... because when I need a fact about a newly encountered product, I want a good overview that I can quickly scan for relevant details. I cycle books pretty quickly (I use google after I have some proficiancy with a tool) simply to keep my breadth of knowledge high. I think the price is reasonable (at the $10 a month I pay) as that represents a single technical book, maybe 1.5.
Ok, terminology problem. I consider the middle click to be a secondary clipboard (it is transient and changes frequently) and the primary to be ctrl-c/ctrl-v accessed. That's my fault, because I was amped on too much coffee, for not clarifying. However, just go to bugzilla and search "clipboard", or refer to the "meta" bug:
The basic problem is this... lets say I want to paste a URL into Mozilla. I go over to my text buffer, select it and ctrl-c to store it in the clipboard. Now I go up to the URL line. Select the entire URL, press delete to clear it and press ctrl-v. Under most apps on gnome/kde and all apps under windows, the buffer would be pulled from ctrl-c's store. Instead, Mozilla pastes back in the highlighted and deleted url.
To be able to paste in a URL, I have to remember to clear the URL *before* making a selection. The same thing happens if you open a text editor, and cut (ctrl-c) some data. Now just drag the cursor over some text in Mozilla (don't copy or anything, just drag over it). Now go back to your text editor and ctrl-v: you will paste what Mozilla has highlighted. That is correct *if* I used middle click... but instead Mozilla writes to the clipboard as if I hit ctrl-c on the text I brushed over.
I don't use firebird - it this is fixed in Firebird, I'm switching 5 seconds ago.
The first application almost anyone goes to on a Linux desktop is Mozilla... after all, web standards mean I can use my Linux box as my primary browser, and only pull up IE in the unlikely case I *wanted* to see that stupid shockwave content. Mozilla runs pretty well on my system, but I think it kills the impression of Linux...
*WHY*THE*HECK* do they overwrite the primary clipboard *EVERY*TIME* I accidently drag a bit of text. It makes it impossible to copy a link somewhere and simply overwrite the URL line. Combine that with no clear option on the URL line, I find myself relexively selecting the current URL and then pasting. Oh, but Mozilla thinks I must have wanted to take that URL I just nuked *TO*THE*FREAKING*MAIN*CLIPBOARD*. Bah and double bah! Anyone used to windows conventions is going to think this is a useless clipboard, and anyone used to any *other* gnome/kde application will realize it is broken, and be forced to use a clipboard manager.
This is absurd, and contributes is one of the few major annoyances left on my Linux desktop. Hey Mozilla guys: you are *NOT* the only application on my desktop, so stop nuking my primary clip, mkay?
... but they are all so obvious that I will leave them as an exercise for the reader. Simply combine the following fragments as desired with a few connector words:
While I agree with you that the theory is that you can't patent an idea, patents in the business process space have been so broad as to effectively allow patents on ideas. Not in this particular case, but do you recall when British Telegraph decided it owned the concept of the hyperlink? Or when a encyclopedia company (blanking on which one, google failed me) decided it owned the concept of a computer based encyclopedia (probably a desperate attempt to lock a market that has reduced multi thousand dollar encylopedia sets to a few hundred dollars for paper, and $50 for a CD). One click shopping (patenting the *concept* of storing data, not the actual implementation: if it was implementation, someone would have reimplemented via new methods in a hartbeat). Heck, there is the guy who is chasing people for presenting pictures of products on a site that allows purchase of those products.
While in this case they are not claming a overly broad area, to say "You CANNOT patent an idea" seems to overlook the fact the patent office seems perfectly willing to issue such patents. A more accurate statement is "You can patent just about anything, but overly broad patents may be struck down at great expense".
Rarely do I wish I had mod points... but this statement is an outright lie. Prior to the Chainmail -> D&D evolution (both of which you can attribute to Gygax) there were only wargames. Unless Magic the Gathering and Mageknight have so warped peoples idea of roleplay that they think wargames are RPGs...
Duplicate posting is bad, but your comment is similar:
Long after the issue, but please refer to
http://zdnet.com.com/2102-1105-963696.html
for just one example of a company blocking transfer of licenses. Because you don't "buy" software, but "license a copyrighted product", actually it *is* the law that you can't just give those licenses to others.
The law in this case is similar to the law that holds if I were to license a movie, music or book property: I would get any rights in the license, but I *could not* then give my license to someone else unless my license *specifically grants* such permission. Software licenses specifically contain the words "non transferable", which means exactly what it sounds like it does.
