The quality and usefulness of an open source application will be generally better if there is no ulterior motive behind it. When developers write code they themselves actually are users of, you can't get closer to understanding the use cases. You can't get much more synchronized than IDEs. Admittedley, some times a developer mindset produces a highly useful project with an interface style only a programmer would love, and it can hamper an otherwise good program for the common user, but IDEs...
They didn't work because they were small companies Ok, I can see that argument for Be and NeXT, but IBM? I mean really, calling IBM a small company is ludicrous.
It has never worked, and I don't think it has a stronger chance of succeeding now. The clones happened, and during that period the Mac market I don't think grew significantly, just fragmented.
Windows has for a long time not done anything interesting in the OS, but at the same time the market has demonstrated indifference to that fact. They care about the third party apps and toss money at MS because they just don't care.
I don't like this reality, particularly when Linux and OSX both provide a richer 'base' experience, but that's what it is. In the 200 dollar and cheaper markets, the economics may cause MS's stranglehold to weaken, but so long as they generally get subsidized by crapware writers that can't be bothered to port to Linux, OEMs will continue to subject people to it and people will just take it, because it is easier than change.
I have seen many projects done by specialists at programming who knew nothing much beyond programming for the sake of programming. The code generally does literally what was asked for, but the approach to me tends to end up with software that misses the point in spirit. When a good developer is intimately familiar with a problem, they accommodate nuances and stretch to do things that no one may have laid out in the first place. Sometimes, I would say a novice to intermediate programmer can produce a more useful application than a good programmer if the novice programmer is more intimately familiar with the problem's nature. A non-developer may never realize how close something else can be while a pure developer wouldn't even know the possibilities to contemplate. I've seen horrible *looking* scripts that I'd hands down rather use than well-structured C code to do the same thing. Sure, the scripts tend to do poorly with error-checking, take longer to understand when maintaining it, but at the end of the day, its surprising how intelligent users can bridge those gaps for the sake of the usefulness.
If nothing else, a good developer who doesn't *really* understand the problem can be teamed with a scientist who knows enough to kind of follow whats going on, even if not expert enough to do the whole thing. They may experience epiphanies along the way and guide development in a way they couldn't without a grasp of the fundamentals.
When you have a divide between the scientists who understand the computations inside and out and programmers, you have a fundamental problem. For the same reason a lot of open source development is so good (the developers are the users), it's important for the scientists to have a grasp to help themselves or at least better communicate with developers.
I would go so far as to say some parallel API like MPI should be introduced and shown how to leverage it well for some problems. Effectively using something like Excel is important for small to moderate tasks, but if you want to ever take advantage of time on a supercomputer, those skills won't allow that resource to be used effectively. For a lot of lab work and education, it may not be that immediately relevant, but I would hope a good scientist is at least somewhat prepared to advance their field when given significant chance to use computing resources. Even without time on a supercomputer, there are opportunities to advance projects in the spirit of folding at home.
Perhaps the inability of someone to answer such a question when they are obviously taking the test through an internet connected browser could reflect badly on their intelligence;)
That said, it scored me the lowest any such test has ever done.
Merely that the companies are the ones tinting the situation for their benefit. 'Web 2.0' has become a bit of marketeering, since the original definition doesn't help a lot of those companies sell more crap.
However, to an extent, fighting for the original spirit/meaning of 'Web 2.0' to an extent is like fighting for correct usage of 'begging the question', while you may be in the right, the masses still adopt the common usage. And in Web 2.0 in the true sense of the word, the most popular opinion tends to win, and thus Web 2.0 isn't that anymore;) It's sort of ironic that the core meaning of Web 2.0 really allows it to not retain the meaning at all.
Web 2.0 has deteriorated to mean 'second coming of.com, come and buy your servers and services before it's too late!' after all the marketing groups got a hold of it. O'Reilly made the mistake of coming up with too catchy a phrase that accurately described aspects of key popular sites, and the only thing the business types see are the aspects that correlate to money.
