What you need is the "HD26200" from "HD Communications". It costs US$318, an extends your WiFi range for up to 5 Miles.
The only requirement is that you have line-of-sight between the two end-points. If you do, all you do is connect on of these boxes on your friend's end, and then another in your home, and you're set.
I think AJAX-style apps have a place not just as apps obtained over the network, but also as locally-installed apps. So my question is, are there plans to have some form of Firefox plugin that includes both a local storage engine (like Derby) and a Dynamic Application framework (like Jetty) so that we can deploy apps on the desktop using web-based interfaces.
Note that this can be done now (I've done it), but it's a big pain to put it all together the very first time and can put newbies off.
A better alternative would be something where Firefox could instantiate both the SQL and App Server and connect to it on localhost.
As for those who ask what good is this for, the answer is embedded apps, and disconnected apps from the network in case the network fails. A real example is a customer order processing system; in the event of network failure the app could redirect to firefox itself and instantiate a scaled-down version of the ordering app where orders could be taken, and then when the network is back up the orders can be uploaded to the remote server.
Anyways, I know that at least the SQL part is in the works for Firefox 3.0, but I think this is something urgent that demands attention ASAP as it solves real problems that many are facing today.
Sometimes I wonder how these top-level execs at companies like Boeing make it to their positions. Can't they see that people *want* WiFi on planes because flying is a *boring* experience?
Companies like Boeing and all the airlines (like American Airlines, et al), should realize that they are in the business of flying people around, not in the ISP business. If they make a buck on WiFi, good for them, but that should not be the motivation to offer WiFi, customer satisfaction should be, an *that* is what makes an airline money.
Just look at JetBlue. They're kicking other airlines' ars for the simple reason that they realize that offering in-flight satellite TV, confortable seats, and good overall customer service is something that costs them peanuts, yet the benefits on customer satisfaction are so great that it brings a lot of customers in.
So long as the airlines keep that "let's take away one olive from the in-flight lunch plate to save ourselves half a cent per customer" the airline business will continue to be a sour experience for all travellers. I think the only reason people flight with such airlines is because they have little choice, as almost all of them offer a bad customer experience.
Philosophical reason why higher level is key
on
The End of Native Code?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There is a philosophical reason to go to a high-level for all this. If you observe evolution in all its forms it always goes from low-level stuff to high-level stuff (from tools making to society behavior, with countless examples in all fields like business, economics, etc). In our brains, it just make sense for us to always think in ever-higher levels, because if we had to keep track of all the previous details we'd spend more time dealing with details than with the goals of what we're trying to accomplish.
Note that this is nothing new in software engineering. Most software a few decades ago was written in low-level code, even assembly language. If you did a survey then about the ratio of low-level to high-level coding, and compare it to a survey today, you'd realize that we do not even ponder about where things are going, as there is plenty of evidence today to tell us that going higher-level is the path the software industry is taking.
Native coding will become more and more of a niche, first to do Operating Systems, Drivers, Kernels and such. But eventually I can see even a fully-operational OS being written in a high-level language. In a sense that's what's happing today when you combine all the Web Services and tools we find today on the Web.
So, it's just a matter of time before everyone codes in high-level languages, and even today's high-level languages will seem low-level by what we're going to replace them in the future.
Why not simply mobi.yahoo.com instead of yahoo.mobi (and a similar pattern for all other domains)???
This is something which in my mind could easily be done with subdomains, and I see no benefit from creating another TLD.
If the excuse is that you will type fewer characters on your mobile phone to get to these domains, it's lame, because as soon as all the short names are taken people will start registering longer names. Besides, new input devices will eventually be released for small devices, rendering this excuse useless.
Also, for how long do they think that mobile devices will remain a niche market? Don't they realize that everything (PCs, laptops, PDAs, cellphones, cameras, mp3 players, etc) is converging into universal devices? The PCs of today will be the mobile devices of tomorrow, so it's preposturous to create a new TLD just for them.
- eyefish
Change will occur much more rapidly than that
on
On the Future of Science
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I think that saying that "the next 50 year will see more progress than the past 400" although being true, it's a major understatement.
If you see Moorse's law as applied to electronics, and the similiar explossive exponential growth we see in all areas of human development, and you extrapolate the available data, you will see that even the next 20 years will see more progress than the past millions of years of human and non-human-derived evolution. Not only will we see major revolutions in biology, but in nanotechnology, robotics, and true artificial intelligence as well.
I also believe that most of us alive today will either get to live for a very long time (at least 1000 years) or indefinitelly as we morph into non-biological entities, where the most important thing will be our minds, and we'll probably spend more time in virtual environments than in the "real" one we experience today. I also believe we'll trascend our human ways into more sublime ways, but will continue to call ourselves "humans" even when we leave behind our biological bodies. I also think this will provide us with more insight into the nature of "reality", and we (and others like us in the universe if they exist) will probably be the determining factor in shaping the future of the universe, and thus of our own existence.
