.... would be a more accurate title (for the CNET article too). If you read the judgement[1] you'll see the case was dismissed because the appeal used a different theory of the case not argued in the original hearing; it seems this would require a whole new suit (IANAL, etc).
On the plus side, as the new theory was not judged on its merits, this doesn't form precedent.
[1] asking/. to RTFJ is a step beyond even RTFA I know...the gist: in the original hearing the plaintiff argued that the website is a "public accomodation" and lost; the appeal argued that the company as a whole is a "public accommodation".
Re:Ceefax is cool but dated....
on
Ceefax Turns 30
·
· Score: 1
"richer digital content"
I don't know if you've tried it but the digital content is *worse* than teletext, for subtitling. On a teletext enabled tv you just press the text button to surf to 888 for the subtitles. They appear pretty much instantaneously, and are easy to toggle on and off.
On Sky (and apparently freeview) you have to: - press services, to get this menu - press 4 to get this menu - press 3 to get this menu - press down to select the subtitles - press right to change the language.
And the menus are sloooooooooooow. While you're doing this the program you were watching is interrupted and some crappy background music plays. They're designed to be permanently on or permanently off. Believe it or not, this is putting me off switching to digital.
Googling to see if anyone else has commented on the problem, I found it's actually in the Ofcom checklist for DTV equipement suppliers (see C.3)... which obviously none of them have read.
A single bot, maybe. But more than one in the same game?
It seems to me like this is the way to cheat: if you have cooperating bots they're not just better cardcounters, they are counting more cards so know the odds better than you can. They can even do nasty mindgame stuff like bid/fold on a bluff to load the stakes for the/other/ hand to win.
I guess shenigans like that happen in human-only poker too, but its harder for a single person to think that fast and in a face to face game the cheating would be obvious.
What we need are virtual derringers for the varmints.
"In the early 1960's Aerojet studied project FIRST (Fabrication of Inflatable Re-entry Structures for Test) in order to evaluate the use of inflatable Rogallo wings for emergency return from orbit.... The resulting trajectory was found to be practical under automatic or manual control. G loads during re-entry would not exceed 2.0 G."
I just did some digging again and found a component based solution which does some of this stuff, unfortunately its *even more* expensive: http://www.antelopetech.com/en/index.a spx?view=i-o rdering_OnlineOrdering.htm
thats based around a 3" x 5" x 3/4" "modular computing core"... this was an IBM invention around the time of the OQO's original debut, if you recall; Antelope licensed it. The trouble is, even as components, the core (CPU, HD) is $1.5k and the handheld shell (battery, screen) is another $1.5k. Eek.
Reading the article, the answer appears to be: politics. eg this from IDC: "There are probably plenty of engineers in the world who would love to have their own cluster so they don't have to wait for the machines in the lab"
you what now? If its about lack of compute power on the network - usually something your project/dept contributes money to - then this comment can only mean those people who have enough money in their budget to go it alone. Most likely these people won't want sysadmins or support contracts either - those things tend to get taken care of only when there's economies of scale.
I've seen this kind of thing happen, its a disaster. 2 years later they'll be whining to central computing that they're desktops arent being replaced when they're no longer contributing to the budget for them. That being said, it seems to happen often enough that Orion could be on a winner.
"In fact in his last set of tests when ext3 is setup to journal the same way reiserfs v3 did, ext3 soundly beats it except in the delete category."
I think you mean "ext3 is soundly beaten except in the delete category". In the mongo benchmarks: http://www.namesys.com/benchmarks.htm l You're talking about columnm, C "ext3 in data=writeback mode". Notice the note that says "Green number means that reiser4 loses in this test." Looking at the latest set of results, the real time column is RED except for delete.
No argument with your other points. I'd need to try reiser4 in the real world to be convinced the difference was worth it.
"he prominence of black characters in those story lines is all the more striking because of the narrow range of video games in which blacks have been present, if present at all, over the years. A 2001 study by Children Now, for example, found that of 1,500 video-game characters surveyed, 288 were African-American males - and 83 percent of those were represented as athletes."
