his constituents; and Coleman as the smarmy, amoral climber, who would come out in favor of eating live babies if he thought it would get him a position the next rung up. If you do view the two that way, then it's hard not to feel depressed about the election. Certainly AC's comment had nothing to with polls; discuss what he said, Wolffenstein, not some strawman you concocted.
And, I have to admit, I'm one of the people who's held a view something like this of the two candidates, so I'm surprised to see Coleman taking on an issue that puts him on the wrong side of a powerful corporation. What's he getting at? Perhaps there's more in this for him than we see -- or perhaps he's not really amoral after all. I do like being surprised to find a politician more principled than I'd expected!
No offense, BTW.
Oh, none taken, and likewise.
But Lisp is the only language so far that allowed adding new concepts in portable ways, without having to modify the underlying implementation. CLOS, the object system, is basically a bunch of functions and macros, and if you don't like its class/generic-function based approach, just load a package that implements a prototype-based one and use that.
:)
Well, yeah, and that's just the thing -- because it's so wonderfully extensible, your ability to reason programmatically about a program is limited. To analyze an object in Lisp, as I understand it, your analysis system would need to know not just about the language, but about the particular functions and macros you've used to build your object system. Because your atoms are so small, your analysis system starts needing an awareness of molecules. You can still feed your code into a Jackpot-style theorem prover, but there's more case-by-case analysis involved to analyze the code at the same level of abstraction.
So I guess my point is really just that Lisp has very small atoms. Objects, at least as I understand them, are definitely not language-level constructs, because you don't need to code any knowledge of them into the compiler or the runtime. Again, I don't mean to say that's a bad thing, because the MOP is insane crazy cool.
arrays, symbols, objects, structs, characters, numbers, pathnames, streams, packages...
Yeah, yeah, OK, I admit, I only actually ever worked in Scheme, and very basic Scheme at that. You know, you're quite the SmugLis-...oh, you already linked it. Never mind.
Yes, yes, I had to deal with all the "Lisp did it first" comments when Eidola was on Slashdot.
While it's true that the program is the parse tree in Lisp, that's not a very strong statement. Lisp's elegance comes from the fact that there are so few constructs in the language, and basically everything is a list -- even your programs. But they're basically just lists, that's all. So you have this wonderful flexibility, but the parse tree doesn't actually tell you very much about the program; you have to "parse the parse tree" to recognize higher-level constructs.
Now languages with lots of language-level constructs -- like strong static types, objects, access modifiers, etc. -- tell you a whole lot about high-level structure with their parse trees. (And, for those following along at home, Lisp is not such a language -- not that that's a bad thing, but it isn't. Lisp builds these high-level constructs out of a very few language-level atoms.) To my knowledge, applying the "language is the parse tree" principle to non-functional languages is still largely the domain of research projects like Jackpot, Eidola, and Intentional Programming, and visual languages.
Moral: Lisp is very, very, very cool, but it has not already done everything every other language is doing. So yes, it may sound familiar from you Lisp book, but it's not the same.
If you like this feature in Safari, I highly recommend the simple and elegant SearchGoogle service. The page says "10.1" at the top, but that's 10.1 or higher -- it works fine for me on Jaguar.
The service lets you search Google with selected text in any app supporting services, not just Safari, with just a cmd-shift-G. It's amazing how useful this is! For example, I'll often select some class name in my code to look for online docs.
True, it doesn't integrate with Safari's tabs in any slick way -- it just opens a new window. It's still pretty sweet, though.
Does anybody know if Sun has released a recommended "high security" configuration for a security manager?
Wow. I am flabberghasted. That's utter nonsense, and it works!
There's a lot of confusion on this thread as to why you'd *want* a virtual machine when you can always just run your servers with isolated privileges. Good question. I'll take a stab at that:
The two are both excellent ideas, and are essentially orthogonal. Privileges protect a server's interactions with other processes and the rest of the system. They limit its use of the file system, network ports, and sensitive APIs.
However, permissions can't limit a program's interactions with itself -- and that's where a VM comes in. Obviously, a buffer overflows exploit doesn't instantly get you root if you're using the exploit on a server running as user www. But most buffer overflows don't work that way; instead, one uses that exploit to tweak some part of the system which the server might perfectly well need access to, in order to open a wider door.
No amount of privilege-futzing can prevent buffer overflows, stack smashing, etc. Setting privileges is good because it contains the damage, but a virtual machine may also be good, because it prevents much of the damage in the first place. That's one of the things I like about programming in Java: private members are truly private, and it's physically impossible for other code to access them, except as I expose them. If I design objects with a tight, well-defined contract, then I get automatic closure of that contract over all interactions with all other objects, guaranteed. And of course Java isn't the only language that offers guarantees like this.
So I think the author has a point: why not sacrifice some of the raw speed of C++ for security when 20% slower performance is acceptable?
(Of course, VMs can't fix the logical errors that invariably crop up in messy code; programmers unfortunately still have to think about what they're doing!)
Boris, I'm afraid that I learned what I know from a PBS special -- and alas, one can't link to television. However, it's pretty established history, so it shouldn't be too hard to find stuff.
Good article, although it mischaracterizes the difference as performance vs. elegance; really, what they're talking about is tight vs. loose coupling.
.NET's and J2EE's, are inherently loosely coupled. They work well, therefore, in situations which call for loose coupling. Surprise!
