It's like asking why a play costs more than a movie.
A play costs more than a movie because your audience is far more limited and you actually have to pay the actors for several hours of work each time they perform.
Second it costs money to put stuff on TV. It wasn't free. It was in exchange for advertising.
Fine. I have no problem with them putting advertisements every 15 minutes in exchange for lowering the price of the DVD to the price of production + distribution (under $5). They already place advertisements on the damn DVDs which you sometimes can't even fast forward through every 2-4 episodes that are up to 10 minutes long.
You got it through your cable service. Now you're getting it recorded professionally direct from the licensed distributors and producers.
Actually I got it from DirectTV broadcast at nearly the same quality as a DVD. Well, Farscape at least given I can't get much else.
Are we going to ask people why something that lasted for for SEVERAL MONTHS doesn't cost as much as something that last for BARELY TWO HOURS?
Several months? My lord, you don't watch enough TV. A day for most stuff. Maybe a week for some of the long running stuff.
A lot of work goes into anime, though it's funny you should ask because American cartoons cost broadcasters much more than anime does.
Lets keep things in perspective. We are talking about a medium which consists mostly of static backgrounds, significant amount of reused drawings and very little post processing. Compare that to something like Star Trek which takes an insane amount of money to produce and even that contains relatively small amount of sfx.
I've always wondered why anime is so expensive. Heck, even things other than anime distributed by ADV Films (Farscape for instance) is outrageously expensive.
I'm also curious why they put so few episodes on each DVD. Paying $18-35 for something which was broadcast for free on TV just to have to pay another $500 to get the entire story from beginning to end is silly.
Sure a two hour movie is the same price, but it is typically a complete story, not 1% of a story leaving me with some sense of completion. I personally don't like walking away from a movie with questions about what happens next.
All I really want is a complete set in a nice box for a single price with DVDs which are filled to capacity so I don't have to get up all the time and watch silly commercials I've watched 12 times before and some brain dead transitions between episodes which breaks the mood.
Is that too much to ask?
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
The IBM 5160 PC XT had an Intel or AMD 8088 4.77 MHz CPU in it.
The IBM 5162 PC XT/286 had a 286 6 MHz CPU in it. This is the only 286 which can officially be called an XT (I exclude expansion boards as it's cheating to stick a 486 ISA expansion board in an XT:).
The IBM 5150 PC, which is technically not an XT had a choice of 8086 or 8088 running at 4.77 MHz.
The risk of pandemic infection is present in any environment without diversity. In the computing world, we have more diversity than I think any sane person needs.
Of course, with every major advance we make there is always an increasing risk of mass destruction. There is an end to all things. Do nothing and an outside force will destroy everything. Do something and at least you are in control.
Currently I find much of the Internet to be passive in nature. I think our interfaces encourage that.
Part of the problem is the public's mindset of 'consumer'. The Internet has the ability to promote the average person to an active role, but is being strangled by those who believe it is nothing more than television with a keyboard.
A lot of the community oriented services such as IRC and email have begun to erode that image, but there really haven't been any new truly successful technologies stressing community in years. The public has been sucked into this thing called 'the web' and been taught that's all there is to this Internet thing.
I never particularly liked the term peer-to-peer. I'm not exactly sure who originally coined it, but it seems to cause a lot of confusion with other technologies which sometimes piggyback ontop of it.
P2P, Distributed Aggregation and Distributed Computing are three separate but related things.
Peer-to-peer is simply a type of network where all nodes on the system are on equal standing with each other. There are no dedicated server machines, no dedicated client machines, but rather everyone is both a server and a client and they communicate with eachother as equals.
This type of system lends itself to a very interesting change in the way someone finds information. Instead of going to a place (e.g. slashdot.org) to get information, you go to the information to get a place.
Distributed aggregation is a method of intelligently locating and well, aggregating resources distributed among nodes across a network. Whether these resources are files, CPU time or disk space, the method of aggregation should remain basically the same. This fits in very well with the peer-to-peer model to provide each node with a simple way of locating resources on other machines.
Distributed computing is a method of using resources distributed among nodes across a network. Distributed aggregation can be thought of a part of distributed computing as you have to be able to find the resources to use them, but not all distributed computing systems provide or even need a method of handling dynamic changes in the network. Of course, distributed computing systems are not typically peer-to-peer. Individual nodes on the network rarely communicate with each other to share information, but instead handle jobs in batch fashion and push the results up to a central server.
Many have argued that peer-to-peer has existed on the Internet since time began and that all things are basically peer-to-peer. This is quite true in some respects. At the protocol level, machines communicate with other machines in a manner that can be considered peer-to-peer, but historically at the application level there have been a very clear line between servers and clients.
