Cisco IOS can run on a couple unices (BSD and Solaris I believe) as well as Cisco hardware. As far as I know, Cisco folks develop on Unix and then use a cross compiler to build for their router hardware when required.
Actually, what you would end up doing is sticking a PCMCIA hard drive into your camera like they do with high end digital cameras so you can just slide it directly into your PC. Unfortunatly, they aren't all that small.
The problem is that not even these hard drives can write data fast enough in raw form so you would end up with a 2 second lag time from the time you took the picture to the time it could actually be written to disk. There is also the problem with battery life when you are handling that much data.
Professional camera people want to be able to take several pictures with a very short delay between them, this means sticking a very large chunk of RAM into your camera to buffer it before it writes.
Compression is always a possibility, but the CPU might burn up the rest of your power compressing a 48 meg file in real time.
Google sells search engine services to other companies to place on their web sites such as Redhat, Yahoo, Latino.com, the Washington Post, eToys, eGroups, WebVan, etc. These search engines include a good amount of customization and Google gets a monthly fee out of it of upwards of $2,000.
I want something in the Palm V style casing with a color screen. I also wish they'd get rid of that little writing space and replace it with more screen real-estate and just make writing on the entire screen the default. Maybe even a more natural writing feel like the Cross pen stuff so there's a bit more resistance when I'm writing on the screen to make it feel more like paper.
Actually I'd like it to be slightly larger, but thinner.
Either that or one of those little 'padd's from Star Trek... nice and thin with a very simple interface and a highly efficient input mechnism. I personally can do without all those fancy graphics and 3D bullshit in a tiny device, but that's just me.
Ok, the motherboard I can understand, but why would you swap out your case? Damn near everyone uses ATX now.
I guess the switch from AT to ATX would have required it, but unless you only upgrade your CPU once every decade or so, having to replacing your case shouldn't really be a problem.
Not to mention a lot of the cost involved with motherboards is the bios and chipset which tends to be tied to the CPUs, so you really wouldn't be saving that much money considering the cost of motherboards nowadays.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Actually, typically the difference between residential and business service is quality of service and support, not the bundled services.
For example, if you were to get T1 service and it were to go down at 2 am, you could call them up and have them run a diagnostic on your line while you on the phone and get them to come out in the middle of the night and fix it if there was line trouble.
Also, several providers have different guarantees and quality of service ratings between their business and residential packages. Some go as far as to build a completely seperate network which has a lower saturation rate for business customers than residential customers.
As far as DSL is concerned, consumers typically get ADSL while businesses get SDSL. While bandwidth might be bandwidth, the latency differences between the two types of circuits is much different. Telcos have been running HDSL in place of T1 circuits for some time now when it's cost effective to do so (SDSL is sometimes referred to as HDSL-2).
Also note that more IPs given to a customer implies that the customer will have more machines on their network acting as servers and more bandwidth usage on average. It's a cheap way of doing accounting.
Most of this I could probably live without, but MySQL, Cyrus IMAPd, netscape, acroread, mpg123 (used by a lot of other peices of sw), pgp (need backdwards compatibility, and majordomo (come on, even linux-kernel uses this) don't really have decent full-featured equivilents.
The question really comes down to how many resources do maintaining these non-free packages take? I would assume the bulk of the time is put upon the packager which volunteered to handle it anyway. The space requirements is only about half a gig and there really aren't that many packages.
Antialiasing font rendering is something that has existed in at least Freetype for some time. However, antialiasing is fairly worthless without decent fonts to begin with. Microsoft and Apple both have manually hinted fonts which have been adjusted to look their best at the most common point sizes. There are very few people on this planet which can do a really good job manually hinting fonts and it's a very long process.
Fonts are one of those things which have very interest protections under the law. You can legally copy underlining font outline out of a font without violating any copyright laws, however the hinting is actually a set of assembly-like instructions embedded into the font which are covered under US law.
Until someone sits down and spends a year manually hinting things like Arial/Helvitica and open sources the hinting instructions, other OS's are doomed to deal with overly thick verticals, misaligned letters and misshaped ovals.
Of course, someone who really wants to be clever can install FreeType (with the old hinting engine which will process the manual hinting correctly) under Windows and create a program which evolves your own font's hinting until the output looks like the Microsoft font output at various sizes w/o aliasing turned on. The basic idea is you render the 'M' at size 36 from Times New Roman with FreeType then you import the outline into your own font file and continually change the hinting instructions until your 'M' and the Times New Roman 'M' are the same when compared pixel by pixel. You wouldn't be copying the hinting instructions, you'd be creating your own and automating the process of checking it against the original.
You obviously haven't spent too much time with Cisco equipment. Cisco employs the same tactics that Microsoft does... if they can't beat a company, they buy the company. They charge an extrodinary premium (profit margins are in the 60% range last I checked) for their products.
It's my opinion that Cisco has purposely not enabled things like IP Multicast by default simply because it's not in their best interest to do so. They want people to use more bandwidth so they can sell bigger routers and switches. Frankly, if Cisco supported IPv6 by default on all their routers today, we'd be living in a much different world... but they won't, not until they are forced to.