The fact you are holding a CD in your hand is not "proof of ownership", nor is holding the hologram bearing proof of ownership or license. Your "transfer" agreement is invalid without involving the property holder (read: software company). When you involve the software company, they will charge some value, from nothing to more than the original purchase price. I think it is stupid. You think it is stupid. Welcome to stupid copyright laws.
for just one example of a company blocking transfer of licenses. Because you don't "buy" software, but "license a copyrighted product", actually it *is* the law that you can't just give those licenses to others.
The law in this case is similar to the law that holds if I were to license a movie, music or book property: I would get any rights in the license, but I *could not* then give my license to someone else unless my license *specifically grants* such permission. Software licenses specifically contain the words "non transferable", which means exactly what it sounds like it does.
The fact you are holding a CD in your hand is not "proof of ownership", nor is holding the hologram bearing proof of ownership or license. I think it is stupid. You think it is stupid. Welcome to stupid copyright laws.
Re:Boring, but true story
on
UML Fever
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· Score: 1
I find it odd that both projects were killed: obviously the XP project delivered *some* functionality in fairly short order (although three months is a bit on the *long* side with my experience with XP, so maybe you were in "kinda XP" mode, which is the kiss of death and why a lot of people think it is a failed process model). I work with both traditional forward design and XP projects, and XP projects should produce working code in weeks, not months. Sadly, design oversights occur in both traditional and XP flows: if you are doing full XP that is an expected result which means you know understand the required refactoring (and you have the test infrastructure to do the refactoring). In traditional design, you *hopefully* find the design oversight during the design work: perhaps that is why six months passed without a product?
Personally, after doing XP, "kinda XP" and Traditional design, I find the best solution is to do a period of traditional design up front to understand the basics (basically, get better user stories than you would normally, and try to understand scalability issues up front) and then switch to full XP mode for the development effort. "Kinda XP" is like "kinda committed to skydiving" with the ugly end results being similar. Traditional design gives you warm fuzzy feelings when you start, but then reality rears its ugly head during development, and if you don't have XP like framework of tests and methodology in place (aka a parachute), you are simply moving at high speed to a very dead end.
It may be common sense, but the rule is that if a machine transfers ownership *neither* the original owner, *nor* the new owner can legally use the software without a "transfer of ownership". Cisco most recently decided that IOS (the software that runs from firmware on Cisco routers) did *not* transfer with the hardware, and you have to pay them *full hit* to use the hardware you just bought, because to their mind, you don't legally have a license to the *software* that runs it.
Since the license is non transferable (a rule I thinks needs legal review, but that's how it stands) this is an unfortunate necessity. I have worked with Microsoft in the past, and it was difficult to get a relicense approved, even for non profits. Instead they wanted to sell new licenses at a discounted rate, but still at a cost that makes the "donated" hardware a liability rather than an asset.
I think it is great there will be a legal way to bring these machines online: having worked with charities, often the limiting factor was the difficulty of getting Microsoft to relicense the software. Obviously, part of the motivation is to stem the use of free software, which was previously the only surefire way to remain legal. The implementation question that remains is how expensive the refurbishing services will be... too expensive and the practice of simply using an unlicensed copy of Windows or punting and using free products will continue.
I think you doth protest too much. I also run a buisiness, and I have had to adapt with changes in technology and market place. People complain about the "RIAA and MPAA protecting an obsolete buisiness model" and here you are wishing for protection of your business model. Of course the incumbent is going to complain about the pain to adapt... but adapt or die: that is the only options (unless you can convince the government that you deserve a "I'm a poor business who won't adapt" buinsess welfare check). Frankly, yes I do purchase from the most effective source, and if that is online, then it is online. However, as you point out, there are reasons for brick and mortar as well. Either blend business models or capitalize on the benefits you bring, but *don't* just complain about it.
Having been rear ended for being observant, yes the jerk who isn't paying attention *is*at*fault*. I was rear ended by a pregnant woman who decided that "blowing though the yellow" was more valuable than a bit of caution. Unfortunately, there was a stalled car on the other side of the intersection, which I had to stop for, because traffic flow in the lane next to me wasn't giving me a break.
Mr. officer of course got an earful about how I "stopped suddenly" and there was no way she could stop that quickly. His response: "he did". She was cited and her Honda Accordian (yes, I know crumple zones are a safety feature, but boy they fold up real pretty) was totalled with her insurance company upset about an "at fault" accident. (So much so she tried to sue me, but the lawyer folded the instant he got the details of a stalled vehicle in the road).