The servers are stacked pretty much like they have been before, but not as deep. The water cooling is contained within the door and does not go to the servers (as the article says, they thought that currently that was too pricey to be worth doing). Besides, they left their options open, it's easier to tack on a door or not based on the datacenter use of chilled water or not than it is to change system heatsinks, etc etc.
Most racks are on the order of 2 ft. wide and 4ft deep. The iDataplex racks are 4ft wide, and 2ft deep, with two columns each 19" wide. The cooling is still front to back with 19" wide servers, it's just that the racks are less deep. They are doubled up presumably to be in some way conventional for shipping, marketing, whatever, but ultimately aren't as exotic as some would fear. They could have just as well had 'normal' 42U racks with only half the depth and logically be analogous. They also take some of the spare horizontal space and carve out 16U of vertically oriented U space.
As to the air cooling aspect, I think the discussion is tilted toward the extremes of bad datacenter design to sound better, but water-cooling is more efficient to pump the distance even with clear path for the air to go. Not saying this is specific to any particular vendor (the difficulty of sticking the converse of a radiator on the back of a rack seems like it would be low), but I think IBM is fishing for ways to take advantage of two-column racks in a remotely meaningful way. In this case, the ratio of usable surface area on the water pipes to unusable plumbing in the design is higher since they can be wider.
The big companies are locking on to 'Web 2.0' as a moniker for embracing an idea they had been completely ignoring until Google took advantage of it and forced everyone to notice. Smaller companies had already gotten the message that while hardware-failure tolerant servers have their place, in many situations with large numbers of systems the only practical place to solve it is in software, and then expensive hardware redundancy is superfluous, costing both initial money and additional power/cooling.
I'm not saying Google was by any means the first to think of this or do it, but no one else that did that as part of their core strategy had come to the spotlight to the degree Google has. Every single one of Google's moves to the industry at large has become synonymous to 'Web 2.0', and as such hardware designs done with an eye on Google's datacenter sensibilities logically become 'Web 2.0' related. You'll also note them saying 'Green computing' and every other possible buzzword that is fashionable.
Of course, part of it is to an extent trying to create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy around 'Web 2.0'. If you help convince the world (particularly venture capitalists) that a bubble on the order of the '.com' days is there to be ridden, you inflate the customer base. Market engineering in the truest sense of the phrase.
Personally, I would think the easier thing to do if trying to trojan a system would be to mess with agetty or login, or the user's login scripts, or modifying their initrd in/boot if / is an encrypted block device. Modifying the kernel seems... well, pointlessly convoluted for a simple trojaning.
The various components of the Wii are incapable of realtime decoding of 1920x1080 x264 content. That isn't necessarily important to what Wii aims to be, a game console, but it is an important checkbox for anything striving to be a comprehensive media solution.
PS3 has the best hardware base to pursue such a thing, but has no apparent strategy to do so beyond physical media playback. MS has the best software base to pursue it, what with most systems sold today already having MS software preloaded, giving xBox an advantage as a frontend.
On a related note, I was fairly flipped out when a Vista box was put on my home network, and it reported my MythTV backend by default in WMP and even listed the recordings. It wasn't able to play back any of the content, but it surprised me nonetheless.
Why is it overkill? Just because it *can* offer advanced features does not mean you must use those. It's just another DB implementation that happens to use SQL syntax as its query format. For basic stuff, SQL is very straightfoward (doesn't get much simpler than "select name from custromers where address like.."). The amount of setup is trivially the same as any other file (open/create a file just like anything else), and the space requirements are negligible.
In response to the mentions of DB engines that use a human-readable format, my experience with those is that I gain practically nothing because I rarely end up reading the DB directly, but it is horrendously slow for many operations. Not much to gain, a lot to lose. When I do want a plaintext backup or something to read, it's a sqlite dump away. If the databse access are exceedingly rare, a plaintext may be 'enough', but at the end of the day, a solution like SQLite or a bdb setup is much more widely used and tested.