And yes, I have read Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" and agree with a good deal of what it says.
Here are two reasons why reducing the resolution won't work (and will only hurt honest consumers who early-adopted HDTV):
1. Converter boxes will be sold that will take in an HDMI signal and output component video at full resolution.
2. Look at mp3, it was very successful even though it sounded worst than CDs. Why? Because people really care about good songs, not just songs that sound good. The same happens today with movie downloads over the Internet: People download low-quality versions of movies because they care about the movie and not about how good it looks. Of course, people DO want the highest quality version possible, but this is AFTER they get good *content*. Lowering the resolution to one quarter will still be good enough for almost anyone who wishes to copy the movie.
Bottom line: The movie industry should lower their ridiculous prices (say, movies for $5 dollars) and then they will almost completelly put an end to piracy, as most people will rather spend $5 to own a high-quality version of the movie (along with extra features) than spend the time to download it in lower quality.
When will it end for us to keep adding stupid top-level domains without any form of objective thinking (i.e.: do people REALLY think that.xxx will block pornography for kids and that all pornography will move to the.xxx domain?). I think there's a lot of politics and money involved in all this and little common sense.
I think a more productive thing might be for we to get rid of top-level domain names altogether and to allow spaces in names, so that we could go to websites by typing things like: google yahoo coca cola burger king/. the movies
And a nice side bonus of doing this is that all current top-level-domain-based names would be compatible with the new system (we simply interpret them literaly, with.com and all as one long string). This means that google could now register the domain name "google", while its existing google.com would now become "google.com".
This also means that almost all networking code will work unchanged (and in cases where people do check for top-level domains to be part of the name, all they have to do now is simply delete the code that makes that check).
Then, if you want a mobile portal into your website you could tell people to go to: mobile yahoo or m yahoo or yahoo m or m.yahoo or mobile.yahoo
or whatever you want. Now, isn't this simpler? Not to mention that it allows for way more domain names than today, and it makes it easier for search engines to index your site based on its name.
The only rule would be that spaces cannot appear consecutively after other spaces, i.e.: "foo foo" is ok, but "foo foo" is not (the browser could take care of leaving only one space if the users types in more than one consecutively), this is to avoid people who exploit people's typing mistakes.
As for preventing other people to use the equivalent o a second-level domain name within your domain (i.e.: someone registering the domain name "google search") we could simply reserve the use the dot for such a purpose *after* the name, as in "yahoo.movies" or "google . earth" or "ibm.research.lab1.machine1" which even though it looks weird it makes MUCH more sense once you think about it (remember that in roman-derived languages we write from left to right).
When I wrote what I wrote I knew someone was going to make a radical comparison with something worst than a knife, be it a broadsword or a gun.
However, I still think P2P is more like a knife. The fact that *today* most P2P bandwidth probably goes to piracy does *not* preclude its legal uses.
Take the mp3 file format as an example. Do you all remember when the entertainment industry try to sue anyone using it in the Napster days? Nowdays mp3 is driving a whole legal industry.
The same will happen to P2P; once the studios realize that they can solve their distribution problems with P2P we'll see a whole lot of legal uses and a whole new industry formed around it.
So back to my analogy, P2P is like a knife, we just need to give it sometime for its uses in network surgery to be tangible.
P2P is like the the kitchen knife: You can use it to cook or you can use it to kill people, but just because you can kill people doesn't mean we should prohibit everyone from using a knife to cook.
Likewise, you can't restrict people's ussage of P2P just because P2P it is also used for piracy, after all P2P is probably one of the most useful networking patterns in existence for all kinds of things.
If I were the enterntainment industry, I'd embrace P2P as it solves one of the biggest problems they face today: Bandwith to millions of people. This just goes on to show that the people running the enterntainment industry are dinosaurs falling behind the times.
I was wondering, if EA is engaged in breaking the law, and nobody does anything about it and the government doesn't seem to care, should software engineers unionize?
Think about it, if there are the screen actors unions and contruction worker unions, why can't there be Software Engineer Unions?
Maybe then we can make sure to work 40-hour weeks with extra pay. Maybe then will Project Managers put on themselves realistic expectations, maybe then will CEOs learn that software making is a profession as valuable as business management.
I lived through something like this myself during the first internet boom. I worked over-100-hour weeks every week of the year. I still remember having spent two new year eves working. All I had was two weeks of vacation a year which I had to take in one-week instances, and having provided a two-month advance notice.
I was not paid overtime, weekends, or holidays. I did it because I was young, naive, and trully excited about what I was doing, but when I think back I was definitelly exploited along with my fellow co-workers.
In the end I started my own company and moved to a country with better work practices. Let's only hope that those still toiling for the further advance of computer science get a better deal soon. Uninioze and I'll go back and join you. I know what you're going thru, and I will do all I can to support you.
Well, I'm dissapointed at the design. The previous design with the rounded based and the moving screen was much nicer looking, plus more practical and functional as well.
