The problem with media in Britain is that it's run by and controlled by the governement.
No it isn't. 3 out of 5 terrestial channels are commerical, and the BBC has a long tradition of going against the government's wishes. Digital & Satellite channels have an even higher % of commerical stations. Note, the BBC is where you can get bin Laden's speeches uncensoured - something that NO American media will do.
Reference counts are only one way to implement garbage collectors, and seen as one of the simplest, but not the best.
A better way is to do reference tracing, where you trace all the objects which are currently in scope, and follow all their references. Anything which is not followed, is obviously collectable.
Maybe not as smart, but more constant. When C compilers started warning about things like
if(a=b){
}
then we found code which had been reviewed by many different eyes without seeing these mistakes. We're just not good at doing repetative tasks, especially if we think we know what should be there. It's the the same reason we run a spell checker to check for the same word in a row, we're just not good at looking for that sort of mistake.
This is a GOOD thing. The majority of people should not be let near a programming language as they don't have the ability to think logically and break down problems into their components in order to write functioning programs.
There are firewalls which filter both ports & services at the same time, those using application layer proxies. If you configure one of those firewalls to run HTTP on a port, and instead send SMTP messages to that port, then the firewall will block those SMTP messages.
I'd have to disagree with 'easier'. If you're a civil or mech engineer, then you're working with hundreds of years of physics. If you build a bridge you can calculate exactly how much load that bridge can stand. If you calculate that it isn't strong enough, then you can specify to use more rebar, or stronger concrete or whatever is required to make it strong enough. The documentation on source materials is comprehensive and accurate. If we specify that we need 3200psi concrete, then we can test to ensure that's what we've got.
When we program software we are often building on sand. Documentation for APIs and libraries are generally awful. Sometimes different versions of the same OS behave differently. Sometimes errors are thrown which are not documented. Sometimes the same error is thrown for two different problems, so the error codes aren't sufficent to diagnose the cause.
The only way we can test software is by trying everything we can think of to make it fail. If we miss something, then we've got a potential bug. If we become aware of this, then we will add it to our testing schedule. This effectivly makes every software system a unique universe, and means that our testing is always playing catchup.
There is a reason why the biggest & most successful systems are all 30 years old or more. It's not because the programmers of that era are better, it's just because it has taken a long time to make a system reliable.
You can see this if you compare various benchmarks for different systems. The Sun Fire 280R has a CINT2000 of 375, and a CFP2000 of 324, the Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER400 (600MHz)has 390 and 314, so the Fujitsu has faster Integer performance, while the Sun has faster FP performance. Which one is faster in 'real life' depends on the mix found in your application.
We didn't, but the RIAA has been claiming that the reason they're against Napster et al is due to the harm done to the artists. Possibly they're thinking that the average person in the street would have more sympathy for the artists than the price fixing consortium.
Wonderful idea or not, we're decades away from this
Of course, this is exactly what NASA is good at. Writing huge documents which are totally impossible to implement for at least 30 years. In 5 years time, they'll rewrite it from scratch, because all of the assumptions in the orignal document are now wrong. Repeat until you have 15 versions of 100,000 page reports.
Why would you run a Usenet server anyway? This is a huge resource drain (much more content than you actually read is sent to you), when there are plenty of other usenet servers
For leaf sites, it's usually more efficent to run a caching newserver. This only downloads the articles you read, but caches them, plus XOVER's and other repetative stuff which reduces the bandwidth required by a large amount.
Many people think that Digital announcing EOL for PDP's and their OSes, and then Vaxen & VMS was the reason why Digital failed. If you are a company which uses a PDP as a controller in your product, and Digital cut you off, are you going to consider moving to another Digital product, or an alternative supplier which you feel is going to be harder to cut you off in the future? Most people decided the latter, which sadly often meant PC hardware and Windows. IBM seem to be doing it right. There is no cutoff between the old 360's and the modern Z series mainframes, you gradually upgrade over the years, and things which were unthinkable on the 360's such as running Unix & Java, are default on the Z series.