Basically, it's a branding initiative with zero weight behind it. AMD is in the unfortunate position of not having leading products in either graphics or processor, and yet they are trying to emphasize themselves as a leader for gaming enthusiasts. Of all the markets to try to hoodwink, this is a poor choice to focus. There has been a long standing history of PC gaming nuts keeping a close eye on technology and commenting. The ones that aren't so obsessive about it have either moved to consoles or don't bother buying hardware and just game with what they got, with the titles they are comfortable with. They already know that even as of B3 stepping Phenoms, the processor isn't up to compete with Core2. They know that nVidia still has the edge, from either driver optimization or the hardware itself, it's hard to tell.
So what you are left with is a branding initiative targeting a market that is admittedly potentially high margin, but in this scope to savvy to fall for such a move. If they truly want that market, they need to push their product from a technical, not marketing standpoint. With the offering they have now, their only viable option is to emphasis value for the money, regrettably relegating themselves again to the budget market. AMD has been there before and didn't die and emerged with an overwhelming product before, and they have just got to accept it and regroup.
Why I'm not buying digital cable, and instead rely upon broadcast for major television HD. I'll also purchase media, but only if it does not have significantly troubling DRM. I.e. I give CSS a pass on DVDs because my alternatives for legal consumption of media are not good, it's trivial to defeat, and I can't quite give up on the media as a whole (though I very rarely do buy any content, since I am fairly disgusted with the industry).
Except MS is not a monopoly in this space, but rather a minority player. Last I checked, Tivo was probably the market dominator, but no vendor has a monopolistic hold on the market.
Maybe you say they have a grip on the 'media pc' market, but I'm not sure that's accurate either. I think the common market is not excited about media pcs and is instead favoring consoles and DVRs. Particularly since consoles are implementing internet access and web browsing, the motivation for a media pc for most people is low. Since it isn't seen at large as the best means to an end, that means the people implementing it are more the hobbyist type, so the penetration of something like MythTV is higher. In this sort of application, DRM rears its ugly head the most, so a platform like MythTV will treat users well as those are the targets to please, not a commercial partner/customer.
I could see Tivo in the past implementing it as they thought it was inevitable, but probably once it was determined as not inevitable, a company in a competitive marketplace can't afford to screw their customers. The networks probably offered Tivo some money to honor the flag and Tivo may have decided the better business move would be that the money wouldn't be worth the lost sales.
Meanwhile MS is not accustomed to such a situation. To them, the end-users have been a foregone conclusion, MS expects to get that money no matter how crappy they treat those users. So when the networks come to them with an offer, it's a no-brainer. This is what a monopolistic viewpoint does. In the DVR space, you would think they would realize they are not a monopoly and not act this way, but until this incident, they hadn't had their situation tested.
It's an interesting thing showing users the reality of where they stand. They are not customers to NBC, they are a necessary evil for NBC to deal with indirectly to please their customers, advertisers. Advertisers desires trump viewer desires. To MS, the end-users are to an extent customers, but again they are assumed to be guaranteed customers. MS has to pander a bit more to OEMs, but not much. MS therefore views deals with other entities (like studios) for abusing their users as the place where they can grow.
I will say I like how this has played out in general compared to the alternative. The networks tried to get the FCC to enforce it on their behalf and failed. Now, they must pay every DVR vendor and every DVR vendor gets to choose whether or not the lost sales are worth it. Allow the broadcast flag, and specify a standard path for it, but don't mandate enforcement and let capitalism work it out. Of course, I know which way this would go, obeying the broadcast flag is dvr market suicide.
I have Fedora on one system because it handles one scenario more easily than Ubuntu, x86_64 having to install third-party 32-bit software. Other than that, the system is frustrating:
-Their 'releases' seem to mean little. They don't stick to the major revisions of software (Fedroa 8 box updated kernel to 2.6.24 and pidgin to 2.4 for example). As a result, third party drivers can exhibit different glitches or not work at all even during a routine update. Pidgin changed its UI and initially started crashing for me a lot when they went to 2.4. No matter what Fedora path you take, you are submitted to the bleeding edge across the board, not just the areas you are intrinsically interested in.