I was curious - how many of the 1500 were hedgehogs? Racoons? Demon imps?
I checked the report this figure was lifted from: http://www.childrennow.org/media/video-game s/2001/
"White characters were the majority in the video game population (56%)" - thats as opposed to 19% being african-american males (see above). That's compared to the real US population which is 80% white and roughly 7% african-american males (see http://www.census.gov/statab/www/poprace.html) - even ignoring for a moment that many games originate in Japan where the racial mix is even more skewed.
The accusations of stereotyping and the narrow range of games including such characters ring true, but the "if present at all" remark is completely unsupported by the figures - if anything african-american males are quite over-represented in games. Although not to the extent of space aliens, who make up less than 1% of the real population.
Living in the UK, I'd ask - where are the asian characters? (apart from japanese/chinese). Our population is about 5% from the indian subcontinent, but I can't recall ever playing a game with indian or pakistani characters.
Is this correct? The greenhouse effect happens precisely because the atmosphere absorbs infrared but transmits visible light - light heats the earth, the heat is re-radiated in IR, but is trapped here by the atmosphere. To cool down you want to radiate IR, not trap it?
I presume these people know what they're doing, but its sounds to me like the future holds unformfortably sticky leopardskin seats in our flying cars.
In fact, in the presentation on IronPython at OSCON, they also did the Pie-thon benchmark and IronPython WAS SLOWER than CPython. See the presentation. IP was 70% faster than CPython on the PyStone benchmark, which was what's been written about in the past, but on the Pie-thon benchmark, it came out about 4% slower (slides 24, 25). While IronPython was faster on most of the individual bits of the benchmark, he would have been pied in the face as well.
Its interesting to do a head-to-head comparison of the benchmarks Parrot completed (speedups are relative to CPython):
b1: IronPython 2.1x faster, Parrot 1.2x faster b2: IP same speed, Parrot 3x faster b3: IP 1.5x faster, Parrot 2.1x slower b6: IP 1.2x faster, Parrot 1.5x faster
Score: 2 each. Both authors claim they can improve their benchmarks significantly yet, but you have to feel it will be easier for Dan as he's optimising the VM itself, Jim Hugunin can only optimize his IL output for an existing VM.
Re:Completely silent-Dead giveaway.
on
Sun Rays For Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Not sure what the pricing is like now, but I looked into buying 50 of them at one point. In the UK it was going to cost me around £500 per station, plus of course the extra beef the servers needed (our network was ok so at least I didn't need to upgrade that). I couldn't justify the cost in comparison to PCs, which we were buying at arouns £1k at the time; for £500 extra the PC could be repurposed as a build machine, a test server, or whatever a project needed; they also came with 40Gb of disk, which would have cost us $$$ on the server. We could also save on PCs by not buying a new monitor for each PC replaced.
User's PCs weren't backed up, everyone had space on the servers which was raided and backed up; the cost of providing that much disk space, and backing it up, with the Sunray solution was prohibitive, and it would have been a single point of failure.
In the end, while it was cool, there were too many down sides. If I had been buying for a faily homogenous 'office' population, instead of developers, it would have been a closer-run thing.
Be warned - Bontago will bring your system to its knees on bigger maps, more players.
In larger games you end up with a standoff where each player is constantly disrupting the others lines of communication, and the only way to attempt a win is to build a rubble road to the flags. This means that you end up with huge numbers of objects on the map, and thats when the game falls apart. It takes so long to recalculate your area of influence, which is constantly changing, that all your drops time out and you are no longer able to play.
If the game changed just a bit so it didn't completely reset your area of influence while it figures out the effect of a change, it wouldn't be so bad.
The idea of software that lasts 200 years reminded me of a discussion on the radio the other day about the origin of a joke: "I've had this broom 50 years, its had 5 new heads and 3 new handles". The identity issue played with here dates back at least to Plutarch's Ship of Theseus - if you keep replacing parts of a thing, until no original parts remain, is it still the same thing?