We currently live in a world where the majority of computers are nothing more than glorified dumb terminals utilizing only a small fraction of their computing power. My hope is that one day, the average person won't "use" the Internet, but instead "be" the Internet.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
So many terms, so little time. I never particularly liked the term peer-to-peer. I'm not exactly sure who originally coined it, but it seems to cause a lot of confusion.
P2P, Distributed Aggregation and Distributed Computing are three separate but related things.
Peer-to-peer is simply a system where all nodes on the system are on equal standing with each other. There are no dedicated server machines, no dedicated client machines, but rather everyone is both a server and a client and they communicate with each as equals.
This type of system lends itself to a very interesting change in the way someone finds information. Instead of going to a place (e.g. slashdot.org) to get information, you go to the information to get a place.
Distributed aggregation is a method of intelligently locating and well, aggregating resources distributed among nodes across a network. Whether these resources are files, CPU time or disk space, the method of aggregation should remain basically the same. This fits in very well with the peer-to-peer model to provide each node with a simple way of locating resources on other machines.
Distributed computing is a method of using resources distributed among nodes across a network. Distributed aggregation can be thought of a part of distributed computing as you have to be able to find the resources to use them, but not all distributed computing systems provide or even need a method of handling dynamic changes in the peer-to-peer network. Of course, distributed computing systems are not typically peer-to-peer. Individual nodes on the network rarely communicate with each other to share information, but instead handle jobs in batch fashion and push the results up to a central server.
Many have argued that peer-to-peer has existed on the Internet since time began and that all things are basically peer-to-peer. This is quite true in some respects. At the protocol level, machines communicate with other machines in a manner that can be considered peer-to-peer, but historically at the application level there have been a very clear line between servers and clients.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
What is actually being patented is a system which attempts to replace the resolver on a machine with one which will automatically encode the local character set into an RFC 1035 compliant format. This patent specifically states that this is a mechnism to implement internationalized domain names without modifying the DNS servers.
Now, if you are going to replace all the resolver libraries anyway, why not just extend the DNS specification to take straight UTF8 to begin with?
Why create a huge ugly hack to preserve the DNS specification when the DNS specification has changed many times over the years to support new features such as IPv6.
The only benefit I see to not changing the specification is that client application developers don't have to change their calls to gethostbyname() to gethostbynameutf8(). This is an advantage, but honestly... does anyone really believe that this is any harder than what applications have to do to support IPv6 address lookups?
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Frankly, I don't care if Microsoft is pure evil or how they promote their hardware in this particular case. I am sick and tired of having console hardware come out in Japan first and six to twelve months later in the US even though the US constitutes a significantly larger portion of the market.
Yes they can charge more in Japan and yes they do recoup back some of their costs, but I doubt there aren't certain sections of the US (silicon valley, new york, LA, etc) which wouldn't pay the exact same amount if not more.
One thing I can be assured of is that with Microsoft's existing manufacturing and distribution channels, that little Xbox will be sitting on the shelves at my local electronics store waiting for me when it launches.
Of course this may seem wrong and evil, but I'm come on. I feel especially sorry for those in Europe who sometimes have to wait even longer.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
ORACLE database tables can be accessed by SQL commands which are embedded in standard programming language programs.
Definitely not unique. PostgreSQL, for example, has hooks in Tcl, Perl, Python, C, C++.
They aren't talking about programming hooks. They are talking about Pro* (Pro*C/C++, Pro*COBOL, Pro*Fortran) which allows you to directly embed SQL into an application without hooks. You basically run a precompiler over your code which validates the SQL itself, allows runtime diagnostics at the client level, clean type conversion, etc. Personally I prefer OCI, but that's just me.
Features which I believe Oracle has most of the open source competition beat in is clustering (run oracle on x machines and have it load balance), parallelization of queries across CPUs in your cluster (very nice for long running queries), resource management (you can allocate x bytes for y task if you want), the ability to index based on function (index upper(col) for instance) and runtime configuration & status (the v$ tables are scary they are so complete).
Now, Oracle has several drawbacks. sqlplus has no readline support (quite annoying). Certain types of simple queries are not optimized (select count(*) sucks). The OCI libraries are big and there is no small client-only installation (we built our own tiny library-only install).
Re:Can HP make a success of anything besides print
on
HP Ending OpenMail
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· Score: 2
Actually, HP also owns a few calculator markets (financial and scientific) with their 12c and 48gx. Frankly, I'll take an HP over anything TI makes any day of the week.
They also have a decent foothold in the PC market with their desktops and notebooks, although it is by no means dominant.
As far as I can tell, the biggest problem with HP is that they seem very conservative about moving in with new products. They seem to be content with not being #1.
And why exactly do you need a full featured Unix system to run a firewall?