-They have no interest in helping users have a convenient time with binary software. I.e. annoying to install flash, nvidia, or ati binary drivers. It's one thing of the OSS alternatives are remotely comparable, but they simply are not at this point. ath5k when first adopted was no where near good enough for common usage. The nv driver is a waste of paying the nVidia premium. Ditto for the open source ATI driver until those efforts see fruition. And the open-source implementation of flash is getting closer, but is still far removed from a viable alternative.
All in all, Fedora feels to an extent like crippleware and a rolling beta. Knowing explicitly that as a user you are little more than a free tester for RedHat's for-profit endeavor is annoying. If I were interested in a specific major increase of a package such that I didn't want to wait a few months for the next distro rev, I'd download it myself.
Ubuntu's releases are not perfect (the hardy scheduler annoyance a good example), but the complaints are far less severe and I know when an update might require work. I'm too lazy to have to deal with a major change at a random time. It's the reason why I stopped using Gentoo after a couple of years.
Sorry to rant, but the implication that Fedora is 'geeky' and Ubuntu is not rubbed me the wrong way.
Was unphased, it's wonderful. I remember the scare to grab digital tuners before the broadcast flag have become mandatory, but now all you have to worry about is Vista going out of their way to honor something noone else in the industry bothers to. Microsoft loves their customers just sooo much.
Wonder how many new MythTV installs this event prompted.
Isn't she? When the *next* item is being oriented to face the scanner is the interval that you could read the display. If they could thrust as fast as they want without regard to orientation, the prices would probably scroll too fast to read.
When doing anything that requires something to physically touch is considered too much work and we'd rather risk our financial info being wirelessly transmitted than have to swipe a card, we have serious issues.
And all this about inventory tracking is kind of an orthogonal point to payment isn't it? I for one certainly don't mind them being able to wave rfid wands around a vague area and account for an entire big package without having to scan a unique barcode for every item. I wouldn't mind a checkout system where they didn't even need to find the upc (or for that matter, could scan the whole cart in one go instead of item by item). However, I don't see the big benefit of avoiding physical contact with my payment device (which I wish was more technically secure than my mag-stripe credit card).
Not to mention the fact that Anime tend towards trying to make animation as real as possible, No, by and large that is not what Anime tends to do. There are examples of attempts to look realistic, but by far they attempt to show fantastical and/or exaggerated things/colors. Take one look at the chosen color palette for a work of Anime, and it's obvious they are not even aiming for realism. Other things like using eye size to roughly indicate goodness/innocence, all the various exagerrated cues, etc etc. For example, Ghost In the Shell, I could see being argued as aiming for realistic color schemes/physiology, while Armitage deviates. Those are two pieces of sci-fi drama relatively close in genre with different artistic styles.
Speed Racer definitely fell into the category of unrealistic/stylized on purpose, so it seems an appropriate fit.
But then at the end of a day, it's just supposed to be a fun movie, and we miss the fun by overanalyzing it to death.
Many of these vendors would have just written Windows clients/apps. I too prefer native apps, but untill the consumer market is more heterogenous, the likely alternative to web apps is native apps for a platform I don't like.
Of course, in a heterogeneous environment, the developers won't touch native clients with a teen foot pole...
Until I thought about the ability to have multiple tags on an item. Essentially, with tagging you have the full power of set arithmetic. A hierarchical scheme can be considered a strict subset. If you have INBOX, with a subfolder called 'Bank', and a subfolder called 'Credit', you can acheive the same thing by tagging the same message both 'bank' and 'credit'. The 'subfolder' would now represent the set intersection of the two tags. True, all your groups are visiibile from the top level, but a UI could none the less have a drill-down with set notation and acheive the same effect as hierarchical organization.
So tagging can have that power, it's a matter of UI design to make it as convenient.
I read a sample and I must confess that I think the sample was more confusing than most typical code. I'm talking about how multiply gives only one operand, and seems to be using an implicit default variable. Perl also can do this, and when I see people use it in complex situations, it's hard to tell when the last time default would have been set at times.