Moral of the story: give yourself a safe stopping distance and you only have to worry about being rear ended by people who think they are too good to give *themselves* a safe stopping distance.
I can attest to the fact many people turn to God to explain technology when they don't understand it. I was sitting in church when the question was asked of a small group of members: "How does TV work." The expected answer was that the TV station transmitted a signal the TV received... not looking for a technical answer here (and they were heading for an analogy, but that is beside the point). From the group, who had been so indoctrinated that they couldn't think for themselves anymore, the answer rose: "God's will".
It was the last time I attended church. Yes, some of those people were intelligent (the one asking the question had far higher hopes than that - he never got to apply his obvious analogy he was working towards), but it felt *wrong* to sit in a room knowing that these people didn't just have faith where faith was potentially appropriate: they had faith indiscriminately. To them, the light switch was powered by God, the microwave worked because God did not see it as evil, and TV was beamed from heaven direct (must not have *watched* too much TV recently, eh?).
After some years of thinking about this situation, I have come to a realization that you don't need a higher power to explain the organization of the universe. (Previously, I had my doubts about the complexity arising spontaniously, a common doubt of even scientifically minded people). Quantum mechanics says that until an event is observed, the outcome is a probability wave. Upon observation, that wave collapses. Taking this to the logical conclusion, after the creation of the universe (big bang or string colision or whatever) there was a huge, unobserved probability wave. Upon one part of that wave stumbling across the unlikely (but part of the probabilty wave) creation of an "observer", that observer would cause the wave to collapse locally, influencing the rest of the wave from that point forward. In other words, every outcome was equally likely until an observer becomes an outcome of the probability wave. Once that happens, the observer is no longer just a probability, but a fact. More simply: a quantum mechanical universe favors the creation of observers. Of course, this conclusion is simply the creation of my own brain: perhaps someone has a refutation?
Finally got to the meat of this guy's idea. I already have implemented a simple form of this. To contact my most critical e-mail account, you must have a specific text on the subject line. Simple, and so far, 99% effective.
The reason for setting up this tagline based account was that, like the author of the article, I get over 100 spam messages a day. Since business contacts use (and apparently then abused, via viruses or bad CC lists) this e-mail address, I can't simply change addresses. What I have done is place an autoresponder on it that triggers if the subject tag is not found. It notifies the user to contact me via other means to find out what the tag is, if they have forgotten, or to simply forward the message with the tag. It is 100% effective at keeping out spam, and about 10% effective at keeping out my customers. As of late I'm considering it to be an IQ test: I'm willing to lose 10% of my business to not work with people who can't type five extra characters or read the autoresponse. (And yes, I white list people after the first exchange, which is where I lose 100% effectiveness: I still have to filter for viruses).
Combine that tag with spamgourmet driven throw away addresses (great perl script, recommended) for newsletters and such, and my inbox is pretty clean.
However, as pointed out in the article, these unique keys are not going to be easy to manage. The suggested solution is software to handle the keys, and fixed keys for the many won't/can't cooperate with such a scheme. My tag is pretty easy to remember, but if everyone has them, this becomes a stumbling block.
I'm pretty sure that is the *last* thing Microsoft would want to see... an open source Java. Heck, perhaps the Sun "no, we won't open source" has been combined with back channel "unless you continue to beat us up"...... ah, the Tin Foil fits nicely after long wearing it got on April 1....
Doubling your available cash assests (Yahoo Finance) will help, but the company is still bleeding money. (Dropping 3,000+ jobs will also help.) Really what this appears to mean is that Microsoft has put Sun on life support so they don't become the only vendor in the virtual machine driven software development market. Imagine the potential antitrust suit if Java wasn't there to compete against dot Net. Frankly, I think this shows that Microsoft thinks it is winning this battle, otherwise they wouldn't have thrown the bone to them.
Not even "old school" pen and paper RPGs are balanced when you look at distinct classes. Frankly, the issue of balance is usually an overreaction by the players. Having coded for Muds for many years, everyone wants the advantages of their class *plus* what everyone else has.
Running a mud for some time, our technique for determining balance was pretty simple: capture the "time between levels" of the players. Simply log the play time between each level for each player, and number of player deaths during that time. Sort them out by level achived, race and class. A little bit of statistics will show any unbalanced classes pretty quickly. It will also show your better players: they will level any class faster than average.
After doing this for a few years, we could calculate the level rates like clockwork. Yet, even with this "level playing field" the whining continued. My final realization: there is a level of "background whining" which reflects upon the players personality, not upon your game. Learn what this level is, and you only have to worry when the whining breaks that level.