There are environments where you need performance and security. This is especially true of supercomputing environments where different people with different security levels all have access to the same physical machine(s).
Just because you have a firewall, doesn't mean you aren't prone to attack. You are certainly less likely to be attacked from the outside world, but who said the attack had to come from the outside world?
If you have a person with physical access to a machine you are trying to secure, it should still be extremely difficult for the person to gain entry into it.
Why would DirecTV do this at the customer side when they control the broadcasting side?
DirecTV has to encode all stations via MPEG themselves; it seems perfectly sane to think that if they wanted the same functionality, they'd simply encode everything at a lower quality themselves and transmit the lower quality content.
This has the added benefit of saving bandwidth for other channels.
DirecTV already controls quality of the encoding based on the type of show. Sports broadcasts get significantly more bandwidth than the average movie due to the rapid camera movement.
It seems to me that the only reason they'd want to do it at the customer's end is if they wanted to shut off individuals. This would make sense if they wanted to charge different rates for quality.
The matter is quite simply that people feel that if they CAN that they SHOULD. I could look on the net I'm sure that I can find a "How to steal a Chrysler" manual. Does that give me the right to go out and `borrow' Chryslers? Of course this gets into the "Well in that case you're depriving someone of something...but me I'm just making a copy! I've deprived no-one of anything!" That of course is complete bullshit that is the excuse of the thief. "Well that old bag had lots of money anyways!"
Well the real question is... is it legal to build a car that looks identical to a chrysler for your own personal use?
Is it legal to make a hamburger that looks and tastes identical to one you would get at McDonalds if you are the one who is going to eat it?
You better hope replicator technology never comes to pass; the legal system might just spontaneously combust.
Linus' email to linux-kernel seems a bit down. Someone should really do something about it. A parade, maybe a new car... I don't know..
Email is as follows:
In a move unanimously hailed by the trade press and industry analysts as
being a sure sign of incipient braindamage, Linus Torvalds (also known as
the "father of Linux" or, more commonly, as "mush-for-brains") decided
that enough is enough, and that things don't get better from having the
same people test it over and over again. In short, 2.4.0 is out there.
Anxiously awaited for the last too many months, 2.4.0 brings to the table
many improvements, none of which come to mind to the exhausted release
manager right now. "It's better", was the only printable quote. Pressed
for details, Linus bared his teeth and hissed at reporters, most of which
suddenly remembered that they'd rather cover "Home and Gardening" than the
IT industry anyway.
Anyway, have fun. And don't bother reporting any bugs for the next few
days. I won't care anyway.
It seems the general consensus among white, male tech workers is that they belong in the industry. If they are up for a promotion against an equally skilled minority, of COURSE they should get the promotion, because they're automatically more skilled. Because the majority of tech managers are ALSO white, this attitude is perpetuated.
I don't really think this is limited only to white males. Frankly, most of the american bred high tech workers I've met, especially the really good ones, are not the most modest people in the world. The basic fact of the matter is that when you have an inflated ego, a sense of entitlement tends to follow very closely. This seems to be especially true if you were brought up with a limited exposure to culture and cultural values from outside the US.
Now it may be that on average, more white families maintain less of their cultural heritage and therefore breed children which surrender themselves to the ego monster more easily. I know this is true at least in my own case and I'm sure the sense of entitlement I project to others has a lot to do with how they treat me.
Even back to college (University of Michigan), I was faced every day with fellow students who were SO SURE that they were smarter than me, and professors who didn't think that I deserved to be here, assuming that I was only here because of Affirmative Action (I've got that in the workplace as well).
So my big question is, how do you know your felow students were sure they were smarter than you? How do you know what they assumed? The biggest problem I think that exists is that as long as no one stands up and says something, an act that I might view as perfectly benign may to you be a deeply hurtful thing and the behavior will simply continue.
A lot of the descrimination I have read in these postings is someone's interpretation of a look or a feeling that someone else gives them. No real blatent descriminating. The problem is that unless you can read minds, the view you take upon a look or an act will be completely tainted by your past dealings with whatever group you've generalized the person into.
So the next time you feel that you've been descriminated against, no matter how minor, you might want to think about calmly and politely explaining to the person how that act made you feel or what you thought it was motivated by instead of trying to figure out what the other person is thinking.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Frankly, I'm a bit confused to find out that my machine, which happens to run Linux, is not a personal computer.
I've noticed this a lot lately. When did "PC", a fairly generic term for the type of computer you have, become synonimous with Windows, an operating system which runs on your computer?
I'm sure Apple contributed to this trend with their never-ending PC vs Mac press. I always felt this was a bit strange considering they were marketting a machine designed to be the most personal of personal computers.