What happens right now is that some guy or girl somewhere puts up an interesting web page about a hobby or other interest. It costs $100 a year to run. Then it gets Slashdotted, so to speak, by a mention in a magazine, and they get hit with a $500 bandwidth charge. They close down the site and have no incentive to ever try it again.
Sounds like we need a better way of spreading the bandwidth so that they're NOT hit with a $500 bandwidth charge. Unfortunatly, current caches aren't the answer, so only the mega ISP's such as AOL & @home are making a difference to the bandwidth utilized.
So you get a bill for your last 4 months surfing at a site, and there is no way you can know if it's accurate or not. Or can you remember how many times you've viewed a site in the last 4 months?
What I find very interesting is comparing the ratings that movies get around the world. A movie that gets an "R" in the US can get a "U" in France - same as a "G". Very rarely do they agree.
Readoing RFC 2870 doesn't tell you anything really. It's a best practices document, and as such it's full of 'SHOULD' and 'MUST' and 'SHOULD NOT'. However, it doesn't tell you anything about what's really happening.
Here we have our internal DNS running off some Microsoft based system, with MSSQL as the datastore.
I've had to write a program which validates that all our hosts are still properly resolving, as every few weeks it drops a bunch of records. The adminstrators of the DNS have no idea why it happens, all they can do is manually re-add the addresses through the GUI system.
The answer is that you Can. However none of the studios are doing so because the expense of multiple shoots of the relevent scenes, multiple editing, multiple certification by the censor boards and so on costs more than they think they will get back in increased revenue. The DVD FAQ has the explination.
Many large cities now have free newspapers often published by Metro international. I don't know what happened in other cities, but in Toronto they have basically virtually eliminated the 'traditional' newspapers from the scene.
But offices are much different - wiring cubicles for Cat5 and running it back to a phone closet costs money,
But every business has already bitten that cost, and loosing uptime & performance because there is a loose connection in the elevator motor costs an enormous amount of time. To my mind
I talked with United Airlines a couple years ago about how bad their site was, bulky, difficult to navigate, lacking information and the IT guy I talked with agreed, but it was already their *new* site.
I see this sort of thinking a lot. Too many companies treat their websites their annual reports. You make an edition, and then a few months later you start thinking of the new one. In between you might tweak a few pages, update the content on some of them, but nothing major. The problem is that every 'edition' of the website has new major issues. If they treated it as an evolution, where each time they keep the same basic site but fix particular issues, and did it more frequently, then they'd get much better sites.
Slashdot Mirror
No it isn't. 3 out of 5 terrestial channels are commerical, and the BBC has a long tradition of going against the government's wishes. Digital & Satellite channels have an even higher % of commerical stations. Note, the BBC is where you can get bin Laden's speeches uncensoured - something that NO American media will do.
A better way is to do reference tracing, where you trace all the objects which are currently in scope, and follow all their references. Anything which is not followed, is obviously collectable.
then we found code which had been reviewed by many different eyes without seeing these mistakes. We're just not good at doing repetative tasks, especially if we think we know what should be there. It's the the same reason we run a spell checker to check for the same word in a row, we're just not good at looking for that sort of mistake.
If you're using an optimizing compiler, then your code is being rewritten. Unrolling loops, storing of computed values, register assignment etc.
It depends if you count when the Unisys patent expires, or when the exact same compression patent by IBM expires.
This is a GOOD thing. The majority of people should not be let near a programming language as they don't have the ability to think logically and break down problems into their components in order to write functioning programs.
There are firewalls which filter both ports & services at the same time, those using application layer proxies. If you configure one of those firewalls to run HTTP on a port, and instead send SMTP messages to that port, then the firewall will block those SMTP messages.
When we program software we are often building on sand. Documentation for APIs and libraries are generally awful. Sometimes different versions of the same OS behave differently. Sometimes errors are thrown which are not documented. Sometimes the same error is thrown for two different problems, so the error codes aren't sufficent to diagnose the cause.
