That's great if all I want to do is maintain a database through a web interface. I don't. Most of my work involves complex modification of that data, or calculations based on it.
Does Rails help with that?
Don't get me wrong, I've got some simple PHP lying around this could replace brilliantly, but first impressions are it doesn't help with the really complex stuff.
I'm not sure what non-iTunes stores outside the UK are like (because they won't let me find out), but the ones I've seen in the UK are all rebranded versions of the same backend. Which was awkward to use, glitchy, and more expensive. Their only advantage was they had some tracks iTunes didn't. I'd provide links, but I can only get into the pages using IE for Windows.
"Will work with anything except the iTunes store" isn't that great a selling point, IMHO...
Ummm... huh? Could you reference some of these laws, to start with?
I'll use the Data Protection Act (1998) from the UK, as an example here. You can view it at: http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/19980029.htm. The short version of this is that to hold personal information, you must be registered, and you must register how you intend to use that information. You also have to provide that information on request, to the person whose information it is, but that's not relevant here...
The thing is, I don't see how an IP address is personal information. It doesn't identify you, it identifies a computer system (with dynamic IPs, it only identifies them at a particular point in time). This is comparable to having a house address without the name of anyone in the house; this information is trivially available (lets start with the websites of estate agents, and work from there).
Now, in the UK, they would need to be registered to associate a person with that IP address, but I can't seriously see them being blocked from doing so. The only real stumbling block is actually getting that information from the person's ISP, as I believe we've managed to avoid having our own DMCA so far (can anyone confirm/deny?).
Certainly, I can't see it making the slightest difference why they're recording the IP address. Let me put this another way; I have server logs of someone trying to break into the server. These contain IP address; why would that be illegal for me to hold? I have no idea who this person is...
While it's going to be slow, they could hack a BitTorrent client to not upload. Perhaps more usefully, they could upload gibberish; I believe most clients would still upload in response, because they are receiving data.
I would be amazed if it doesn't. In particular, this would leave Apple having to pull out a new Mac Mini for the new OS, and alienate the large number of PC switchers they'll probably get (those people that thought "Hey, iPods rock, maybe their computers do to").
Personally, I'm getting a Mac Mini for my father (how do you explain to someone when you should and shouldn't click on attachments e-mailed by someone you know? Getting a system that won't have this problem, and which I can actually help him fix, seems a better plan), and will get one for myself once they ship with Tiger.
I have to say, I use a 1.5Ghz PowerBook with 512mb RAM, and it's wonderfully fast. Sure, I wouldn't want to run seriously CPU intensive stuff on it (Doom 3 springs to mind), but for web, e-mail, text editing, music/movie playing etc. I can't tell the difference between it and my Athlon64 3200+ Linux box at home. Startup times are a little longer because of the slower HD, but that's about it.
People are too used to PC requirements. In particular, as someone else pointed out, OS X has been getting progressively faster with each release, not slower.
I have to say here, if you want a cool laptop, why are you waiting for a G5? I've got a 1.5Ghz 15" G4 PowerBook as my desktop replacement, and it rocks, but it's about as hot as I'm comfortable with. Do you genuinely do anything that requires processing power with your laptops, or do you just want the latest thing? Unless you're going to use that CPU grunt, I'd really recommend getting a 1.33Ghz or 1.5Ghz PowerBook.
Personally, I feel like cheering. Overpeer are doing more for killing the WMA (and probably WMV) formats, and their DRM, than anyone else. Also, for a site that can be really harsh on people who get their PCs infected with viruses/adware because they did something dumb,/. seems remarkably forgiving of "I downloaded this illegal WMA file from some random guy on the Internet and played it".
In particular, I'd rather have more competition in the browser market place. While Firefox being the most widely used browser is better than IE, IMHO (mostly because I'm fed up working around IE bugs), having a good spread of web browsers means:
1. Browser developers are more motivated to think of nifty new features. 2. Security holes in one are unlikely (but I'm aware there are exceptions) to turn up in a different browser. This reduces the impact of such security holes. 3. Web developers are more inclined to work to the standards, rather than "It works on my browser". This in turn means that browser developers are more likely to work to the standards, rather than "Works with my favourite websites". This all helps keep those of us who like the standards, sane.