Then again, maybe I misunderstood and Neverwinter Nights is being shipped for pollitically correct people and also those who use Linux and BeOS. BeOS and Linux both run on Macs and I'm shocked to hear they won't be porting this to MacOS (operating system vs hardware).
Uhm, a quick search on monster.com shows well over a thousand jobs for C++. Hell, there are more than a thousand jobs for C++ in San Jose alone.
I hate to break it to you, but Java is not replacing C++. If you are developing an application for mass public consuption (which oddly enough is where Java should really shine), the language of choice is still C++ (Windows/MacOS) and C (*nix).
At first I was going to wait for the Nintendo 64, then I was going to wait for the Dreamcast, then I was going to way for the Playstation 2, and now I'm thinking of waiting for the X-Box, but it finally hit me.
Man can own multiple console machines at the same time.
Apparently, there is no crime against owning both a Playstation 2 and a Dreamcast at the same time or even, dare I say it, a Nintendo 64, Playstation 2 and Dreamcast at the same time.
Now, I'm not sure why I thought that I couldn't own two consoles at the same time. I guess it just feels a bit wrong owning two machines which do basically the exact same thing only because sony, sega and nintendo can't get it through their heads that the money is in the software.
In fact, it seems to me that Java's biggest weakness is execution speed. It has everything else going for it. Type safe. No unhecked runtime errors. RTTI. Garbage collection. Portable object code. And on and on. Given Moore's Law, it seems that Java, or a language like it is destined to become a widely used language.
The reason I like C++ more than Java is very simple. There are a lot of annoying (and wonderful) features in C++ and if I don't want to use them I don't have to.
An optional garbage collection type modifier would be a great thing to have for very isolated situations where for some unknown reason, you can't keep track of your own dynamic memory usage. Garbage collection is not a cheap operation and can lead to nasty performance and memory overhead in certain types of applications. Forcing it upon the programmer is wrong.
An optional thread locking type modifier would be the ultimate godsend so one could not have to worry about sticking mutexes all over the place in applications that contain large amounts of shared data.
And finally, an optional compiler flag which asked it to print out warnings when there are exceptions that haven't been caught.
The reason C++ is the most popular language is simple, it allows the programmer to work with the features they are comfortable with in a flexible manner. You can work with with straight assembly, straight C, or use any combination of the features C++ gives you. Granted, having backwards compatibility with the massive amount of C code out there probably had just as much to do with it, but...:)
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Different people have different tastes in article zposts. Some people like funny posts others like informative. I believe collaborative filtering would work better than a set points system. Everyone votes on the quality of posts and your sorting depends on how closely you mimic others who vote like you.
CF can be integrated in various ways, but the method I'm thinking of would work similar to this:
1. Everyone votes on various posts at will. There is no limit to the number of posts you can vote on.
2. Your votes are compared against other users votes to find the difference in "taste" between you and every other user.
3. Posts are weighted based on the distance between you and other users. Users who vote like you and vote on posts are weighted higher than users who don't vote like you and vote on posts.
The underlying math to implement this is rather simple (with the exception of some of the baysian network models) and widely known, but as far as I know, there are only a few very limited open source implementations in existance.
There are a few problems with using any type of multicast network to do large scale distribution to end users.
The first is very few people have MBONE access. Most dialups certainly don't have it due to a good portion of the terminal servers simply not supporting IGMP. There is also the issue of ISPs getting access from their uplinks which is like pulling teeth with the bulk of tier 1 providers out there. Most routers have multicast disabled by default which hasn't helped much.
The second is the need for a reliable multicast protocol. The problem isn't getting a reliable multicast protocol, the problem is choosing between the 30 or so that were tailor made for specific configurations. The reliable multicast protocols are complex... they have to deal with slow clients, retransmits to individual hosts, ordering, etc. Getting an complete and open general purpose reliable multicast protocol for use on the Internet which can be made into a standard is the problem.
The complete lack of a 'killer application' to force end users to request multicast capable access to the internet is one of the reasons this stuff hasn't taken off. If it had, I'd like to think I'd be streaming HBO to my laptop and watching it right now (which could use existing UDP multicast streams).
As a side note, IPv6 has mandatory multicast support from what I've read which if it ever is actually deployed fully might finally make some of this stuff a reality.
What worries me about MacOS X is the whole new Objective C interface. Creating a new API is one thing; creating a new API in a different language is another. Apparently, certain advanced features of the GUI will only be available to you if you use the Objective C interface which is seems to be a way that Jobs can keep his NeXT dream alive.
I'm not a Mac developer, however at work our Mac developers have no interest in porting their application to the new API in Objective C. I can't imagine it would be extremely easy to port and maintain Windows applications, most of which are written in C++ to it either. For developers who are just starting out, writing their software in Objective C makes it very difficult to port to Windows locking them into the OS.