I do agree making the primitives verbose doesn't help. Ultimately, it isn't the fact that '*' is hard to understand, or that braces enclose blocks, the primitives used in conjunction with clear variable names is sufficient for that to be comprehensibe. You don't see (at least shouldn't): $total = $subtotal * (1+$tax) # Mulitply the subtotal by 1 plus the sales tax
Because it's so simple. Comments come in to explain things in certain cases. The 'black box' description of the function with what it expects and what it will spit out, without talking about intermediate steps. And to explain potentially convoluted blocks.
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The quality and usefulness of an open source application will be generally better if there is no ulterior motive behind it. When developers write code they themselves actually are users of, you can't get closer to understanding the use cases. You can't get much more synchronized than IDEs. Admittedley, some times a developer mindset produces a highly useful project with an interface style only a programmer would love, and it can hamper an otherwise good program for the common user, but IDEs...
Linux Cluster cures cancer.
That would have been a much more provocative headline. And more in keeping with standard Slashdot editorial standards.
It has never worked, and I don't think it has a stronger chance of succeeding now. The clones happened, and during that period the Mac market I don't think grew significantly, just fragmented.
Windows has for a long time not done anything interesting in the OS, but at the same time the market has demonstrated indifference to that fact. They care about the third party apps and toss money at MS because they just don't care.
I don't like this reality, particularly when Linux and OSX both provide a richer 'base' experience, but that's what it is. In the 200 dollar and cheaper markets, the economics may cause MS's stranglehold to weaken, but so long as they generally get subsidized by crapware writers that can't be bothered to port to Linux, OEMs will continue to subject people to it and people will just take it, because it is easier than change.
I have seen many projects done by specialists at programming who knew nothing much beyond programming for the sake of programming. The code generally does literally what was asked for, but the approach to me tends to end up with software that misses the point in spirit. When a good developer is intimately familiar with a problem, they accommodate nuances and stretch to do things that no one may have laid out in the first place. Sometimes, I would say a novice to intermediate programmer can produce a more useful application than a good programmer if the novice programmer is more intimately familiar with the problem's nature. A non-developer may never realize how close something else can be while a pure developer wouldn't even know the possibilities to contemplate. I've seen horrible *looking* scripts that I'd hands down rather use than well-structured C code to do the same thing. Sure, the scripts tend to do poorly with error-checking, take longer to understand when maintaining it, but at the end of the day, its surprising how intelligent users can bridge those gaps for the sake of the usefulness.
If nothing else, a good developer who doesn't *really* understand the problem can be teamed with a scientist who knows enough to kind of follow whats going on, even if not expert enough to do the whole thing. They may experience epiphanies along the way and guide development in a way they couldn't without a grasp of the fundamentals.
When you have a divide between the scientists who understand the computations inside and out and programmers, you have a fundamental problem. For the same reason a lot of open source development is so good (the developers are the users), it's important for the scientists to have a grasp to help themselves or at least better communicate with developers.
I would go so far as to say some parallel API like MPI should be introduced and shown how to leverage it well for some problems. Effectively using something like Excel is important for small to moderate tasks, but if you want to ever take advantage of time on a supercomputer, those skills won't allow that resource to be used effectively. For a lot of lab work and education, it may not be that immediately relevant, but I would hope a good scientist is at least somewhat prepared to advance their field when given significant chance to use computing resources. Even without time on a supercomputer, there are opportunities to advance projects in the spirit of folding at home.
Perhaps the inability of someone to answer such a question when they are obviously taking the test through an internet connected browser could reflect badly on their intelligence ;)
That said, it scored me the lowest any such test has ever done.
Merely that the companies are the ones tinting the situation for their benefit. 'Web 2.0' has become a bit of marketeering, since the original definition doesn't help a lot of those companies sell more crap.
;) It's sort of ironic that the core meaning of Web 2.0 really allows it to not retain the meaning at all.
.com, come and buy your servers and services before it's too late!' after all the marketing groups got a hold of it. O'Reilly made the mistake of coming up with too catchy a phrase that accurately described aspects of key popular sites, and the only thing the business types see are the aspects that correlate to money.