I think the real issue with the Blizzard implementation is that they try to force you not to download any more than you upload. My personal thoughts on this is that they should see the peer to peer uploads as a bandwidth saving, rather than a replacement for supplying massive upload bandwidth themselves.
Personally I used the torrents at:
http://www.wowtorrents.de.vu/
with Azureus, and got reasonable download speed after a while.
This is more or less what I do at work. We've got Linux servers in the server room, which we ssh to. The Mac has plenty of CPU for e-mail, IM, web surfing, playing music, etc., but the real grunt work we leave to the servers.
We've occaisionally toyed with the idea of moving to G5s for servers, but reliability isn't a serious issue for us, and we do some dang weird stuff, so Linux is an easier option at the moment.
Personally, I'll probably pick one of these up for use at home...
which shows (Figure 10) that 75% of BitTorrent users don't upload as much as they download, or put another way, the majority of the uploaded data comes from 25% of the users. I don't have time to work out just how much of the data each section is responsible for, but the numbers are interestingly close to the 80/20 rule.
I don't have time to run the numbers right now, but I wouldn't be too suprised to find that 20% of users uploaded 80% of the data...
Re:Their called assets...
on
Wish Cancelled
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· Score: 1
Can I just second this. Didn't this happen with Blender? Would someone more organised than myself, ideally someone involved with open sourcing Blender, please arrange this? I'd contribute.
...I'll go along with their shiny new DRM standard, if they'll replace my DVD player for free. By which I mean, pick it up from my door, and give me an equivalent player with the DRM, for absolutely no cost to myself.
However, I bought a DVD player, and if it stops playing DVDs for no good reason, I'm not going to be enthusiastic about buying another...
Actually, I do move it around a lot. We have to move every 9 months on average (we've had terrible luck renting anywhere long-term here), at which point weight is a massive issue. Space is also a massive issue currently; I'm sharing a two bedroom flat with two other people, one of whom is occupying the living room. The TV is in my bedroom, because that's all the space we've got.
(Insert rant about UK housing market here)
Still, I know this isn't a situation most people are in, but there are some of us...
I'm also just fed up with paying for a camera on my phone. The images are next to unusable (I can generally tell the subject is human, and can determine gender and hair colour on a good day). Even the phones with good cameras are around 1 megapixel, and I'm really looking for 3-4 megapixels.
Also, given that Linux games tend to cost more, I can save the cost of a copy of Windows in about 5-6 games. As someone who will buy a game a month, this makes it a no-brainer for me.
Re:Do multitaskers have more children?
on
Life Interrupted
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· Score: 1
I suspect the number of/.ers getting absolutely no sex is low, and we zre just a rather vocal minority. Certainly, of the geeks I know IRL, the vast majority have at least dated.
If we therefore assume that multitaskers will generally breed, and that multitasking is considered a useful skill by society, those multitaskers should have enough money to provide a good start in life to their children. This in turn improves the chances of their children passing on multitasking genes.
More to the point,/.ers are merely an extreme example of multitaskers. Many other people can multitask, even if not as well, It is this group that is most likely to cause an evolution towards improved multitasking skills.
Is it just me who would, if designing an AI, would have have a trivial off switch. Probably a few backups, like wire cutters next to the main power cable, a jug of water near the PSU, things like that.
No, seriously, this makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. Case in point, I support several web applications used only in UK based universities. These applications have their own e-mail addresses, which forward on to me. Blocking mail to these, from major USA based ISPs, would drastically cut down the spam that gets to me, with a minimal impact on genuine e-mail...
Even for my personal e-mail, I could whitelist my USA-based friends, and add a high spam score to anything else coming from USA ISPs... very tempting, actually...
Must RTFA more carefully... okay, if they can sell it to telemarketers, that's bad. We've got the Data Protection Act here (UK), which neatly stops them doing that (or at least, not without declaring that they intend to).
Is it just me that finds those electronic trails useful to working out where all the money went? Yes, I could write everything down, but it's so much easier......and why is the bank knowing what I've bought really such a terrible thing?
Slashdot Mirror
That's great if all I want to do is maintain a database through a web interface. I don't. Most of my work involves complex modification of that data, or calculations based on it.