With this model I can see the following problems:
1. You will now see a million wires coming out of the right side of the machine, hanging in mid-air and visible at all times.
2. All that white space at the bottom of the display makes it look like a waste of space (of course it's probably used for the internal electronics, but geez, couldn't they think of a better design?).
3. The display now only rotates in one single dimension (either tilts up or down) as opposed to the previous iMac multi-dimensions of fredom).
4. That base seems awefully inadecuate for so much weight on top of it. Seems like if it is very easy to drop the display sideways if you have a crouded desk and move things around a lot.
5. This design has been created before by the big guys (IBM and Compaq/HP I think had/have something similar), why not come up with something as cool as the iPod? (it's a shame they say on the website "from the creators of iPod" - if I was one of the iPod designers I'd be shamed...).
OK, so here's my list why Java *is* cool and is used by great programmers:
1. It runs everywhere unmodified. This has got to be the coolest thing of all, and the reason I adopted Java in the first place. At the beginning this was not always true, due in major part to the AWT graphics libraries, but today it is.
2. It's more productive to work with it, leading to fewer bugs. This is very important in business apps. I certainly no longer get C/C++ pointer problems, memory leaks, or perl syntax error problems.
3. It is fast (ok, it loads slow the very first time, but with JDK1.5 this seems to being addressed as well). Somehow Java lends itself so easily for users to write efficient code (i.e.: multithreading is a snap and platform-independent), that somehow the applications we've been replacing with it simply run at least twice as fast as the older C++, VB, and perl apps.
4. It is simple. Sure, some hackers like garbage-looking code because they think the harder to understand their code the cooler it is, but in my book the cleaner and simpler code wins any day, specially when programming in a team environment. I think Java should be given credit as the environment that brough simplicity back to programmers in the internet age (just as VB did in the client-server day).
5. You can use multiple tools to develop the same code base. Heck, and now with ANT (possibly one of the coolest tools in recent times) you can choose your IDE (or command-line if that's your thing) and move the project back-and-forth between IDEs to take advantage of each (GUI design, refactoring, etc). Choice is a good thing.
6. I'll repeat it again: How cool is it to develop in Windows and drop the app unmodified in Linux or OS/X and see it run as expected with NO changes to the code? Or if you prefer, develop in Linux and deploy in Windows. Either way it works.
7. It is standard. Sure, it is not open source but then again not everything has to be. I think the fact that open sourcers advocate freedom should be reason enough to allow other companies to choose if they want to free their software or not. It is their choice. The fact that it is standard means that Java is protected from the "Unix division plage" where now almost no Unix is compatible with any other Unix. Geez, even Linux is starting to become incompatible with all the different versions of itself. Sometimes centralized control is a good thing.
How about this: How about browsing the filesystem using tabs?
So for example, in one Firefox window you see the contents of your hard drive (or network folders) pretty much the same way as the Windows Explorer or Gnome/KDE/MacOSX show it to you today BUT if you click the middle mouse button on a directory (or select "open in new tab") you end up with the new directory being open in a new tab.
Think about it, how many windows do you usually have open browsing your filesystem? with this thing you have ALL those windows in the same window organized by tabs, PLUS you also have all you websites as well on tabs right along the filesystem tabs!
And here's another kicker: You can bookmark a group of filesystem browser tabs and later go back to them. You can even drag the group of bookmark tabs to the desktop so that when you double-click on it Firefox opens up all of them at once.
This should all be done with host filesystem integration so that you can drag-and-drop files between the firebox filesystem view and the normal host OS desktop.
A couple of things to keep in mind with Memory Cards:
1. Memory Cards usually have a "number of write times" which is sometimes around 100,000 writes. This is much more than enough when you're using the card for saving photos, and a card could probably last you a lifetime for this purpose. However, when you put an operating system with a swap filesystem on it, which reads/writes tons of times constantly, 100,000 becomes very restrictive and you could easily damage the card in a month or so depending on ussage. NOTE however that not all cards are created equal, so do some research on this. Try searching for MTBF (mean time between failures) along with the type of card you're planning on using on google.
2. Although it is true many flash cards are slow compared to hard drives, some can be as fast or faster (depending on your system). For example, the SanDisk Ultra II CF cards have a *minimum* sustained write speed of 9 MB/s (that's MegaBytes per second, or aprox. 72 Megabits per second) which is VERY fast (however I do not know its MTBF specs). You can get such a 1GB card for about US$220. However, nowdays it is still MUCH cheaper to buy a hard drive.
My experience in third-world countries is that developers are more likely to develop for an open and/or cross-platform architecture than in developed countries. In that sense I've noticed that most Linux development occurs with Java (and to some extend PHP). Another pattern I noticed is that many developers use Windows to develop Java apps and then they deploy them in Linux.
VoIP is nothing more than an attempt by the Telcos to try to hold on to a market that is naturally sliping out of their hands.