The relevance to software is captured with an example: Is Linux still Linux? How much remains of the kernel originally published by Linus? Would would you say that Linux has been around for X years (pick X to suit)?
Most people would agree that it's still Linux. What Linux, the broom, and Theseus' ship have in common is that they could be modified to meet the demands of time, while retaining their identity.
I've always thought that maintainability is the highest virtue software can strive for, above other quality-oriented goals like being bug-free, or performant. If its buggy, but maintainable, it can be fixed; if its slow, but maintainable, we can make it faster. I think it could also be argued that software, like Theseus' ship, needs to be maintainable to last 200 years; but the version 200 years from now may not resemble the original in the slightest.
Java's inner classes (anonymous or named) are not even first class! (Try coding an inner class that refers to a non-final attribute in its enclosing scope.)
This isn't quite right. First off, they are first class, and you can refer to a non-final attribute from a named or anonymous inner class. What you can't do is refer to a non-final local variable from an anonymous inner class.
The intended effect is similar to closures - variables referenced from the enclosing scope have the value when the closure was instantiated (see, e.g. Scheme) - except that unlike scheme, you can't modify the now-private copy. If you want a modifiable copy, you just make one, like so:
final finalFoo = foo;
Object bar = new Object() {
private myFoo = finalFoo;// myFoo now acts as 'foo' would if this was// *really* a closure.
}
I'd agree that the construct sucks. I'd rather be in a language with closures myself.
EU-wide elections took place quite recently. The original vote was before the elections, this decision is after. The (usual) mid-term swing against the governing party in pretty much all EU countries was bound to have some political fallout.
A similar thing could happen in the states; a bill passed by Congress could be passed to an outgoing president, who leaves it to the incoming president to sign up... the incoming president can then still veto the bill.
Its unlikely in the US system, as a bill becomes law after 10 days if the president doesn't sign it, or is stopped by the 'pocket veto' if Congress adjourns during those 10 days - but I'd guess Lyndon Johnson was left with unsigned bills by JFK.
Thank you for listening. I needed to get that off my chest. I'm just sick and tired of dickheads like the parent being the standard by which humanity is judged.
Earthling compassion surprise Morvo. Morvo will spare your puny world.
What's unprofessional is choosing the wrong tools for the job. Progman3k might do almost-all of his development on and for linux, but needs to build a small amount of windows software too (I'm in much the same boat myself). In this case it makes sense that he has abandoned windows, since he has little use for it, and would rather use Wine than whatever second PC/dual boot/VMware solution he currently uses.
It'd be cheaper for the people who pay his salary.
Of course I'm making assumptions about Progman3k's situation, but those are implicit in your argument too.
"At the time, it was the concept of a wireless version of Ethernet that was seen to be novel."
the funny part of this is, that Bob Metcalfe based the design of wired Ethernet on the wireless Aloha-net. I seem to remember an interview where he said they originally moved to cable because they couldn't afford the radio links that U. Hawaii had used.
(yeah I know this is what you're referring to as packet radio - I just happen to be easily amused)
Ok as a serious argument though, this comment from one of the Ethernet pioneers is interesting:
"David Liddle, now general partner at U.S. Venture Partners, said Xerox charged a one-time license fee of just $1,000. That's in contrast to the huge fees associated with Token Ring.
Xerox's stipulation was that the technology couldn't be changed -- it had to interoperate with all other Ethernet implementations. "Thus we made a playing field in which we could all thrive and compete," Liddle said"
Its interesting because its today's argument happening 20 years ago - IBM attempting to turn a token-ring into a cash cow (like today's patent shills) turned people away from it as a standard, and Ethernet won - admittedly with a 'RAND' approach, not a patent-free approach.
Slashdot Mirror
.... would be a more accurate title (for the CNET article too). If you read the judgement[1] you'll see the case was dismissed because the appeal used a different theory of the case not argued in the original hearing; it seems this would require a whole new suit (IANAL, etc).
/. to RTFJ is a step beyond even RTFA I know...the gist: in the original hearing the plaintiff argued that the website is a "public accomodation" and lost; the appeal argued that the company as a whole is a "public accommodation".