Perhaps he is doing functional programming: the original REBOL code was written in C with closures in the functional style. It is just *harder* to write functional style in C than a language specifically geared for it.
The twenty thousand dollar question is: does PGSQL and mysql actually use them in the optimization step? As far as I know they do not (and I am positive that T-SQL does not), which means if you query other tables, instead of converting them into a join, or a subtable scan, the function just gets blindly executed for every row. This makes them far less useful than if the optimizer were able to treat them as part of the actual query (i.e., useful for expressing redundent mathmatical operations, but not for more complex uses.)
For example, I have seen someone write a UDF that calculated the total of the invoice lines on an invoice (not the real example, but functionally equivelent). If you run a SUM(lineamount) with a left join into the invoice line table, the optimizer will do a lot of work for you. The UDF instead just was called on each record in the result set, and was two orders of magnitude slower when used on a report. That means a 0.3 second query becomes a 30 second query.
Ok... I'm just picking this one to answer at random. Yes, I *am* saying not radically different. Now I admit that 25 years ago I was 10, so my perspective is skewed perhaps, but all the things you describe seem pretty minor.
I remember at that point having HBO (granted, it was beamed instead of cable), mobile phones (granted, attached to cars for power) and a Vic 20 (granted with 8K of ram, of which half was already consumed). I even had digital music on my Vic 20. Most of your examples are communications improvements, but I seem to remember dialing into BBSes at 300 Baud and doing a very blocky version of what I'm doing right now. Changes in scale and speed are assumed in technology over time, but it seems like all the *major* inventions were completed in the early 1900s, and all we have done is improve them since.
I guess I'm jaded or something. Where is the modern equivalent of the invention of flight, the first man on the moon, the explosion of household technologies of the first half of the 1900s? Yeah, my internet connection is *better* than my 300 baud modem, but it isn't a flying car (which I'm still promised, but have no expectation of ever seeing).
This show on the other hand seems to postulate (at least via it's website) that we will perfect everything that we have in development now, 13 hours in the future. Which was fine for Max Headroom, and could make for interesting hypothetical legal issues, but seems agressive to me.
I find the timeline a bit aggressive. Supposedly set in 2030, the issues at hand seem more in line for maybe 2070 or beyond. Not to belittle the advances of the last 25 years (all hail the microwave) but twenty five years ago was not that *radically* different from today.
Perhaps the date was chosen to avoid appearing to be "too much like science fiction", but I must express my doubts that LA will have maglev monorails and all cars will be fuel cell powered by then. The death of paper seems even more unlikely, as does robotic kitchens.
Aw, who am I kidding: 1950's scientific optimism plus the moral dilemmas of progress... I may actually watch this just to see if it is ham fisted or actually well thought out.
SQL is a declarative language, which is probably why it feels functional. Declarative languages allow the user to specify *what* you want, and then the underlying engine determines *how* to get it. SQL in some ways is closer to PROLOG, which is a declarative logic language (in fact, it is trivial to create SQL like queries in PROLOG).
Functional languages can implement declarative syntaxes easily, but the real defining factor is that functions are "first order" objects, which can be applied, manipulated and passed. Frankly, if SQL had first order functions, many wild data gymnastics would be vastly simpler. I grumble at the lack of code reuse in SQL (and I say that as a big fan of the ease of use of SQL on the whole). For example, in SQL I must repeat my subquery every time I wish to apply it.(1) Calculations must be specified both in the select list and the conditional if they are used in both places, instead of being defined once and the results being available (some SQL dialects have workarounds for this). Recursion is right out (a hallmark of functional languages is heavy use of recursive functions) which makes navigating tree structures a total bear (PSQL has extensions for trees, but not very clean ones).
Perhaps future developments that bring SQL closer to the true relational model (which has deep roots in set theory) which would make it possible to bring it closer to a true functional language as well. I think SQL would benefit wildly from the ability to define common structures (functions) and yet be able to apply the optimizer to the end result.
(1) Footnote: T-SQL has "user defined functions", but the impose a nasty overhead because they are not part of the query optimization process.
Playing with F#, the entire library is accessable. Obviously, in some ways using these libraries funnels those sections of the program into a more procedural mind set, but other sections work very well.