The only way we can test software is by trying everything we can think of to make it fail. If we miss something, then we've got a potential bug. If we become aware of this, then we will add it to our testing schedule. This effectivly makes every software system a unique universe, and means that our testing is always playing catchup.
There is a reason why the biggest & most successful systems are all 30 years old or more. It's not because the programmers of that era are better, it's just because it has taken a long time to make a system reliable.
Robert Sawyer's Calculating God has an Alien landing and asking to be taken to a palentologist.
Because NASA isn't the business of launching satellites, it's in the business of writing huge reports about how to launch satellites.
You can see this if you compare various benchmarks for different systems. The Sun Fire 280R has a CINT2000 of 375, and a CFP2000 of 324, the Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER400 (600MHz)has 390 and 314, so the Fujitsu has faster Integer performance, while the Sun has faster FP performance. Which one is faster in 'real life' depends on the mix found in your application.
We didn't, but the RIAA has been claiming that the reason they're against Napster et al is due to the harm done to the artists. Possibly they're thinking that the average person in the street would have more sympathy for the artists than the price fixing consortium.
Of course, this is exactly what NASA is good at. Writing huge documents which are totally impossible to implement for at least 30 years. In 5 years time, they'll rewrite it from scratch, because all of the assumptions in the orignal document are now wrong. Repeat until you have 15 versions of 100,000 page reports.
For leaf sites, it's usually more efficent to run a caching newserver. This only downloads the articles you read, but caches them, plus XOVER's and other repetative stuff which reduces the bandwidth required by a large amount.
Actually, they're still developing them now, and will be releasing new enhancements until 2003.
Many people think that Digital announcing EOL for PDP's and their OSes, and then Vaxen & VMS was the reason why Digital failed. If you are a company which uses a PDP as a controller in your product, and Digital cut you off, are you going to consider moving to another Digital product, or an alternative supplier which you feel is going to be harder to cut you off in the future? Most people decided the latter, which sadly often meant PC hardware and Windows. IBM seem to be doing it right. There is no cutoff between the old 360's and the modern Z series mainframes, you gradually upgrade over the years, and things which were unthinkable on the 360's such as running Unix & Java, are default on the Z series.
Sounds like we need a better way of spreading the bandwidth so that they're NOT hit with a $500 bandwidth charge. Unfortunatly, current caches aren't the answer, so only the mega ISP's such as AOL & @home are making a difference to the bandwidth utilized.
So you get a bill for your last 4 months surfing at a site, and there is no way you can know if it's accurate or not. Or can you remember how many times you've viewed a site in the last 4 months?
What I find very interesting is comparing the ratings that movies get around the world. A movie that gets an "R" in the US can get a "U" in France - same as a "G". Very rarely do they agree.
Readoing RFC 2870 doesn't tell you anything really. It's a best practices document, and as such it's full of 'SHOULD' and 'MUST' and 'SHOULD NOT'. However, it doesn't tell you anything about what's really happening.
I've had to write a program which validates that all our hosts are still properly resolving, as every few weeks it drops a bunch of records. The adminstrators of the DNS have no idea why it happens, all they can do is manually re-add the addresses through the GUI system.
The answer is that you Can. However none of the studios are doing so because the expense of multiple shoots of the relevent scenes, multiple editing, multiple certification by the censor boards and so on costs more than they think they will get back in increased revenue. The DVD FAQ has the explination.
Many large cities now have free newspapers often published by Metro international. I don't know what happened in other cities, but in Toronto they have basically virtually eliminated the 'traditional' newspapers from the scene.
But every business has already bitten that cost, and loosing uptime & performance because there is a loose connection in the elevator motor costs an enormous amount of time. To my mind
I see this sort of thinking a lot. Too many companies treat their websites their annual reports. You make an edition, and then a few months later you start thinking of the new one. In between you might tweak a few pages, update the content on some of them, but nothing major. The problem is that every 'edition' of the website has new major issues. If they treated it as an evolution, where each time they keep the same basic site but fix particular issues, and did it more frequently, then they'd get much better sites.