When one thinks about it, regulating VoIP is as stupid as trying to regulate chat programs; both are simply sending packets across and both run on off-the-shelf open-standards hardware and software.
I only wish lawmakers (who are _supposed_ to represent the public) notice this and realize that consumers should not be scammed like this.
I must ponder this question: Before we create machines with human-level intelligence, shouldn't we first ask "why?".
As it is, we're running out of human jobs to do (McDonald's for example is toying with the idea of fully-automated vending machines), so what will happen when we can make machines that can work for almost nothing, and start replacing human jobs? And what will happen if and when these machines start thinking by themselves (in which case they will demand rights, just as we do) and if they decide that they don't need us?
I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, I just think we should be careful on _how_ we do it. I'm actually a believer that at some distant point in the future we humans will slowly evolve into machines, and _then_ at that point creating more machines will be a natural thing for us.
So I must ask, should we spend all those billions on machines instead of education? I don't want to sound like a miss universe contestant but right now world peace, world hunger, and world education should be our top priorities.
Again, don't bash me, I'm a true geek, I love machines, robots, AI, etc, it's just that I think we should spend some time thinking about the big issues facing humanity today.
On a related side note, space exploration is probably where I see the best use for robots.
I think Microsoft business people are missing one key point: owning things is an intrinsic part of being human.
This does not mean that rental or subscription-based services will fail, it just means that owning media SHOULD be part of the deal. This also means that Apple should (besides selling songs) also contemplate renting songs for a specified amount of time (say, 25 or 50 cents for 1 year?).
In other words, we need BOTH options, since people WILL want to own certain songs, but just rent others. Just look at the DVD market. People buy the movies they love (Matrix, Star Wars), but rent the ones they just want to have a good night with (i.e.: Van Damme and Steve Segal movies come to mind).
Rebates are a calculated bet to fool consumers
on
Are Rebates Scandalous?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
When you think about it, companies offering rebates could have as well simply lowered the price of the product and make more convinient for consumers.
However, they *know* that most people: (1) forget to send them, (2) lose them, (3) fill them incorrectly (even a misspell of a city name is "wrong" for them, (4) or simply cannot fill them because the box where the product came in (and that had the barcode scan number on it) has been long gone in the trash.
In other words, it's a way for them to screw you. I have to admit I only received *one* check in my entire life out of a rebate, and it arrived so long after the purchase that I had already forgotten about it.
My thought is that any self-respected company who *trully* cares about customers, should simply drop rebates and lower the price of the products (even if not by as much as the value of the actual rebates).
From a user's point of view, I wonder if in a couple of years users will have to decide if they want binaries for Intel's 64-bit architecture or AMD's. This as you all know is not a good thing, since it will bring market confussion to users (however, in the server space where these chips are first targeted this is not so big of an issue, specially with technologies like Java). A workaround is for companies to ship versions of their products for both architectures, thus at the very least this represents a burden on developers.
Another posibility I see is that AMD's choice of creating a backwards-compatible x86-64 instructions set will reign supreme over Intel's, and thus force Intel to adopt in AMD's x86-64.
If the book is *only* 750 pages, I suggest we change the name from "Mac OS X in a Nutshell" to "Mac OS X in a Bombshell", since it will fit better there.
I think before people reach some conlussions, they should be aware that Microsoft does not have the lightest intention of making their.Net environment a standard or open source for that matter.
Summiting C# to standard bodies means nothing in the world of.Net, for the very simple reason that in order to write even the most basic usefull C# application you need *libraries*, a virtual machine, and many other propriatary Microsoft hooks. Summiting C# to standard bodies is just a public relations move from Microsoft, so that they can brag later that C# is open-standards based and Java is not, then management makes a decision to go full steam with.Net and a year later realize that they are stuck with all the Microsoft propriatary stuff you need to run C#.
The analogy to Java would be Sun making the Java Language an open standard, but then keeping the Java API (i.e.: the libraries), and the JVM proprietary.
I do agree with many though that Java should be not just a standard, but even open source. However when it comes to Virtual Machines it is *extremelly* important to have some central authority to authorize changes, since one of the premises of a VM is that you can run code anywhere, and if you let a million programmers create their own VMs, all of a sudden code stops running everywhere, defeating the advantages of a VM. This is why I don't mind SUN controlling a bit the final say on Java development, and experience tells me that the Java Community Process is a very reasonable alternative to open standards and open source. In the end, Java is a deFacto standard anyways when it comes to enterprise business applications, so Sun might as well try hard to submit it to ISO at least. But remember, all Sun is trying to do is avoiding a fragmentation of the Java market, which I think it's A Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
What you need is the "HD26200" from "HD Communications". It costs US$318, an extends your WiFi range for up to 5 Miles.
The only requirement is that you have line-of-sight between the two end-points. If you do, all you do is connect on of these boxes on your friend's end, and then another in your home, and you're set.