However, to an extent, fighting for the original spirit/meaning of 'Web 2.0' to an extent is like fighting for correct usage of 'begging the question', while you may be in the right, the masses still adopt the common usage. And in Web 2.0 in the true sense of the word, the most popular opinion tends to win, and thus Web 2.0 isn't that anymore
Web 2.0 has deteriorated to mean 'second coming of
The servers are stacked pretty much like they have been before, but not as deep. The water cooling is contained within the door and does not go to the servers (as the article says, they thought that currently that was too pricey to be worth doing). Besides, they left their options open, it's easier to tack on a door or not based on the datacenter use of chilled water or not than it is to change system heatsinks, etc etc.
Most racks are on the order of 2 ft. wide and 4ft deep. The iDataplex racks are 4ft wide, and 2ft deep, with two columns each 19" wide. The cooling is still front to back with 19" wide servers, it's just that the racks are less deep. They are doubled up presumably to be in some way conventional for shipping, marketing, whatever, but ultimately aren't as exotic as some would fear. They could have just as well had 'normal' 42U racks with only half the depth and logically be analogous. They also take some of the spare horizontal space and carve out 16U of vertically oriented U space.
As to the air cooling aspect, I think the discussion is tilted toward the extremes of bad datacenter design to sound better, but water-cooling is more efficient to pump the distance even with clear path for the air to go. Not saying this is specific to any particular vendor (the difficulty of sticking the converse of a radiator on the back of a rack seems like it would be low), but I think IBM is fishing for ways to take advantage of two-column racks in a remotely meaningful way. In this case, the ratio of usable surface area on the water pipes to unusable plumbing in the design is higher since they can be wider.
The big companies are locking on to 'Web 2.0' as a moniker for embracing an idea they had been completely ignoring until Google took advantage of it and forced everyone to notice. Smaller companies had already gotten the message that while hardware-failure tolerant servers have their place, in many situations with large numbers of systems the only practical place to solve it is in software, and then expensive hardware redundancy is superfluous, costing both initial money and additional power/cooling.
I'm not saying Google was by any means the first to think of this or do it, but no one else that did that as part of their core strategy had come to the spotlight to the degree Google has. Every single one of Google's moves to the industry at large has become synonymous to 'Web 2.0', and as such hardware designs done with an eye on Google's datacenter sensibilities logically become 'Web 2.0' related. You'll also note them saying 'Green computing' and every other possible buzzword that is fashionable.
Of course, part of it is to an extent trying to create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy around 'Web 2.0'. If you help convince the world (particularly venture capitalists) that a bubble on the order of the '.com' days is there to be ridden, you inflate the customer base. Market engineering in the truest sense of the phrase.
Personally, I would think the easier thing to do if trying to trojan a system would be to mess with agetty or login, or the user's login scripts, or modifying their initrd in /boot if / is an encrypted block device. Modifying the kernel seems... well, pointlessly convoluted for a simple trojaning.
The various components of the Wii are incapable of realtime decoding of 1920x1080 x264 content. That isn't necessarily important to what Wii aims to be, a game console, but it is an important checkbox for anything striving to be a comprehensive media solution.
PS3 has the best hardware base to pursue such a thing, but has no apparent strategy to do so beyond physical media playback. MS has the best software base to pursue it, what with most systems sold today already having MS software preloaded, giving xBox an advantage as a frontend.
On a related note, I was fairly flipped out when a Vista box was put on my home network, and it reported my MythTV backend by default in WMP and even listed the recordings. It wasn't able to play back any of the content, but it surprised me nonetheless.
Why is it overkill? Just because it *can* offer advanced features does not mean you must use those. It's just another DB implementation that happens to use SQL syntax as its query format. For basic stuff, SQL is very straightfoward (doesn't get much simpler than "select name from custromers where address like.."). The amount of setup is trivially the same as any other file (open/create a file just like anything else), and the space requirements are negligible.
In response to the mentions of DB engines that use a human-readable format, my experience with those is that I gain practically nothing because I rarely end up reading the DB directly, but it is horrendously slow for many operations. Not much to gain, a lot to lose. When I do want a plaintext backup or something to read, it's a sqlite dump away. If the databse access are exceedingly rare, a plaintext may be 'enough', but at the end of the day, a solution like SQLite or a bdb setup is much more widely used and tested.