C# and F# interop has a link on how to call C# from F#. However, it is interesting that F# uses some of the OCaml library *in addition* to the.NET libraries, as obviously OCaml has functionality specifically for manipulating functional structures, which is still valuable for F# programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
... because when I need a fact about a newly encountered product, I want a good overview that I can quickly scan for relevant details. I cycle books pretty quickly (I use google after I have some proficiancy with a tool) simply to keep my breadth of knowledge high. I think the price is reasonable (at the $10 a month I pay) as that represents a single technical book, maybe 1.5.
Ok, terminology problem. I consider the middle click to be a secondary clipboard (it is transient and changes frequently) and the primary to be ctrl-c/ctrl-v accessed. That's my fault, because I was amped on too much coffee, for not clarifying. However, just go to bugzilla and search "clipboard", or refer to the "meta" bug:
2 60
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=144
The basic problem is this... lets say I want to paste a URL into Mozilla. I go over to my text buffer, select it and ctrl-c to store it in the clipboard. Now I go up to the URL line. Select the entire URL, press delete to clear it and press ctrl-v. Under most apps on gnome/kde and all apps under windows, the buffer would be pulled from ctrl-c's store. Instead, Mozilla pastes back in the highlighted and deleted url.
To be able to paste in a URL, I have to remember to clear the URL *before* making a selection. The same thing happens if you open a text editor, and cut (ctrl-c) some data. Now just drag the cursor over some text in Mozilla (don't copy or anything, just drag over it). Now go back to your text editor and ctrl-v: you will paste what Mozilla has highlighted. That is correct *if* I used middle click... but instead Mozilla writes to the clipboard as if I hit ctrl-c on the text I brushed over.
I don't use firebird - it this is fixed in Firebird, I'm switching 5 seconds ago.
The first application almost anyone goes to on a Linux desktop is Mozilla... after all, web standards mean I can use my Linux box as my primary browser, and only pull up IE in the unlikely case I *wanted* to see that stupid shockwave content. Mozilla runs pretty well on my system, but I think it kills the impression of Linux...
*WHY*THE*HECK* do they overwrite the primary clipboard *EVERY*TIME* I accidently drag a bit of text. It makes it impossible to copy a link somewhere and simply overwrite the URL line. Combine that with no clear option on the URL line, I find myself relexively selecting the current URL and then pasting. Oh, but Mozilla thinks I must have wanted to take that URL I just nuked *TO*THE*FREAKING*MAIN*CLIPBOARD*. Bah and double bah! Anyone used to windows conventions is going to think this is a useless clipboard, and anyone used to any *other* gnome/kde application will realize it is broken, and be forced to use a clipboard manager.
This is absurd, and contributes is one of the few major annoyances left on my Linux desktop. Hey Mozilla guys: you are *NOT* the only application on my desktop, so stop nuking my primary clip, mkay?
Gah... venting complete.
While I agree with you that the theory is that you can't patent an idea, patents in the business process space have been so broad as to effectively allow patents on ideas. Not in this particular case, but do you recall when British Telegraph decided it owned the concept of the hyperlink? Or when a encyclopedia company (blanking on which one, google failed me) decided it owned the concept of a computer based encyclopedia (probably a desperate attempt to lock a market that has reduced multi thousand dollar encylopedia sets to a few hundred dollars for paper, and $50 for a CD). One click shopping (patenting the *concept* of storing data, not the actual implementation: if it was implementation, someone would have reimplemented via new methods in a hartbeat). Heck, there is the guy who is chasing people for presenting pictures of products on a site that allows purchase of those products.
While in this case they are not claming a overly broad area, to say "You CANNOT patent an idea" seems to overlook the fact the patent office seems perfectly willing to issue such patents. A more accurate statement is "You can patent just about anything, but overly broad patents may be struck down at great expense".
Rarely do I wish I had mod points... but this statement is an outright lie. Prior to the Chainmail -> D&D evolution (both of which you can attribute to Gygax) there were only wargames. Unless Magic the Gathering and Mageknight have so warped peoples idea of roleplay that they think wargames are RPGs...
*sigh*
Duplicate posting is bad, but your comment is similar:
Long after the issue, but please refer to
http://zdnet.com.com/2102-1105-963696.html
for just one example of a company blocking transfer of licenses. Because you don't "buy" software, but "license a copyrighted product", actually it *is* the law that you can't just give those licenses to others.
The law in this case is similar to the law that holds if I were to license a movie, music or book property: I would get any rights in the license, but I *could not* then give my license to someone else unless my license *specifically grants* such permission. Software licenses specifically contain the words "non transferable", which means exactly what it sounds like it does.