See this link for details: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080521005391&newsLang=en
For more info about the Google "gPhone" you might want to visit the following URL, it's an analysis of the whole gPhone topic (this is just the latest in long list of articles on that site predicting things) http://eliax.com/index.php?/archives/2434-Google-a -lanzar-gPhone-para-redes-VoIP.html
F %2Feliax.com%2Findex.php%3F%2Farchives%2F2434-Goog le-a-lanzar-gPhone-para-redes-VoIP.html&langpair=e s%7Cen&hl=en&safe=off&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Fla nguage_tools
It's in spanish, but here's a translation from Google Language: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2
I think AJAX-style apps have a place not just as apps obtained over the network, but also as locally-installed apps. So my question is, are there plans to have some form of Firefox plugin that includes both a local storage engine (like Derby) and a Dynamic Application framework (like Jetty) so that we can deploy apps on the desktop using web-based interfaces.
Note that this can be done now (I've done it), but it's a big pain to put it all together the very first time and can put newbies off.
A better alternative would be something where Firefox could instantiate both the SQL and App Server and connect to it on localhost.
As for those who ask what good is this for, the answer is embedded apps, and disconnected apps from the network in case the network fails. A real example is a customer order processing system; in the event of network failure the app could redirect to firefox itself and instantiate a scaled-down version of the ordering app where orders could be taken, and then when the network is back up the orders can be uploaded to the remote server.
Anyways, I know that at least the SQL part is in the works for Firefox 3.0, but I think this is something urgent that demands attention ASAP as it solves real problems that many are facing today.
Sometimes I wonder how these top-level execs at companies like Boeing make it to their positions. Can't they see that people *want* WiFi on planes because flying is a *boring* experience?
Companies like Boeing and all the airlines (like American Airlines, et al), should realize that they are in the business of flying people around, not in the ISP business. If they make a buck on WiFi, good for them, but that should not be the motivation to offer WiFi, customer satisfaction should be, an *that* is what makes an airline money.
Just look at JetBlue. They're kicking other airlines' ars for the simple reason that they realize that offering in-flight satellite TV, confortable seats, and good overall customer service is something that costs them peanuts, yet the benefits on customer satisfaction are so great that it brings a lot of customers in.
So long as the airlines keep that "let's take away one olive from the in-flight lunch plate to save ourselves half a cent per customer" the airline business will continue to be a sour experience for all travellers. I think the only reason people flight with such airlines is because they have little choice, as almost all of them offer a bad customer experience.
There is a philosophical reason to go to a high-level for all this. If you observe evolution in all its forms it always goes from low-level stuff to high-level stuff (from tools making to society behavior, with countless examples in all fields like business, economics, etc). In our brains, it just make sense for us to always think in ever-higher levels, because if we had to keep track of all the previous details we'd spend more time dealing with details than with the goals of what we're trying to accomplish.
Note that this is nothing new in software engineering. Most software a few decades ago was written in low-level code, even assembly language. If you did a survey then about the ratio of low-level to high-level coding, and compare it to a survey today, you'd realize that we do not even ponder about where things are going, as there is plenty of evidence today to tell us that going higher-level is the path the software industry is taking.
Native coding will become more and more of a niche, first to do Operating Systems, Drivers, Kernels and such. But eventually I can see even a fully-operational OS being written in a high-level language. In a sense that's what's happing today when you combine all the Web Services and tools we find today on the Web.
So, it's just a matter of time before everyone codes in high-level languages, and even today's high-level languages will seem low-level by what we're going to replace them in the future.
Ok,
Why not simply mobi.yahoo.com instead of yahoo.mobi (and a similar pattern for all other domains)???
This is something which in my mind could easily be done with subdomains, and I see no benefit from creating another TLD.
If the excuse is that you will type fewer characters on your mobile phone to get to these domains, it's lame, because as soon as all the short names are taken people will start registering longer names. Besides, new input devices will eventually be released for small devices, rendering this excuse useless.
Also, for how long do they think that mobile devices will remain a niche market? Don't they realize that everything (PCs, laptops, PDAs, cellphones, cameras, mp3 players, etc) is converging into universal devices? The PCs of today will be the mobile devices of tomorrow, so it's preposturous to create a new TLD just for them.
- eyefish
I think that saying that "the next 50 year will see more progress than the past 400" although being true, it's a major understatement.
If you see Moorse's law as applied to electronics, and the similiar explossive exponential growth we see in all areas of human development, and you extrapolate the available data, you will see that even the next 20 years will see more progress than the past millions of years of human and non-human-derived evolution. Not only will we see major revolutions in biology, but in nanotechnology, robotics, and true artificial intelligence as well.
I also believe that most of us alive today will either get to live for a very long time (at least 1000 years) or indefinitelly as we morph into non-biological entities, where the most important thing will be our minds, and we'll probably spend more time in virtual environments than in the "real" one we experience today. I also believe we'll trascend our human ways into more sublime ways, but will continue to call ourselves "humans" even when we leave behind our biological bodies. I also think this will provide us with more insight into the nature of "reality", and we (and others like us in the universe if they exist) will probably be the determining factor in shaping the future of the universe, and thus of our own existence.