Now Objective C might be the greatest language since latin, but the simple fact of the matter is that in GUI arenas, C++ currently dominates.
Just curious what the opinions of others are out there.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA's Ames Research Center is in Moffett Field, CA which borders Mountain View, CA.
A play costs more than a movie because your audience is far more limited and you actually have to pay the actors for several hours of work each time they perform.
Fine. I have no problem with them putting advertisements every 15 minutes in exchange for lowering the price of the DVD to the price of production + distribution (under $5). They already place advertisements on the damn DVDs which you sometimes can't even fast forward through every 2-4 episodes that are up to 10 minutes long.
Actually I got it from DirectTV broadcast at nearly the same quality as a DVD. Well, Farscape at least given I can't get much else.
Several months? My lord, you don't watch enough TV. A day for most stuff. Maybe a week for some of the long running stuff.
Lets keep things in perspective. We are talking about a medium which consists mostly of static backgrounds, significant amount of reused drawings and very little post processing. Compare that to something like Star Trek which takes an insane amount of money to produce and even that contains relatively small amount of sfx.
I've always wondered why anime is so expensive. Heck, even things other than anime distributed by ADV Films (Farscape for instance) is outrageously expensive.
I'm also curious why they put so few episodes on each DVD. Paying $18-35 for something which was broadcast for free on TV just to have to pay another $500 to get the entire story from beginning to end is silly.
Sure a two hour movie is the same price, but it is typically a complete story, not 1% of a story leaving me with some sense of completion. I personally don't like walking away from a movie with questions about what happens next.
All I really want is a complete set in a nice box for a single price with DVDs which are filled to capacity so I don't have to get up all the time and watch silly commercials I've watched 12 times before and some brain dead transitions between episodes which breaks the mood.
Is that too much to ask?
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
IBM named multiple models 'XT'.
:).
The IBM 5160 PC XT had an Intel or AMD 8088 4.77 MHz CPU in it.
The IBM 5162 PC XT/286 had a 286 6 MHz CPU in it. This is the only 286 which can officially be called an XT (I exclude expansion boards as it's cheating to stick a 486 ISA expansion board in an XT
The IBM 5150 PC, which is technically not an XT had a choice of 8086 or 8088 running at 4.77 MHz.
The risk of pandemic infection is present in any environment without diversity. In the computing world, we have more diversity than I think any sane person needs.
Of course, with every major advance we make there is always an increasing risk of mass destruction. There is an end to all things. Do nothing and an outside force will destroy everything. Do something and at least you are in control.
Part of the problem is the public's mindset of 'consumer'. The Internet has the ability to promote the average person to an active role, but is being strangled by those who believe it is nothing more than television with a keyboard.
A lot of the community oriented services such as IRC and email have begun to erode that image, but there really haven't been any new truly successful technologies stressing community in years. The public has been sucked into this thing called 'the web' and been taught that's all there is to this Internet thing.
I never particularly liked the term peer-to-peer. I'm not exactly sure who originally coined it, but it seems to cause a lot of confusion with other technologies which sometimes piggyback ontop of it.
P2P, Distributed Aggregation and Distributed Computing are three separate but related things.
Peer-to-peer is simply a type of network where all nodes on the system are on equal standing with each other. There are no dedicated server machines, no dedicated client machines, but rather everyone is both a server and a client and they communicate with eachother as equals.
This type of system lends itself to a very interesting change in the way someone finds information. Instead of going to a place (e.g. slashdot.org) to get information, you go to the information to get a place.
Distributed aggregation is a method of intelligently locating and well, aggregating resources distributed among nodes across a network. Whether these resources are files, CPU time or disk space, the method of aggregation should remain basically the same. This fits in very well with the peer-to-peer model to provide each node with a simple way of locating resources on other machines.
Distributed computing is a method of using resources distributed among nodes across a network. Distributed aggregation can be thought of a part of distributed computing as you have to be able to find the resources to use them, but not all distributed computing systems provide or even need a method of handling dynamic changes in the network. Of course, distributed computing systems are not typically peer-to-peer. Individual nodes on the network rarely communicate with each other to share information, but instead handle jobs in batch fashion and push the results up to a central server.
Many have argued that peer-to-peer has existed on the Internet since time began and that all things are basically peer-to-peer. This is quite true in some respects. At the protocol level, machines communicate with other machines in a manner that can be considered peer-to-peer, but historically at the application level there have been a very clear line between servers and clients.
We currently live in a world where the majority of computers are nothing more than glorified dumb terminals utilizing only a small fraction of their computing power. My hope is that one day, the average person won't "use" the Internet, but instead "be" the Internet.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
So many terms, so little time. I never particularly liked the term peer-to-peer. I'm not exactly sure who originally coined it, but it seems to cause a lot of confusion.