The fact you are holding a CD in your hand is not "proof of ownership", nor is holding the hologram bearing proof of ownership or license. Your "transfer" agreement is invalid without involving the property holder (read: software company). When you involve the software company, they will charge some value, from nothing to more than the original purchase price. I think it is stupid. You think it is stupid. Welcome to stupid copyright laws.
Long after the issue, but please refer to
http://zdnet.com.com/2102-1105-963696.html
for just one example of a company blocking transfer of licenses. Because you don't "buy" software, but "license a copyrighted product", actually it *is* the law that you can't just give those licenses to others.
The law in this case is similar to the law that holds if I were to license a movie, music or book property: I would get any rights in the license, but I *could not* then give my license to someone else unless my license *specifically grants* such permission. Software licenses specifically contain the words "non transferable", which means exactly what it sounds like it does.
The fact you are holding a CD in your hand is not "proof of ownership", nor is holding the hologram bearing proof of ownership or license. I think it is stupid. You think it is stupid. Welcome to stupid copyright laws.
I find it odd that both projects were killed: obviously the XP project delivered *some* functionality in fairly short order (although three months is a bit on the *long* side with my experience with XP, so maybe you were in "kinda XP" mode, which is the kiss of death and why a lot of people think it is a failed process model). I work with both traditional forward design and XP projects, and XP projects should produce working code in weeks, not months. Sadly, design oversights occur in both traditional and XP flows: if you are doing full XP that is an expected result which means you know understand the required refactoring (and you have the test infrastructure to do the refactoring). In traditional design, you *hopefully* find the design oversight during the design work: perhaps that is why six months passed without a product?
Personally, after doing XP, "kinda XP" and Traditional design, I find the best solution is to do a period of traditional design up front to understand the basics (basically, get better user stories than you would normally, and try to understand scalability issues up front) and then switch to full XP mode for the development effort. "Kinda XP" is like "kinda committed to skydiving" with the ugly end results being similar. Traditional design gives you warm fuzzy feelings when you start, but then reality rears its ugly head during development, and if you don't have XP like framework of tests and methodology in place (aka a parachute), you are simply moving at high speed to a very dead end.
It may be common sense, but the rule is that if a machine transfers ownership *neither* the original owner, *nor* the new owner can legally use the software without a "transfer of ownership". Cisco most recently decided that IOS (the software that runs from firmware on Cisco routers) did *not* transfer with the hardware, and you have to pay them *full hit* to use the hardware you just bought, because to their mind, you don't legally have a license to the *software* that runs it.
Since the license is non transferable (a rule I thinks needs legal review, but that's how it stands) this is an unfortunate necessity. I have worked with Microsoft in the past, and it was difficult to get a relicense approved, even for non profits. Instead they wanted to sell new licenses at a discounted rate, but still at a cost that makes the "donated" hardware a liability rather than an asset.
I think it is great there will be a legal way to bring these machines online: having worked with charities, often the limiting factor was the difficulty of getting Microsoft to relicense the software. Obviously, part of the motivation is to stem the use of free software, which was previously the only surefire way to remain legal. The implementation question that remains is how expensive the refurbishing services will be... too expensive and the practice of simply using an unlicensed copy of Windows or punting and using free products will continue.
I think you doth protest too much. I also run a buisiness, and I have had to adapt with changes in technology and market place. People complain about the "RIAA and MPAA protecting an obsolete buisiness model" and here you are wishing for protection of your business model. Of course the incumbent is going to complain about the pain to adapt... but adapt or die: that is the only options (unless you can convince the government that you deserve a "I'm a poor business who won't adapt" buinsess welfare check). Frankly, yes I do purchase from the most effective source, and if that is online, then it is online. However, as you point out, there are reasons for brick and mortar as well. Either blend business models or capitalize on the benefits you bring, but *don't* just complain about it.
Having been rear ended for being observant, yes the jerk who isn't paying attention *is*at*fault*. I was rear ended by a pregnant woman who decided that "blowing though the yellow" was more valuable than a bit of caution. Unfortunately, there was a stalled car on the other side of the intersection, which I had to stop for, because traffic flow in the lane next to me wasn't giving me a break.
Mr. officer of course got an earful about how I "stopped suddenly" and there was no way she could stop that quickly. His response: "he did". She was cited and her Honda Accordian (yes, I know crumple zones are a safety feature, but boy they fold up real pretty) was totalled with her insurance company upset about an "at fault" accident. (So much so she tried to sue me, but the lawyer folded the instant he got the details of a stalled vehicle in the road).