And yes, I have read Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" and agree with a good deal of what it says.
Here are two reasons why reducing the resolution won't work (and will only hurt honest consumers who early-adopted HDTV):
1. Converter boxes will be sold that will take in an HDMI signal and output component video at full resolution.
2. Look at mp3, it was very successful even though it sounded worst than CDs. Why? Because people really care about good songs, not just songs that sound good. The same happens today with movie downloads over the Internet: People download low-quality versions of movies because they care about the movie and not about how good it looks. Of course, people DO want the highest quality version possible, but this is AFTER they get good *content*. Lowering the resolution to one quarter will still be good enough for almost anyone who wishes to copy the movie.
Bottom line: The movie industry should lower their ridiculous prices (say, movies for $5 dollars) and then they will almost completelly put an end to piracy, as most people will rather spend $5 to own a high-quality version of the movie (along with extra features) than spend the time to download it in lower quality.
Small correction in my post above:
m.yahoo
and
mobile.yahoo
should really be
yahoo.m
yahoo.mobile
When will it end for us to keep adding stupid top-level domains without any form of objective thinking (i.e.: do people REALLY think that .xxx will block pornography for kids and that all pornography will move to the .xxx domain?). I think there's a lot of politics and money involved in all this and little common sense.
/.
.com and all as one long string). This means that google could now register the domain name "google", while its existing google.com would now become "google.com".
I think a more productive thing might be for we to get rid of top-level domain names altogether and to allow spaces in names, so that we could go to websites by typing things like:
google
yahoo
coca cola
burger king
the movies
And a nice side bonus of doing this is that all current top-level-domain-based names would be compatible with the new system (we simply interpret them literaly, with
This also means that almost all networking code will work unchanged (and in cases where people do check for top-level domains to be part of the name, all they have to do now is simply delete the code that makes that check).
Then, if you want a mobile portal into your website you could tell people to go to:
mobile yahoo
or
m yahoo
or
yahoo m
or
m.yahoo
or
mobile.yahoo
or whatever you want. Now, isn't this simpler? Not to mention that it allows for way more domain names than today, and it makes it easier for search engines to index your site based on its name.
The only rule would be that spaces cannot appear consecutively after other spaces, i.e.: "foo foo" is ok, but "foo foo" is not (the browser could take care of leaving only one space if the users types in more than one consecutively), this is to avoid people who exploit people's typing mistakes.
As for preventing other people to use the equivalent o a second-level domain name within your domain (i.e.: someone registering the domain name "google search") we could simply reserve the use the dot for such a purpose *after* the name, as in "yahoo.movies" or "google . earth" or "ibm.research.lab1.machine1" which even though it looks weird it makes MUCH more sense once you think about it (remember that in roman-derived languages we write from left to right).
When I wrote what I wrote I knew someone was going to make a radical comparison with something worst than a knife, be it a broadsword or a gun.
However, I still think P2P is more like a knife. The fact that *today* most P2P bandwidth probably goes to piracy does *not* preclude its legal uses.
Take the mp3 file format as an example. Do you all remember when the entertainment industry try to sue anyone using it in the Napster days? Nowdays mp3 is driving a whole legal industry.
The same will happen to P2P; once the studios realize that they can solve their distribution problems with P2P we'll see a whole lot of legal uses and a whole new industry formed around it.
So back to my analogy, P2P is like a knife, we just need to give it sometime for its uses in network surgery to be tangible.
P2P is like the the kitchen knife: You can use it to cook or you can use it to kill people, but just because you can kill people doesn't mean we should prohibit everyone from using a knife to cook.
Likewise, you can't restrict people's ussage of P2P just because P2P it is also used for piracy, after all P2P is probably one of the most useful networking patterns in existence for all kinds of things.
If I were the enterntainment industry, I'd embrace P2P as it solves one of the biggest problems they face today: Bandwith to millions of people. This just goes on to show that the people running the enterntainment industry are dinosaurs falling behind the times.
I was wondering, if EA is engaged in breaking the law, and nobody does anything about it and the government doesn't seem to care, should software engineers unionize?
Think about it, if there are the screen actors unions and contruction worker unions, why can't there be Software Engineer Unions?
Maybe then we can make sure to work 40-hour weeks with extra pay. Maybe then will Project Managers put on themselves realistic expectations, maybe then will CEOs learn that software making is a profession as valuable as business management.
I lived through something like this myself during the first internet boom. I worked over-100-hour weeks every week of the year. I still remember having spent two new year eves working. All I had was two weeks of vacation a year which I had to take in one-week instances, and having provided a two-month advance notice.
I was not paid overtime, weekends, or holidays. I did it because I was young, naive, and trully excited about what I was doing, but when I think back I was definitelly exploited along with my fellow co-workers.