P2P, Distributed Aggregation and Distributed Computing are three separate but related things.
Peer-to-peer is simply a system where all nodes on the system are on equal standing with each other. There are no dedicated server machines, no dedicated client machines, but rather everyone is both a server and a client and they communicate with each as equals.
This type of system lends itself to a very interesting change in the way someone finds information. Instead of going to a place (e.g. slashdot.org) to get information, you go to the information to get a place.
Distributed aggregation is a method of intelligently locating and well, aggregating resources distributed among nodes across a network. Whether these resources are files, CPU time or disk space, the method of aggregation should remain basically the same. This fits in very well with the peer-to-peer model to provide each node with a simple way of locating resources on other machines.
Distributed computing is a method of using resources distributed among nodes across a network. Distributed aggregation can be thought of a part of distributed computing as you have to be able to find the resources to use them, but not all distributed computing systems provide or even need a method of handling dynamic changes in the peer-to-peer network. Of course, distributed computing systems are not typically peer-to-peer. Individual nodes on the network rarely communicate with each other to share information, but instead handle jobs in batch fashion and push the results up to a central server.
Many have argued that peer-to-peer has existed on the Internet since time began and that all things are basically peer-to-peer. This is quite true in some respects. At the protocol level, machines communicate with other machines in a manner that can be considered peer-to-peer, but historically at the application level there have been a very clear line between servers and clients.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
What is actually being patented is a system which attempts to replace the resolver on a machine with one which will automatically encode the local character set into an RFC 1035 compliant format. This patent specifically states that this is a mechnism to implement internationalized domain names without modifying the DNS servers.
Now, if you are going to replace all the resolver libraries anyway, why not just extend the DNS specification to take straight UTF8 to begin with?
Why create a huge ugly hack to preserve the DNS specification when the DNS specification has changed many times over the years to support new features such as IPv6.
The only benefit I see to not changing the specification is that client application developers don't have to change their calls to gethostbyname() to gethostbynameutf8(). This is an advantage, but honestly... does anyone really believe that this is any harder than what applications have to do to support IPv6 address lookups?
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Frankly, I don't care if Microsoft is pure evil or how they promote their hardware in this particular case. I am sick and tired of having console hardware come out in Japan first and six to twelve months later in the US even though the US constitutes a significantly larger portion of the market.
Yes they can charge more in Japan and yes they do recoup back some of their costs, but I doubt there aren't certain sections of the US (silicon valley, new york, LA, etc) which wouldn't pay the exact same amount if not more.
One thing I can be assured of is that with Microsoft's existing manufacturing and distribution channels, that little Xbox will be sitting on the shelves at my local electronics store waiting for me when it launches.
Of course this may seem wrong and evil, but I'm come on. I feel especially sorry for those in Europe who sometimes have to wait even longer.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
ORACLE database tables can be accessed by SQL commands which are embedded in standard programming language programs.
Definitely not unique. PostgreSQL, for example, has hooks in Tcl, Perl, Python, C, C++.
They aren't talking about programming hooks. They are talking about Pro* (Pro*C/C++, Pro*COBOL, Pro*Fortran) which allows you to directly embed SQL into an application without hooks. You basically run a precompiler over your code which validates the SQL itself, allows runtime diagnostics at the client level, clean type conversion, etc. Personally I prefer OCI, but that's just me.
Features which I believe Oracle has most of the open source competition beat in is clustering (run oracle on x machines and have it load balance), parallelization of queries across CPUs in your cluster (very nice for long running queries), resource management (you can allocate x bytes for y task if you want), the ability to index based on function (index upper(col) for instance) and runtime configuration & status (the v$ tables are scary they are so complete).
Now, Oracle has several drawbacks. sqlplus has no readline support (quite annoying). Certain types of simple queries are not optimized (select count(*) sucks). The OCI libraries are big and there is no small client-only installation (we built our own tiny library-only install).
Actually, HP also owns a few calculator markets (financial and scientific) with their 12c and 48gx. Frankly, I'll take an HP over anything TI makes any day of the week.
They also have a decent foothold in the PC market with their desktops and notebooks, although it is by no means dominant.
As far as I can tell, the biggest problem with HP is that they seem very conservative about moving in with new products. They seem to be content with not being #1.
And why exactly do you need a full featured Unix system to run a firewall?
There are environments where you need performance and security. This is especially true of supercomputing environments where different people with different security levels all have access to the same physical machine(s).
Just because you have a firewall, doesn't mean you aren't prone to attack. You are certainly less likely to be attacked from the outside world, but who said the attack had to come from the outside world?
If you have a person with physical access to a machine you are trying to secure, it should still be extremely difficult for the person to gain entry into it.