On the plus side, as the new theory was not judged on its merits, this doesn't form precedent.
[1] asking
"richer digital content"
I don't know if you've tried it but the digital content is *worse* than teletext, for subtitling. On a teletext enabled tv you just press the text button to surf to 888 for the subtitles. They appear pretty much instantaneously, and are easy to toggle on and off.
On Sky (and apparently freeview) you have to:
- press services, to get this menu
- press 4 to get this menu
- press 3 to get this menu
- press down to select the subtitles
- press right to change the language.
And the menus are sloooooooooooow. While you're doing this the program you were watching is interrupted and some crappy background music plays. They're designed to be permanently on or permanently off. Believe it or not, this is putting me off switching to digital.
Googling to see if anyone else has commented on the problem, I found it's actually in the Ofcom checklist for DTV equipement suppliers (see C.3)... which obviously none of them have read.
A single bot, maybe. But more than one in the same game?
/other/ hand to win.
It seems to me like this is the way to cheat: if you have cooperating bots they're not just better cardcounters, they are counting more cards so know the odds better than you can. They can even do nasty mindgame stuff like bid/fold on a bluff to load the stakes for the
I guess shenigans like that happen in human-only poker too, but its harder for a single person to think that fast and in a face to face game the cheating would be obvious.
What we need are virtual derringers for the varmints.
"I want a distro where by default packages install under $HOME so that someone can install their favorite browser without root access."
Take a look at zero install. You can install 0install on many distros (as root) then install apps as a user exactly like you want.
Or buy a mac!
Mod parent up, he's right. Here's the link
... The resulting trajectory was found to be practical under automatic or manual control. G loads during re-entry would not exceed 2.0 G."
"In the early 1960's Aerojet studied project FIRST (Fabrication of Inflatable Re-entry Structures for Test) in order to evaluate the use of inflatable Rogallo wings for emergency return from orbit.
I just did some digging again and found a component based solution which does some of this stuff, unfortunately its *even more* expensive:a spx?view=i-o rdering_OnlineOrdering.htm
... this was an IBM invention around the time of the OQO's original debut, if you recall; Antelope licensed it. The trouble is, even as components, the core (CPU, HD) is $1.5k and the handheld shell (battery, screen) is another $1.5k. Eek.
http://www.antelopetech.com/en/index.
thats based around a 3" x 5" x 3/4" "modular computing core"
"why not get a huge server..."
Reading the article, the answer appears to be: politics. eg this from IDC: "There are probably plenty of engineers in the world who would love to have their own cluster so they don't have to wait for the machines in the lab"
you what now? If its about lack of compute power on the network - usually something your project/dept contributes money to - then this comment can only mean those people who have enough money in their budget to go it alone. Most likely these people won't want sysadmins or support contracts either - those things tend to get taken care of only when there's economies of scale.
I've seen this kind of thing happen, its a disaster. 2 years later they'll be whining to central computing that they're desktops arent being replaced when they're no longer contributing to the budget for them. That being said, it seems to happen often enough that Orion could be on a winner.
3 years ago, when he was asked to take its image format conversion out of the kernel:
here's the message
"In fact in his last set of tests when ext3 is setup to journal the same way reiserfs v3 did, ext3 soundly beats it except in the delete category."
m l
I think you mean "ext3 is soundly beaten except in the delete category". In the mongo benchmarks:
http://www.namesys.com/benchmarks.ht
You're talking about columnm, C "ext3 in data=writeback mode". Notice the note that says "Green number means that reiser4 loses in this test." Looking at the latest set of results, the real time column is RED except for delete.
No argument with your other points. I'd need to try reiser4 in the real world to be convinced the difference was worth it.
"he prominence of black characters in those story lines is all the more striking because of the narrow range of video games in which blacks have been present, if present at all, over the years. A 2001 study by Children Now, for example, found that of 1,500 video-game characters surveyed, 288 were African-American males - and 83 percent of those were represented as athletes."
e s/2001/
I was curious - how many of the 1500 were hedgehogs? Racoons? Demon imps?