In the end I started my own company and moved to a country with better work practices. Let's only hope that those still toiling for the further advance of computer science get a better deal soon. Uninioze and I'll go back and join you. I know what you're going thru, and I will do all I can to support you.
Well, I'm dissapointed at the design. The previous design with the rounded based and the moving screen was much nicer looking, plus more practical and functional as well.
With this model I can see the following problems:
1. You will now see a million wires coming out of the right side of the machine, hanging in mid-air and visible at all times.
2. All that white space at the bottom of the display makes it look like a waste of space (of course it's probably used for the internal electronics, but geez, couldn't they think of a better design?).
3. The display now only rotates in one single dimension (either tilts up or down) as opposed to the previous iMac multi-dimensions of fredom).
4. That base seems awefully inadecuate for so much weight on top of it. Seems like if it is very easy to drop the display sideways if you have a crouded desk and move things around a lot.
5. This design has been created before by the big guys (IBM and Compaq/HP I think had/have something similar), why not come up with something as cool as the iPod? (it's a shame they say on the website "from the creators of iPod" - if I was one of the iPod designers I'd be shamed...).
6. And how about a $999 model?
OK, so here's my list why Java *is* cool and is used by great programmers:
1. It runs everywhere unmodified. This has got to be the coolest thing of all, and the reason I adopted Java in the first place. At the beginning this was not always true, due in major part to the AWT graphics libraries, but today it is.
2. It's more productive to work with it, leading to fewer bugs. This is very important in business apps. I certainly no longer get C/C++ pointer problems, memory leaks, or perl syntax error problems.
3. It is fast (ok, it loads slow the very first time, but with JDK1.5 this seems to being addressed as well). Somehow Java lends itself so easily for users to write efficient code (i.e.: multithreading is a snap and platform-independent), that somehow the applications we've been replacing with it simply run at least twice as fast as the older C++, VB, and perl apps.
4. It is simple. Sure, some hackers like garbage-looking code because they think the harder to understand their code the cooler it is, but in my book the cleaner and simpler code wins any day, specially when programming in a team environment. I think Java should be given credit as the environment that brough simplicity back to programmers in the internet age (just as VB did in the client-server day).
5. You can use multiple tools to develop the same code base. Heck, and now with ANT (possibly one of the coolest tools in recent times) you can choose your IDE (or command-line if that's your thing) and move the project back-and-forth between IDEs to take advantage of each (GUI design, refactoring, etc). Choice is a good thing.
6. I'll repeat it again: How cool is it to develop in Windows and drop the app unmodified in Linux or OS/X and see it run as expected with NO changes to the code? Or if you prefer, develop in Linux and deploy in Windows. Either way it works.
7. It is standard. Sure, it is not open source but then again not everything has to be. I think the fact that open sourcers advocate freedom should be reason enough to allow other companies to choose if they want to free their software or not. It is their choice. The fact that it is standard means that Java is protected from the "Unix division plage" where now almost no Unix is compatible with any other Unix. Geez, even Linux is starting to become incompatible with all the different versions of itself. Sometimes centralized control is a good thing.
How about this: How about browsing the filesystem using tabs?
So for example, in one Firefox window you see the contents of your hard drive (or network folders) pretty much the same way as the Windows Explorer or Gnome/KDE/MacOSX show it to you today BUT if you click the middle mouse button on a directory (or select "open in new tab") you end up with the new directory being open in a new tab.
Think about it, how many windows do you usually have open browsing your filesystem? with this thing you have ALL those windows in the same window organized by tabs, PLUS you also have all you websites as well on tabs right along the filesystem tabs!
And here's another kicker: You can bookmark a group of filesystem browser tabs and later go back to them. You can even drag the group of bookmark tabs to the desktop so that when you double-click on it Firefox opens up all of them at once.
This should all be done with host filesystem integration so that you can drag-and-drop files between the firebox filesystem view and the normal host OS desktop.
A couple of things to keep in mind with Memory Cards:
1. Memory Cards usually have a "number of write times" which is sometimes around 100,000 writes. This is much more than enough when you're using the card for saving photos, and a card could probably last you a lifetime for this purpose. However, when you put an operating system with a swap filesystem on it, which reads/writes tons of times constantly, 100,000 becomes very restrictive and you could easily damage the card in a month or so depending on ussage. NOTE however that not all cards are created equal, so do some research on this. Try searching for MTBF (mean time between failures) along with the type of card you're planning on using on google.
2. Although it is true many flash cards are slow compared to hard drives, some can be as fast or faster (depending on your system). For example, the SanDisk Ultra II CF cards have a *minimum* sustained write speed of 9 MB/s (that's MegaBytes per second, or aprox. 72 Megabits per second) which is VERY fast (however I do not know its MTBF specs). You can get such a 1GB card for about US$220. However, nowdays it is still MUCH cheaper to buy a hard drive.