Moral of the story: give yourself a safe stopping distance and you only have to worry about being rear ended by people who think they are too good to give *themselves* a safe stopping distance.
I can attest to the fact many people turn to God to explain technology when they don't understand it. I was sitting in church when the question was asked of a small group of members: "How does TV work." The expected answer was that the TV station transmitted a signal the TV received... not looking for a technical answer here (and they were heading for an analogy, but that is beside the point). From the group, who had been so indoctrinated that they couldn't think for themselves anymore, the answer rose: "God's will".
It was the last time I attended church. Yes, some of those people were intelligent (the one asking the question had far higher hopes than that - he never got to apply his obvious analogy he was working towards), but it felt *wrong* to sit in a room knowing that these people didn't just have faith where faith was potentially appropriate: they had faith indiscriminately. To them, the light switch was powered by God, the microwave worked because God did not see it as evil, and TV was beamed from heaven direct (must not have *watched* too much TV recently, eh?).
After some years of thinking about this situation, I have come to a realization that you don't need a higher power to explain the organization of the universe. (Previously, I had my doubts about the complexity arising spontaniously, a common doubt of even scientifically minded people). Quantum mechanics says that until an event is observed, the outcome is a probability wave. Upon observation, that wave collapses. Taking this to the logical conclusion, after the creation of the universe (big bang or string colision or whatever) there was a huge, unobserved probability wave. Upon one part of that wave stumbling across the unlikely (but part of the probabilty wave) creation of an "observer", that observer would cause the wave to collapse locally, influencing the rest of the wave from that point forward. In other words, every outcome was equally likely until an observer becomes an outcome of the probability wave. Once that happens, the observer is no longer just a probability, but a fact. More simply: a quantum mechanical universe favors the creation of observers. Of course, this conclusion is simply the creation of my own brain: perhaps someone has a refutation?
Finally got to the meat of this guy's idea. I already have implemented a simple form of this. To contact my most critical e-mail account, you must have a specific text on the subject line. Simple, and so far, 99% effective.
The reason for setting up this tagline based account was that, like the author of the article, I get over 100 spam messages a day. Since business contacts use (and apparently then abused, via viruses or bad CC lists) this e-mail address, I can't simply change addresses. What I have done is place an autoresponder on it that triggers if the subject tag is not found. It notifies the user to contact me via other means to find out what the tag is, if they have forgotten, or to simply forward the message with the tag. It is 100% effective at keeping out spam, and about 10% effective at keeping out my customers. As of late I'm considering it to be an IQ test: I'm willing to lose 10% of my business to not work with people who can't type five extra characters or read the autoresponse. (And yes, I white list people after the first exchange, which is where I lose 100% effectiveness: I still have to filter for viruses).
Combine that tag with spamgourmet driven throw away addresses (great perl script, recommended) for newsletters and such, and my inbox is pretty clean.
However, as pointed out in the article, these unique keys are not going to be easy to manage. The suggested solution is software to handle the keys, and fixed keys for the many won't/can't cooperate with such a scheme. My tag is pretty easy to remember, but if everyone has them, this becomes a stumbling block.
I'm pretty sure that is the *last* thing Microsoft would want to see... an open source Java. Heck, perhaps the Sun "no, we won't open source" has been combined with back channel "unless you continue to beat us up"... ... ah, the Tin Foil fits nicely after long wearing it got on April 1 ....
Doubling your available cash assests (Yahoo Finance) will help, but the company is still bleeding money. (Dropping 3,000+ jobs will also help.) Really what this appears to mean is that Microsoft has put Sun on life support so they don't become the only vendor in the virtual machine driven software development market. Imagine the potential antitrust suit if Java wasn't there to compete against dot Net. Frankly, I think this shows that Microsoft thinks it is winning this battle, otherwise they wouldn't have thrown the bone to them.
Not even "old school" pen and paper RPGs are balanced when you look at distinct classes. Frankly, the issue of balance is usually an overreaction by the players. Having coded for Muds for many years, everyone wants the advantages of their class *plus* what everyone else has.
Running a mud for some time, our technique for determining balance was pretty simple: capture the "time between levels" of the players. Simply log the play time between each level for each player, and number of player deaths during that time. Sort them out by level achived, race and class. A little bit of statistics will show any unbalanced classes pretty quickly. It will also show your better players: they will level any class faster than average.
After doing this for a few years, we could calculate the level rates like clockwork. Yet, even with this "level playing field" the whining continued. My final realization: there is a level of "background whining" which reflects upon the players personality, not upon your game. Learn what this level is, and you only have to worry when the whining breaks that level.