I'm somewhat confused.
Why would DirecTV do this at the customer side when they control the broadcasting side?
DirecTV has to encode all stations via MPEG themselves; it seems perfectly sane to think that if they wanted the same functionality, they'd simply encode everything at a lower quality themselves and transmit the lower quality content.
This has the added benefit of saving bandwidth for other channels.
DirecTV already controls quality of the encoding based on the type of show. Sports broadcasts get significantly more bandwidth than the average movie due to the rapid camera movement.
It seems to me that the only reason they'd want to do it at the customer's end is if they wanted to shut off individuals. This would make sense if they wanted to charge different rates for quality.
Maybe I haven't had enough caffiene yet.
The matter is quite simply that people feel that if they CAN that they SHOULD. I could look on the net I'm sure that I can find a "How to steal a Chrysler" manual. Does that give me the right to go out and `borrow' Chryslers? Of course this gets into the "Well in that case you're depriving someone of something...but me I'm just making a copy! I've deprived no-one of anything!" That of course is complete bullshit that is the excuse of the thief. "Well that old bag had lots of money anyways!"
Well the real question is... is it legal to build a car that looks identical to a chrysler for your own personal use?
Is it legal to make a hamburger that looks and tastes identical to one you would get at McDonalds if you are the one who is going to eat it?
You better hope replicator technology never comes to pass; the legal system might just spontaneously combust.
Linus' email to linux-kernel seems a bit down. Someone should really do something about it. A parade, maybe a new car... I don't know..
Email is as follows:
In a move unanimously hailed by the trade press and industry analysts as being a sure sign of incipient braindamage, Linus Torvalds (also known as the "father of Linux" or, more commonly, as "mush-for-brains") decided that enough is enough, and that things don't get better from having the same people test it over and over again. In short, 2.4.0 is out there.
Anxiously awaited for the last too many months, 2.4.0 brings to the table many improvements, none of which come to mind to the exhausted release manager right now. "It's better", was the only printable quote. Pressed for details, Linus bared his teeth and hissed at reporters, most of which suddenly remembered that they'd rather cover "Home and Gardening" than the IT industry anyway.
Anyway, have fun. And don't bother reporting any bugs for the next few days. I won't care anyway.
Linus
It seems the general consensus among white, male tech workers is that they belong in the industry. If they are up for a promotion against an equally skilled minority, of COURSE they should get the promotion, because they're automatically more skilled. Because the majority of tech managers are ALSO white, this attitude is perpetuated.
I don't really think this is limited only to white males. Frankly, most of the american bred high tech workers I've met, especially the really good ones, are not the most modest people in the world. The basic fact of the matter is that when you have an inflated ego, a sense of entitlement tends to follow very closely. This seems to be especially true if you were brought up with a limited exposure to culture and cultural values from outside the US.
Now it may be that on average, more white families maintain less of their cultural heritage and therefore breed children which surrender themselves to the ego monster more easily. I know this is true at least in my own case and I'm sure the sense of entitlement I project to others has a lot to do with how they treat me.
Even back to college (University of Michigan), I was faced every day with fellow students who were SO SURE that they were smarter than me, and professors who didn't think that I deserved to be here, assuming that I was only here because of Affirmative Action (I've got that in the workplace as well).
So my big question is, how do you know your felow students were sure they were smarter than you? How do you know what they assumed? The biggest problem I think that exists is that as long as no one stands up and says something, an act that I might view as perfectly benign may to you be a deeply hurtful thing and the behavior will simply continue.
A lot of the descrimination I have read in these postings is someone's interpretation of a look or a feeling that someone else gives them. No real blatent descriminating. The problem is that unless you can read minds, the view you take upon a look or an act will be completely tainted by your past dealings with whatever group you've generalized the person into.
So the next time you feel that you've been descriminated against, no matter how minor, you might want to think about calmly and politely explaining to the person how that act made you feel or what you thought it was motivated by instead of trying to figure out what the other person is thinking.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Frankly, I'm a bit confused to find out that my machine, which happens to run Linux, is not a personal computer.
I've noticed this a lot lately. When did "PC", a fairly generic term for the type of computer you have, become synonimous with Windows, an operating system which runs on your computer?
I'm sure Apple contributed to this trend with their never-ending PC vs Mac press. I always felt this was a bit strange considering they were marketting a machine designed to be the most personal of personal computers.
Then again, maybe I misunderstood and Neverwinter Nights is being shipped for pollitically correct people and also those who use Linux and BeOS. BeOS and Linux both run on Macs and I'm shocked to hear they won't be porting this to MacOS (operating system vs hardware).
Uhm, a quick search on monster.com shows well over a thousand jobs for C++. Hell, there are more than a thousand jobs for C++ in San Jose alone.