My experience in third-world countries is that developers are more likely to develop for an open and/or cross-platform architecture than in developed countries. In that sense I've noticed that most Linux development occurs with Java (and to some extend PHP). Another pattern I noticed is that many developers use Windows to develop Java apps and then they deploy them in Linux.
VoIP is nothing more than an attempt by the Telcos to try to hold on to a market that is naturally sliping out of their hands.
When one thinks about it, regulating VoIP is as stupid as trying to regulate chat programs; both are simply sending packets across and both run on off-the-shelf open-standards hardware and software.
I only wish lawmakers (who are _supposed_ to represent the public) notice this and realize that consumers should not be scammed like this.
I must ponder this question: Before we create machines with human-level intelligence, shouldn't we first ask "why?".
As it is, we're running out of human jobs to do (McDonald's for example is toying with the idea of fully-automated vending machines), so what will happen when we can make machines that can work for almost nothing, and start replacing human jobs? And what will happen if and when these machines start thinking by themselves (in which case they will demand rights, just as we do) and if they decide that they don't need us?
I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, I just think we should be careful on _how_ we do it. I'm actually a believer that at some distant point in the future we humans will slowly evolve into machines, and _then_ at that point creating more machines will be a natural thing for us.
So I must ask, should we spend all those billions on machines instead of education? I don't want to sound like a miss universe contestant but right now world peace, world hunger, and world education should be our top priorities.
Again, don't bash me, I'm a true geek, I love machines, robots, AI, etc, it's just that I think we should spend some time thinking about the big issues facing humanity today.
On a related side note, space exploration is probably where I see the best use for robots.
I think Microsoft business people are missing one key point: owning things is an intrinsic part of being human.
This does not mean that rental or subscription-based services will fail, it just means that owning media SHOULD be part of the deal. This also means that Apple should (besides selling songs) also contemplate renting songs for a specified amount of time (say, 25 or 50 cents for 1 year?).
In other words, we need BOTH options, since people WILL want to own certain songs, but just rent others. Just look at the DVD market. People buy the movies they love (Matrix, Star Wars), but rent the ones they just want to have a good night with (i.e.: Van Damme and Steve Segal movies come to mind).
When you think about it, companies offering rebates could have as well simply lowered the price of the product and make more convinient for consumers.
However, they *know* that most people: (1) forget to send them, (2) lose them, (3) fill them incorrectly (even a misspell of a city name is "wrong" for them, (4) or simply cannot fill them because the box where the product came in (and that had the barcode scan number on it) has been long gone in the trash.
In other words, it's a way for them to screw you. I have to admit I only received *one* check in my entire life out of a rebate, and it arrived so long after the purchase that I had already forgotten about it.
My thought is that any self-respected company who *trully* cares about customers, should simply drop rebates and lower the price of the products (even if not by as much as the value of the actual rebates).
From a user's point of view, I wonder if in a couple of years users will have to decide if they want binaries for Intel's 64-bit architecture or AMD's. This as you all know is not a good thing, since it will bring market confussion to users (however, in the server space where these chips are first targeted this is not so big of an issue, specially with technologies like Java). A workaround is for companies to ship versions of their products for both architectures, thus at the very least this represents a burden on developers.
Another posibility I see is that AMD's choice of creating a backwards-compatible x86-64 instructions set will reign supreme over Intel's, and thus force Intel to adopt in AMD's x86-64.
Either way, I see turbulent times ahead...
If the book is *only* 750 pages, I suggest we change the name from "Mac OS X in a Nutshell" to "Mac OS X in a Bombshell", since it will fit better there.
I think before people reach some conlussions, they should be aware that Microsoft does not have the lightest intention of making their .Net environment a standard or open source for that matter.
.Net, for the very simple reason that in order to write even the most basic usefull C# application you need *libraries*, a virtual machine, and many other propriatary Microsoft hooks. Summiting C# to standard bodies is just a public relations move from Microsoft, so that they can brag later that C# is open-standards based and Java is not, then management makes a decision to go full steam with .Net and a year later realize that they are stuck with all the Microsoft propriatary stuff you need to run C#.
Summiting C# to standard bodies means nothing in the world of
The analogy to Java would be Sun making the Java Language an open standard, but then keeping the Java API (i.e.: the libraries), and the JVM proprietary.
I do agree with many though that Java should be not just a standard, but even open source. However when it comes to Virtual Machines it is *extremelly* important to have some central authority to authorize changes, since one of the premises of a VM is that you can run code anywhere, and if you let a million programmers create their own VMs, all of a sudden code stops running everywhere, defeating the advantages of a VM. This is why I don't mind SUN controlling a bit the final say on Java development, and experience tells me that the Java Community Process is a very reasonable alternative to open standards and open source. In the end, Java is a deFacto standard anyways when it comes to enterprise business applications, so Sun might as well try hard to submit it to ISO at least. But remember, all Sun is trying to do is avoiding a fragmentation of the Java market, which I think it's A Good Thing.