I checked the report this figure was lifted from:
http://www.childrennow.org/media/video-gam
"White characters were the majority in the video game population (56%)" - thats as opposed to 19% being african-american males (see above). That's compared to the real US population which is 80% white and roughly 7% african-american males (see http://www.census.gov/statab/www/poprace.html) - even ignoring for a moment that many games originate in Japan where the racial mix is even more skewed.
The accusations of stereotyping and the narrow range of games including such characters ring true, but the "if present at all" remark is completely unsupported by the figures - if anything african-american males are quite over-represented in games. Although not to the extent of space aliens, who make up less than 1% of the real population.
Living in the UK, I'd ask - where are the asian characters? (apart from japanese/chinese). Our population is about 5% from the indian subcontinent, but I can't recall ever playing a game with indian or pakistani characters.
Is this correct? The greenhouse effect happens precisely because the atmosphere absorbs infrared but transmits visible light - light heats the earth, the heat is re-radiated in IR, but is trapped here by the atmosphere. To cool down you want to radiate IR, not trap it?
I presume these people know what they're doing, but its sounds to me like the future holds unformfortably sticky leopardskin seats in our flying cars.
In fact, in the presentation on IronPython at OSCON, they also did the Pie-thon benchmark and IronPython WAS SLOWER than CPython. See the presentation. IP was 70% faster than CPython on the PyStone benchmark, which was what's been written about in the past, but on the Pie-thon benchmark, it came out about 4% slower (slides 24, 25). While IronPython was faster on most of the individual bits of the benchmark, he would have been pied in the face as well.
Its interesting to do a head-to-head comparison of the benchmarks Parrot completed (speedups are relative to CPython):
b1: IronPython 2.1x faster, Parrot 1.2x faster
b2: IP same speed, Parrot 3x faster
b3: IP 1.5x faster, Parrot 2.1x slower
b6: IP 1.2x faster, Parrot 1.5x faster
Score: 2 each. Both authors claim they can improve their benchmarks significantly yet, but you have to feel it will be easier for Dan as he's optimising the VM itself, Jim Hugunin can only optimize his IL output for an existing VM.
Not sure what the pricing is like now, but I looked into buying 50 of them at one point. In the UK it was going to cost me around £500 per station, plus of course the extra beef the servers needed (our network was ok so at least I didn't need to upgrade that). I couldn't justify the cost in comparison to PCs, which we were buying at arouns £1k at the time; for £500 extra the PC could be repurposed as a build machine, a test server, or whatever a project needed; they also came with 40Gb of disk, which would have cost us $$$ on the server. We could also save on PCs by not buying a new monitor for each PC replaced.
User's PCs weren't backed up, everyone had space on the servers which was raided and backed up; the cost of providing that much disk space, and backing it up, with the Sunray solution was prohibitive, and it would have been a single point of failure.
In the end, while it was cool, there were too many down sides. If I had been buying for a faily homogenous 'office' population, instead of developers, it would have been a closer-run thing.
Its a sample of 1.5 million, not 1.5 million. That paragraph basically says they did a telephone survey, probably about 1000 users.
Be warned - Bontago will bring your system to its knees on bigger maps, more players.
In larger games you end up with a standoff where each player is constantly disrupting the others lines of communication, and the only way to attempt a win is to build a rubble road to the flags. This means that you end up with huge numbers of objects on the map, and thats when the game falls apart. It takes so long to recalculate your area of influence, which is constantly changing, that all your drops time out and you are no longer able to play.
If the game changed just a bit so it didn't completely reset your area of influence while it figures out the effect of a change, it wouldn't be so bad.
The idea of software that lasts 200 years reminded me of a discussion on the radio the other day about the origin of a joke: "I've had this broom 50 years, its had 5 new heads and 3 new handles". The identity issue played with here dates back at least to Plutarch's Ship of Theseus - if you keep replacing parts of a thing, until no original parts remain, is it still the same thing?
The relevance to software is captured with an example: Is Linux still Linux? How much remains of the kernel originally published by Linus? Would would you say that Linux has been around for X years (pick X to suit)?