I hate to break it to you, but Java is not replacing C++. If you are developing an application for mass public consuption (which oddly enough is where Java should really shine), the language of choice is still C++ (Windows/MacOS) and C (*nix).
At first I was going to wait for the Nintendo 64, then I was going to wait for the Dreamcast, then I was going to way for the Playstation 2, and now I'm thinking of waiting for the X-Box, but it finally hit me.
Man can own multiple console machines at the same time.
Apparently, there is no crime against owning both a Playstation 2 and a Dreamcast at the same time or even, dare I say it, a Nintendo 64, Playstation 2 and Dreamcast at the same time.
Now, I'm not sure why I thought that I couldn't own two consoles at the same time. I guess it just feels a bit wrong owning two machines which do basically the exact same thing only because sony, sega and nintendo can't get it through their heads that the money is in the software.
In fact, it seems to me that Java's biggest weakness is execution speed. It has everything else going for it. Type safe. No unhecked runtime errors. RTTI. Garbage collection. Portable object code. And on and on. Given Moore's Law, it seems that Java, or a language like it is destined to become a widely used language.
:)
The reason I like C++ more than Java is very simple. There are a lot of annoying (and wonderful) features in C++ and if I don't want to use them I don't have to.
An optional garbage collection type modifier would be a great thing to have for very isolated situations where for some unknown reason, you can't keep track of your own dynamic memory usage. Garbage collection is not a cheap operation and can lead to nasty performance and memory overhead in certain types of applications. Forcing it upon the programmer is wrong.
An optional thread locking type modifier would be the ultimate godsend so one could not have to worry about sticking mutexes all over the place in applications that contain large amounts of shared data.
And finally, an optional compiler flag which asked it to print out warnings when there are exceptions that haven't been caught.
The reason C++ is the most popular language is simple, it allows the programmer to work with the features they are comfortable with in a flexible manner. You can work with with straight assembly, straight C, or use any combination of the features C++ gives you. Granted, having backwards compatibility with the massive amount of C code out there probably had just as much to do with it, but...
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Maybe you missed the new Claudia Schiffer Palm Pilot Vx which includes a metallic blue case and all her favorite add-ons?
Different people have different tastes in article zposts. Some people like funny posts others like informative. I believe collaborative filtering would work better than a set points system. Everyone votes on the quality of posts and your sorting depends on how closely you mimic others who vote like you.
CF can be integrated in various ways, but the method I'm thinking of would work similar to this:
1. Everyone votes on various posts at will. There is no limit to the number of posts you can vote on.
2. Your votes are compared against other users votes to find the difference in "taste" between you and every other user.
3. Posts are weighted based on the distance between you and other users. Users who vote like you and vote on posts are weighted higher than users who don't vote like you and vote on posts.
The underlying math to implement this is rather simple (with the exception of some of the baysian network models) and widely known, but as far as I know, there are only a few very limited open source implementations in existance.
There are a few problems with using any type of multicast network to do large scale distribution to end users.
The first is very few people have MBONE access. Most dialups certainly don't have it due to a good portion of the terminal servers simply not supporting IGMP. There is also the issue of ISPs getting access from their uplinks which is like pulling teeth with the bulk of tier 1 providers out there. Most routers have multicast disabled by default which hasn't helped much.
The second is the need for a reliable multicast protocol. The problem isn't getting a reliable multicast protocol, the problem is choosing between the 30 or so that were tailor made for specific configurations. The reliable multicast protocols are complex... they have to deal with slow clients, retransmits to individual hosts, ordering, etc. Getting an complete and open general purpose reliable multicast protocol for use on the Internet which can be made into a standard is the problem.
The complete lack of a 'killer application' to force end users to request multicast capable access to the internet is one of the reasons this stuff hasn't taken off. If it had, I'd like to think I'd be streaming HBO to my laptop and watching it right now (which could use existing UDP multicast streams).
As a side note, IPv6 has mandatory multicast support from what I've read which if it ever is actually deployed fully might finally make some of this stuff a reality.
What worries me about MacOS X is the whole new Objective C interface. Creating a new API is one thing; creating a new API in a different language is another. Apparently, certain advanced features of the GUI will only be available to you if you use the Objective C interface which is seems to be a way that Jobs can keep his NeXT dream alive.
I'm not a Mac developer, however at work our Mac developers have no interest in porting their application to the new API in Objective C. I can't imagine it would be extremely easy to port and maintain Windows applications, most of which are written in C++ to it either. For developers who are just starting out, writing their software in Objective C makes it very difficult to port to Windows locking them into the OS.
Now Objective C might be the greatest language since latin, but the simple fact of the matter is that in GUI arenas, C++ currently dominates.
Just curious what the opinions of others are out there.