Web services, both
But loose coupling is not always what you want -- a more tightly coupled, or more language- or platform-specific, remote communication mechanism can yield better performance and less bandwidth usage, and may allow richer communication between systems and better use of language-specific features. When you don't have language independence or integration of heterogeneous systems as a design constraint, tighter integration may be the better option. Certainly the fashionable mania for web-servicifying everything under the sun is a bit overzealous.
It's a familiar moral: choose a degree of abstraction and decoupling appropriate to the problem at hand.
Well, I though it was funny. These "shootout" reviews with point-by-point ratings always irritate me, since they miss so many of the subjective but extremely important differences between products (like usability). And I'm always amusing at geeks' willingness to buy expensive toys -- I got an 802.11b card & statation because I though it was cool, even though my cables already basically reached all the way across my apartment. I found this article an amusing reductio ad absurdum of both these things: explicitly compare two completely unrelated products on ludicrously unimportant scales to measure their prestige value as geek toys, and call it scientific. Nice satire. It made me smile.
Last Criteria: Do you need a camera, Or a Gameboy? All those comparison are nice, but you could offer the same comparisons between a lightbulb and a toothbrush.
Game boy's for playing games. The PowerShot's for taking pictures. Functional overlap seems a lot more important for comparing products (as they would actually begin to compete with one another) than this crap.
If this is supposed to be a joke, I think he forgot to add the humor.
Gee, great points, guys. I can't imagine why the author didn't think of any of that. It would be really funny if he had thought of that, because then the article would be a clever lampoon of the geeky habit of buying expensive equipment for the sake of having it, and only inventing practical purposes for it post hoc. Too bad the author wasn't clever enought to think of that.
The posts on this thread remind me of a great invented word... Granted, the word doesn't quite fit here -- this is more of a "deadpanhumorchasm" -- but it's still a great word.
Anyone know how this affects the theroy that Global Warming, might shut down the Gulf stream and plunge the northern Hemisphere into more severe winters?
Before this finding about the Rockies: That theory about the Gulf Stream really sounds like wild speculation.
After this finding about the Rockies: That theory about the Gulf Stream really sounds like wild speculation.
Global warming is fairly strongly established at this point, but its actual effects -- even at macroscopic levels -- still remain terrifyingly unknown. Most scientists aren't managing much better than wild speculation. But it's all a moot question, since we get to find out through a nice fun emperical global experiment over the next thousand years!
If you bought it, you most certainly have the right to resell it, and I have trouble imagining how the law would view that as substantially different from renting it. So yes, I think you have the right to rent any copyrighted work you buy.
Of course I also think the DMCA and the CTEA are unconstitutional, defendants have a right to see evidence used against them, and presidents are elected by the general population. So clearly you should not be taking any legal advice from me.
Leaving personal politics aside -- whether you agree or disagree -- it's certainly the case that Bush's diplomacy and Microsoft's security have been called into question and are the center of heated debate. In situations like these, the actual facts play only a modest role in shaping public opinion, especially when the "facts" are nebulous, subjective, and largely unquantifiable. There are no established objective measures of computer security, and even less of diplomatic success, that do not rely heavily on retrospective data.
In debates like these, perception and politics reign. And one surprisingly effective tactic is to assert the point under debate by calmly behaving as if there were no debate and moving on to the next step. If you simply act as if something is true, and act surprised when people question it, listener tend to build consensus around the confidence you project. Certainly the Bush administrations (and, of course, many previous administrations) have used this tactic extensively, and Microsoft seems to be using it now: If they're teaching a course on security, they must know security, right?
This places those arguing the opposite side (pacifists in the one case, the Slashdot majority crowd in the other) in the awkward position of constantly having to re-establish that the debate is still open, without boring, tiring, or otherwise turning off the only semi-interested public.
Note that none of all that maneuvering has anything to do with who's actually right.
Although people often use the terms interchangably, strictly speaking the Fourier Transform is the mathematical operation (like "sort") and the FFT is a particular way of computing it (like "quicksort").
.jpg, or an .mp3, or a DVD. When you view or listen or watch you are using an Inverse FFT.
... though again, the DCT and the FT are essentially the same operation -- the DCT is just the real part of the FT (the FT is complex).
The FFT is a particularly FAST algorithm for computing Fourier Transforms, with O(n log n) instead of O(n^2) for the naive algorithm -- thus the name. I believe that there is a comparably fast and very similar algorithm for computing the DCT, which doesn't really have a separate name.
You use a FFT anytime you ENCODE a
True, though an inverse Fourier tranform is simply the Fourier transform run through a complex complement and multiplication by a constant. The FFT and the IFFT are essentially the same algorithm.
And to be very specific, I think all your examples use DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and not FFT.
Right
Bush did not fly planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
My, you're awfully certain.
I don't share your certainty. I believe that it's possible that he was at least complicit in letting the attack happen. I have no evidence for this, and know that it is or isn't true -- I simply believe it's possible.
Does that sound radical?
FDR almost certainly knew about and decided to allow the attack on Pearl Harbor. LBJ was even complicit in fabricating an attack to justify the full escalation of the Vietnam war (do a Google search on "Gulf of Tonkin").
So did Bush actually encourage, or at least complicitly allow, the attacks of 9/11? We won't know for decades. But history's lesson is that, if he is truly "presidential material", then he's capable of such a thing. Certainly, at the very least, we must admit that we don't know now what the truth is.