Most people would agree that it's still Linux. What Linux, the broom, and Theseus' ship have in common is that they could be modified to meet the demands of time, while retaining their identity.
I've always thought that maintainability is the highest virtue software can strive for, above other quality-oriented goals like being bug-free, or performant. If its buggy, but maintainable, it can be fixed; if its slow, but maintainable, we can make it faster. I think it could also be argued that software, like Theseus' ship, needs to be maintainable to last 200 years; but the version 200 years from now may not resemble the original in the slightest.
Just my 2c
Baz
leaked
here.
BillG: Pinky, Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Ballmer: I think so, Brain, but will the undead pay for support?
This isn't quite right. First off, they are first class, and you can refer to a non-final attribute from a named or anonymous inner class. What you can't do is refer to a non-final local variable from an anonymous inner class.
The intended effect is similar to closures - variables referenced from the enclosing scope have the value when the closure was instantiated (see, e.g. Scheme) - except that unlike scheme, you can't modify the now-private copy. If you want a modifiable copy, you just make one, like so:
final finalFoo = foo; Object bar = new Object() { private myFoo = finalFoo; // myFoo now acts as 'foo' would if this was // *really* a closure.
}
I'd agree that the construct sucks. I'd rather be in a language with closures myself.
EU-wide elections took place quite recently. The original vote was before the elections, this decision is after. The (usual) mid-term swing against the governing party in pretty much all EU countries was bound to have some political fallout.
A similar thing could happen in the states; a bill passed by Congress could be passed to an outgoing president, who leaves it to the incoming president to sign up... the incoming president can then still veto the bill.
Its unlikely in the US system, as a bill becomes law after 10 days if the president doesn't sign it, or is stopped by the 'pocket veto' if Congress adjourns during those 10 days - but I'd guess Lyndon Johnson was left with unsigned bills by JFK.
-Baz
Thank you for listening. I needed to get that off my chest. I'm just sick and tired of dickheads like the parent being the standard by which humanity is judged.
Earthling compassion surprise Morvo. Morvo will spare your puny world.
What's unprofessional is choosing the wrong tools for the job. Progman3k might do almost-all of his development on and for linux, but needs to build a small amount of windows software too (I'm in much the same boat myself). In this case it makes sense that he has abandoned windows, since he has little use for it, and would rather use Wine than whatever second PC/dual boot/VMware solution he currently uses.
It'd be cheaper for the people who pay his salary.
Of course I'm making assumptions about Progman3k's situation, but those are implicit in your argument too.
Depends where you are though, this list is US-centric:
Vendors List
Someone else has already suggested the JBoss group, there's also the Core Developers Network, both of them provide support in Europe.
Actually, Netbeans does come bundled with the compiler and debugger:d .html
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/downloa
And in the case of Eclipse, the debugger *is* bundled, just not the java runtime or compiler.
Yes, it's very, very common. Think embedded systems. Think PDAs. Think mainframes.
"At the time, it was the concept of a wireless version of Ethernet that was seen to be novel."
d =3 4327
the funny part of this is, that Bob Metcalfe based the design of wired Ethernet on the wireless Aloha-net. I seem to remember an interview where he said they originally moved to cable because they couldn't afford the radio links that U. Hawaii had used.
(yeah I know this is what you're referring to as packet radio - I just happen to be easily amused)
Ok as a serious argument though, this comment from one of the Ethernet pioneers is interesting:
"David Liddle, now general partner at U.S. Venture Partners, said Xerox charged a one-time license fee of just $1,000. That's in contrast to the huge fees associated with Token Ring.
Xerox's stipulation was that the technology couldn't be changed -- it had to interoperate with all other Ethernet implementations. "Thus we made a playing field in which we could all thrive and compete," Liddle said"
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_i
Its interesting because its today's argument happening 20 years ago - IBM attempting to turn a token-ring into a cash cow (like today's patent shills) turned people away from it as a standard, and Ethernet won - admittedly with a 'RAND' approach, not a patent-free approach.