Basically, it's a branding initiative with zero weight behind it. AMD is in the unfortunate position of not having leading products in either graphics or processor, and yet they are trying to emphasize themselves as a leader for gaming enthusiasts. Of all the markets to try to hoodwink, this is a poor choice to focus. There has been a long standing history of PC gaming nuts keeping a close eye on technology and commenting. The ones that aren't so obsessive about it have either moved to consoles or don't bother buying hardware and just game with what they got, with the titles they are comfortable with. They already know that even as of B3 stepping Phenoms, the processor isn't up to compete with Core2. They know that nVidia still has the edge, from either driver optimization or the hardware itself, it's hard to tell.
So what you are left with is a branding initiative targeting a market that is admittedly potentially high margin, but in this scope to savvy to fall for such a move. If they truly want that market, they need to push their product from a technical, not marketing standpoint. With the offering they have now, their only viable option is to emphasis value for the money, regrettably relegating themselves again to the budget market. AMD has been there before and didn't die and emerged with an overwhelming product before, and they have just got to accept it and regroup.
Why I'm not buying digital cable, and instead rely upon broadcast for major television HD. I'll also purchase media, but only if it does not have significantly troubling DRM. I.e. I give CSS a pass on DVDs because my alternatives for legal consumption of media are not good, it's trivial to defeat, and I can't quite give up on the media as a whole (though I very rarely do buy any content, since I am fairly disgusted with the industry).
Except MS is not a monopoly in this space, but rather a minority player. Last I checked, Tivo was probably the market dominator, but no vendor has a monopolistic hold on the market.
Maybe you say they have a grip on the 'media pc' market, but I'm not sure that's accurate either. I think the common market is not excited about media pcs and is instead favoring consoles and DVRs. Particularly since consoles are implementing internet access and web browsing, the motivation for a media pc for most people is low. Since it isn't seen at large as the best means to an end, that means the people implementing it are more the hobbyist type, so the penetration of something like MythTV is higher. In this sort of application, DRM rears its ugly head the most, so a platform like MythTV will treat users well as those are the targets to please, not a commercial partner/customer.
I could see Tivo in the past implementing it as they thought it was inevitable, but probably once it was determined as not inevitable, a company in a competitive marketplace can't afford to screw their customers. The networks probably offered Tivo some money to honor the flag and Tivo may have decided the better business move would be that the money wouldn't be worth the lost sales.
Meanwhile MS is not accustomed to such a situation. To them, the end-users have been a foregone conclusion, MS expects to get that money no matter how crappy they treat those users. So when the networks come to them with an offer, it's a no-brainer. This is what a monopolistic viewpoint does. In the DVR space, you would think they would realize they are not a monopoly and not act this way, but until this incident, they hadn't had their situation tested.
It's an interesting thing showing users the reality of where they stand. They are not customers to NBC, they are a necessary evil for NBC to deal with indirectly to please their customers, advertisers. Advertisers desires trump viewer desires. To MS, the end-users are to an extent customers, but again they are assumed to be guaranteed customers. MS has to pander a bit more to OEMs, but not much. MS therefore views deals with other entities (like studios) for abusing their users as the place where they can grow.
I will say I like how this has played out in general compared to the alternative. The networks tried to get the FCC to enforce it on their behalf and failed. Now, they must pay every DVR vendor and every DVR vendor gets to choose whether or not the lost sales are worth it. Allow the broadcast flag, and specify a standard path for it, but don't mandate enforcement and let capitalism work it out. Of course, I know which way this would go, obeying the broadcast flag is dvr market suicide.
I have Fedora on one system because it handles one scenario more easily than Ubuntu, x86_64 having to install third-party 32-bit software. Other than that, the system is frustrating:
-Their 'releases' seem to mean little. They don't stick to the major revisions of software (Fedroa 8 box updated kernel to 2.6.24 and pidgin to 2.4 for example). As a result, third party drivers can exhibit different glitches or not work at all even during a routine update. Pidgin changed its UI and initially started crashing for me a lot when they went to 2.4. No matter what Fedora path you take, you are submitted to the bleeding edge across the board, not just the areas you are intrinsically interested in.