Does Rails help with that?
Don't get me wrong, I've got some simple PHP lying around this could replace brilliantly, but first impressions are it doesn't help with the really complex stuff.
I'm not sure what non-iTunes stores outside the UK are like (because they won't let me find out), but the ones I've seen in the UK are all rebranded versions of the same backend. Which was awkward to use, glitchy, and more expensive. Their only advantage was they had some tracks iTunes didn't. I'd provide links, but I can only get into the pages using IE for Windows.
"Will work with anything except the iTunes store" isn't that great a selling point, IMHO...
Ummm... huh? Could you reference some of these laws, to start with?
. The short version of this is that to hold personal information, you must be registered, and you must register how you intend to use that information. You also have to provide that information on request, to the person whose information it is, but that's not relevant here...
I'll use the Data Protection Act (1998) from the UK, as an example here. You can view it at: http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/19980029.htm
The thing is, I don't see how an IP address is personal information. It doesn't identify you, it identifies a computer system (with dynamic IPs, it only identifies them at a particular point in time). This is comparable to having a house address without the name of anyone in the house; this information is trivially available (lets start with the websites of estate agents, and work from there).
Now, in the UK, they would need to be registered to associate a person with that IP address, but I can't seriously see them being blocked from doing so. The only real stumbling block is actually getting that information from the person's ISP, as I believe we've managed to avoid having our own DMCA so far (can anyone confirm/deny?).
Certainly, I can't see it making the slightest difference why they're recording the IP address. Let me put this another way; I have server logs of someone trying to break into the server. These contain IP address; why would that be illegal for me to hold? I have no idea who this person is...
While it's going to be slow, they could hack a BitTorrent client to not upload. Perhaps more usefully, they could upload gibberish; I believe most clients would still upload in response, because they are receiving data.
I would be amazed if it doesn't. In particular, this would leave Apple having to pull out a new Mac Mini for the new OS, and alienate the large number of PC switchers they'll probably get (those people that thought "Hey, iPods rock, maybe their computers do to").
Personally, I'm getting a Mac Mini for my father (how do you explain to someone when you should and shouldn't click on attachments e-mailed by someone you know? Getting a system that won't have this problem, and which I can actually help him fix, seems a better plan), and will get one for myself once they ship with Tiger.
I have to say, I use a 1.5Ghz PowerBook with 512mb RAM, and it's wonderfully fast. Sure, I wouldn't want to run seriously CPU intensive stuff on it (Doom 3 springs to mind), but for web, e-mail, text editing, music/movie playing etc. I can't tell the difference between it and my Athlon64 3200+ Linux box at home. Startup times are a little longer because of the slower HD, but that's about it.
People are too used to PC requirements. In particular, as someone else pointed out, OS X has been getting progressively faster with each release, not slower.
I have to say here, if you want a cool laptop, why are you waiting for a G5? I've got a 1.5Ghz 15" G4 PowerBook as my desktop replacement, and it rocks, but it's about as hot as I'm comfortable with. Do you genuinely do anything that requires processing power with your laptops, or do you just want the latest thing? Unless you're going to use that CPU grunt, I'd really recommend getting a 1.33Ghz or 1.5Ghz PowerBook.
Personally, I feel like cheering. Overpeer are doing more for killing the WMA (and probably WMV) formats, and their DRM, than anyone else. Also, for a site that can be really harsh on people who get their PCs infected with viruses/adware because they did something dumb, /. seems remarkably forgiving of "I downloaded this illegal WMA file from some random guy on the Internet and played it".
In particular, I'd rather have more competition in the browser market place. While Firefox being the most widely used browser is better than IE, IMHO (mostly because I'm fed up working around IE bugs), having a good spread of web browsers means:
1. Browser developers are more motivated to think of nifty new features.
2. Security holes in one are unlikely (but I'm aware there are exceptions) to turn up in a different browser. This reduces the impact of such security holes.
3. Web developers are more inclined to work to the standards, rather than "It works on my browser". This in turn means that browser developers are more likely to work to the standards, rather than "Works with my favourite websites". This all helps keep those of us who like the standards, sane.