Perhaps he is doing functional programming: the original REBOL code was written in C with closures in the functional style. It is just *harder* to write functional style in C than a language specifically geared for it.
The twenty thousand dollar question is: does PGSQL and mysql actually use them in the optimization step? As far as I know they do not (and I am positive that T-SQL does not), which means if you query other tables, instead of converting them into a join, or a subtable scan, the function just gets blindly executed for every row. This makes them far less useful than if the optimizer were able to treat them as part of the actual query (i.e., useful for expressing redundent mathmatical operations, but not for more complex uses.)
For example, I have seen someone write a UDF that calculated the total of the invoice lines on an invoice (not the real example, but functionally equivelent). If you run a SUM(lineamount) with a left join into the invoice line table, the optimizer will do a lot of work for you. The UDF instead just was called on each record in the result set, and was two orders of magnitude slower when used on a report. That means a 0.3 second query becomes a 30 second query.
Ok... I'm just picking this one to answer at random. Yes, I *am* saying not radically different. Now I admit that 25 years ago I was 10, so my perspective is skewed perhaps, but all the things you describe seem pretty minor.
I remember at that point having HBO (granted, it was beamed instead of cable), mobile phones (granted, attached to cars for power) and a Vic 20 (granted with 8K of ram, of which half was already consumed). I even had digital music on my Vic 20. Most of your examples are communications improvements, but I seem to remember dialing into BBSes at 300 Baud and doing a very blocky version of what I'm doing right now. Changes in scale and speed are assumed in technology over time, but it seems like all the *major* inventions were completed in the early 1900s, and all we have done is improve them since.
I guess I'm jaded or something. Where is the modern equivalent of the invention of flight, the first man on the moon, the explosion of household technologies of the first half of the 1900s? Yeah, my internet connection is *better* than my 300 baud modem, but it isn't a flying car (which I'm still promised, but have no expectation of ever seeing).
This show on the other hand seems to postulate (at least via it's website) that we will perfect everything that we have in development now, 13 hours in the future. Which was fine for Max Headroom, and could make for interesting hypothetical legal issues, but seems agressive to me.
I find the timeline a bit aggressive. Supposedly set in 2030, the issues at hand seem more in line for maybe 2070 or beyond. Not to belittle the advances of the last 25 years (all hail the microwave) but twenty five years ago was not that *radically* different from today.
Perhaps the date was chosen to avoid appearing to be "too much like science fiction", but I must express my doubts that LA will have maglev monorails and all cars will be fuel cell powered by then. The death of paper seems even more unlikely, as does robotic kitchens.
Aw, who am I kidding: 1950's scientific optimism plus the moral dilemmas of progress... I may actually watch this just to see if it is ham fisted or actually well thought out.
SQL is a declarative language, which is probably why it feels functional. Declarative languages allow the user to specify *what* you want, and then the underlying engine determines *how* to get it. SQL in some ways is closer to PROLOG, which is a declarative logic language (in fact, it is trivial to create SQL like queries in PROLOG).
Functional languages can implement declarative syntaxes easily, but the real defining factor is that functions are "first order" objects, which can be applied, manipulated and passed. Frankly, if SQL had first order functions, many wild data gymnastics would be vastly simpler. I grumble at the lack of code reuse in SQL (and I say that as a big fan of the ease of use of SQL on the whole). For example, in SQL I must repeat my subquery every time I wish to apply it.(1) Calculations must be specified both in the select list and the conditional if they are used in both places, instead of being defined once and the results being available (some SQL dialects have workarounds for this). Recursion is right out (a hallmark of functional languages is heavy use of recursive functions) which makes navigating tree structures a total bear (PSQL has extensions for trees, but not very clean ones).
Perhaps future developments that bring SQL closer to the true relational model (which has deep roots in set theory) which would make it possible to bring it closer to a true functional language as well. I think SQL would benefit wildly from the ability to define common structures (functions) and yet be able to apply the optimizer to the end result.
(1) Footnote: T-SQL has "user defined functions", but the impose a nasty overhead because they are not part of the query optimization process.
Playing with F#, the entire library is accessable. Obviously, in some ways using these libraries funnels those sections of the program into a more procedural mind set, but other sections work very well.
.NET libraries, as obviously OCaml has functionality specifically for manipulating functional structures, which is still valuable for F# programmers.
C# and F# interop has a link on how to call C# from F#. However, it is interesting that F# uses some of the OCaml library *in addition* to the