-They have no interest in helping users have a convenient time with binary software. I.e. annoying to install flash, nvidia, or ati binary drivers. It's one thing of the OSS alternatives are remotely comparable, but they simply are not at this point. ath5k when first adopted was no where near good enough for common usage. The nv driver is a waste of paying the nVidia premium. Ditto for the open source ATI driver until those efforts see fruition. And the open-source implementation of flash is getting closer, but is still far removed from a viable alternative.
All in all, Fedora feels to an extent like crippleware and a rolling beta. Knowing explicitly that as a user you are little more than a free tester for RedHat's for-profit endeavor is annoying. If I were interested in a specific major increase of a package such that I didn't want to wait a few months for the next distro rev, I'd download it myself.
Ubuntu's releases are not perfect (the hardy scheduler annoyance a good example), but the complaints are far less severe and I know when an update might require work. I'm too lazy to have to deal with a major change at a random time. It's the reason why I stopped using Gentoo after a couple of years.
Sorry to rant, but the implication that Fedora is 'geeky' and Ubuntu is not rubbed me the wrong way.
Was unphased, it's wonderful. I remember the scare to grab digital tuners before the broadcast flag have become mandatory, but now all you have to worry about is Vista going out of their way to honor something noone else in the industry bothers to. Microsoft loves their customers just sooo much.
Wonder how many new MythTV installs this event prompted.
Isn't she? When the *next* item is being oriented to face the scanner is the interval that you could read the display. If they could thrust as fast as they want without regard to orientation, the prices would probably scroll too fast to read.
When doing anything that requires something to physically touch is considered too much work and we'd rather risk our financial info being wirelessly transmitted than have to swipe a card, we have serious issues.
And all this about inventory tracking is kind of an orthogonal point to payment isn't it? I for one certainly don't mind them being able to wave rfid wands around a vague area and account for an entire big package without having to scan a unique barcode for every item. I wouldn't mind a checkout system where they didn't even need to find the upc (or for that matter, could scan the whole cart in one go instead of item by item). However, I don't see the big benefit of avoiding physical contact with my payment device (which I wish was more technically secure than my mag-stripe credit card).
Speed Racer definitely fell into the category of unrealistic/stylized on purpose, so it seems an appropriate fit.
But then at the end of a day, it's just supposed to be a fun movie, and we miss the fun by overanalyzing it to death.
Many of these vendors would have just written Windows clients/apps. I too prefer native apps, but untill the consumer market is more heterogenous, the likely alternative to web apps is native apps for a platform I don't like.
Of course, in a heterogeneous environment, the developers won't touch native clients with a teen foot pole...
Until I thought about the ability to have multiple tags on an item. Essentially, with tagging you have the full power of set arithmetic. A hierarchical scheme can be considered a strict subset. If you have INBOX, with a subfolder called 'Bank', and a subfolder called 'Credit', you can acheive the same thing by tagging the same message both 'bank' and 'credit'. The 'subfolder' would now represent the set intersection of the two tags. True, all your groups are visiibile from the top level, but a UI could none the less have a drill-down with set notation and acheive the same effect as hierarchical organization.
So tagging can have that power, it's a matter of UI design to make it as convenient.
I read a sample and I must confess that I think the sample was more confusing than most typical code. I'm talking about how multiply gives only one operand, and seems to be using an implicit default variable. Perl also can do this, and when I see people use it in complex situations, it's hard to tell when the last time default would have been set at times.
I do agree making the primitives verbose doesn't help. Ultimately, it isn't the fact that '*' is hard to understand, or that braces enclose blocks, the primitives used in conjunction with clear variable names is sufficient for that to be comprehensibe. You don't see (at least shouldn't):
$total = $subtotal * (1+$tax) # Mulitply the subtotal by 1 plus the sales tax
Because it's so simple. Comments come in to explain things in certain cases. The 'black box' description of the function with what it expects and what it will spit out, without talking about intermediate steps. And to explain potentially convoluted blocks.