I think the real issue with the Blizzard implementation is that they try to force you not to download any more than you upload. My personal thoughts on this is that they should see the peer to peer uploads as a bandwidth saving, rather than a replacement for supplying massive upload bandwidth themselves.
Personally I used the torrents at:
http://www.wowtorrents.de.vu/
with Azureus, and got reasonable download speed after a while.
This is more or less what I do at work. We've got Linux servers in the server room, which we ssh to. The Mac has plenty of CPU for e-mail, IM, web surfing, playing music, etc., but the real grunt work we leave to the servers.
We've occaisionally toyed with the idea of moving to G5s for servers, but reliability isn't a serious issue for us, and we do some dang weird stuff, so Linux is an easier option at the moment.
Personally, I'll probably pick one of these up for use at home...
Hey, some of remember when web pages were safe. I think it was around 1995...
We (Distributed Systems group at the University of St. Andrews) presented a paper at PGNet 2004, available at:
http://distsyst.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/btpaper.pdf
which shows (Figure 10) that 75% of BitTorrent users don't upload as much as they download, or put another way, the majority of the uploaded data comes from 25% of the users. I don't have time to work out just how much of the data each section is responsible for, but the numbers are interestingly close to the 80/20 rule.
I don't have time to run the numbers right now, but I wouldn't be too suprised to find that 20% of users uploaded 80% of the data...
Can I just second this. Didn't this happen with Blender? Would someone more organised than myself, ideally someone involved with open sourcing Blender, please arrange this? I'd contribute.
...I'll go along with their shiny new DRM standard, if they'll replace my DVD player for free. By which I mean, pick it up from my door, and give me an equivalent player with the DRM, for absolutely no cost to myself.
However, I bought a DVD player, and if it stops playing DVDs for no good reason, I'm not going to be enthusiastic about buying another...
Actually, I do move it around a lot. We have to move every 9 months on average (we've had terrible luck renting anywhere long-term here), at which point weight is a massive issue. Space is also a massive issue currently; I'm sharing a two bedroom flat with two other people, one of whom is occupying the living room. The TV is in my bedroom, because that's all the space we've got.
(Insert rant about UK housing market here)
Still, I know this isn't a situation most people are in, but there are some of us...
I'm also just fed up with paying for a camera on my phone. The images are next to unusable (I can generally tell the subject is human, and can determine gender and hair colour on a good day). Even the phones with good cameras are around 1 megapixel, and I'm really looking for 3-4 megapixels.
Also, given that Linux games tend to cost more, I can save the cost of a copy of Windows in about 5-6 games. As someone who will buy a game a month, this makes it a no-brainer for me.
I suspect the number of /.ers getting absolutely no sex is low, and we zre just a rather vocal minority. Certainly, of the geeks I know IRL, the vast majority have at least dated.
/.ers are merely an extreme example of multitaskers. Many other people can multitask, even if not as well, It is this group that is most likely to cause an evolution towards improved multitasking skills.
If we therefore assume that multitaskers will generally breed, and that multitasking is considered a useful skill by society, those multitaskers should have enough money to provide a good start in life to their children. This in turn improves the chances of their children passing on multitasking genes.
More to the point,
Or, hey, we get to test how serious all those women were about "Not even if you were the last man alive"...
That's easy. I know several lesbians matching just that description. Now, straight women, you're out of luck, sorry...
Is it just me who would, if designing an AI, would have have a trivial off switch. Probably a few backups, like wire cutters next to the main power cable, a jug of water near the PSU, things like that.
It is just me, isn't it...
No, seriously, this makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. Case in point, I support several web applications used only in UK based universities. These applications have their own e-mail addresses, which forward on to me. Blocking mail to these, from major USA based ISPs, would drastically cut down the spam that gets to me, with a minimal impact on genuine e-mail...
Even for my personal e-mail, I could whitelist my USA-based friends, and add a high spam score to anything else coming from USA ISPs... very tempting, actually...
Must RTFA more carefully... okay, if they can sell it to telemarketers, that's bad. We've got the Data Protection Act here (UK), which neatly stops them doing that (or at least, not without declaring that they intend to).
Is it just me that finds those electronic trails useful to working out where all the money went? Yes, I could write everything down, but it's so much easier... ...and why is the bank knowing what I've bought really such a terrible thing?