Their support is spotty, they like making proprietary protocols which are completely duplicated by industry standards only to make integration with non-Cisco equipment a pain in the ass. Their online support is shotty. Their website is painfully slow.
The fact of the matter is, most successful entities, be it a corporation or a country, have gotten there by stepping on the little folks and forcing their will upon the public. This is the same for Microsoft, the US, Cisco, etc.
The US is however in a slightly different situation as the public has control over it, but is frankly too happy with our economy to do anything about it.
Another major problem comes from the fact that what people outside the US see and what people inside the US see is completely and utterly different. Britain for instance in my eyes has been extremely supportive of all of the US's military efforts in the last 10 years. They certainly aren't bending to our will because we have a lot of money.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
First things first... if you have signed any type of work assignment contract then basically any work you do on company hours or on company equipment is legally owned by them.
Here under California state law, any work you do on your own time without company equipment is owned by you, so you can work on it on your time.
What this means is that if you release company property without obtaining permission, you can be held liable. This also means that any source which was added to GPL'ed projects can be removed as it was not submitted by the copyright holder. The GPL provides no protection if you don't have the right to license the source. It would be as if you took Microsoft source code and added it to the Linux kernel without permission. You have no more rights to that source code as you do to code you right while at work.
Also note that if you duplicate modifications to a source tree that you did at work, you are on extremely shakey ground even if you fully document what you are doing. Your only option is to get an exemption from your company for this peice of software so that you either own the copyright or they agree to license the changes under the GPL so they can be included in the official source tree.
For a lot of major video releases, the initial prices are set high so that movie rentals are boosted. The price of these releases tends to drop a month or two after the initial release.
It has nothing to do with DVDs, it has been common practice for quite some time with video cassettes as well.
I actually have a replay box. It doesn't require a subscription or any type of registration with replaytv. This means that what replay will be tracking is simply my viewing habits blind. Replay knows the telephone number I'm calling from however.
I'll tell you, I sure as well have my viewing habits tracked to pick better TV than someone else. I'm personally sick of my favorite tv shows being canceled.
As long as I'm not blasted by more ads, I'm ok with it. The 25% ad time for TV today is a bit excessive as it is.
What is a decent overcommit for high-speed users anyway? I've been hearing anywhere from 5:1 to 100:1 but nobody has good solid evidence one way or the next.
Nationwide the average ISP pays roughly $1000 per megabit for bandwidth to their upstream provider. There's additional costs involved in the circuit between the CO and the ISP, the circuit to their upstream provider, and tech support and what not.
But you can figure out for yourself roughly what the ISP needs to overcommit just to break even on bandwidth. 1.5 Mbps ADSL in Bell Atlantic territory averages about $40/month which means the ISP must overcommit 37.5:1 to break even on bandwidth.
Subtract roughly $5 per customer in tech support costs, 15% profit margin and it comes out to about 40:1 overcommit rate.
Of course that still doesn't include equipment, adminstrative costs, software development costs, management costs, etc.
It also doesn't take into account the 'free' outbound bandwidth which ADSL users can't use which you can use for web hosting and what not in attempt to recoup some money.
Personally, I think the primary reason why Perl is used so often for CGI is because of it's text manipulating abilities. It seems a lot of the CGI out there today has to work with text, forms, HTML, etc.
Now that's not to say there aren't libraries out there for C/C++ which provide similar levels of power for text manipulation, but by default when doing things like parsing text, you will tend to be working on a much lower level than perl.
Now there is a question of optimization. You can do some things to Perl to make it run faster using mod_perl or FastCGI, but they have limitations. Mod_perl unfortunately has no concept of suexec so it's not real ISP friendly. FastCGI requires code modifications which make it a bit undesirable. The overhead of starting a copy of perl and parsing the perl script every pass will take a real toll on your machine if you can't use mod_perl or FastCGI. You could even 'daemonize' your perl CGI to boost performance, but that adds quite a bit of complexity for simple tasks.
In these instances, it would be wise to use C, C++ or ObjC.. or even Java w/ the new Java compiler. If you have a banner ad rotation script or some other little program which gets called a lot, writing it in one of these languages will not be much more complex than writing it in Perl.
Really, unless you are doing a lot of text processing, C, C++ and ObjC aren't all that much more complex than Perl and I would recommend using them in place of perl.
You know, I really find it amazing how much people like to bash successful companies.
First, the very idea that Intel could prevent every single one of the 150+ motherboard manufacturers from building an Athlon board is silly. A good portion of these motherboard manufacturers don't even use Intel parts (other than the CPU) on their boards making them completely independent from Intel. The high costs and lack of availability have more to do with demand and costs of building and producing the motherboards.
Second, I'd like to say that Intel is doing nothing immoral. They have a product which is no longer the fastest but they want to maintain public perception that it is. There's nothing wrong with this. They didn't pull an Apple and put out junk benchmarks that show their CPU 8x faster than the Athlon. In fact, as far as I could tell from their little search engine, their web site has no mention at all of the Athlon.
Third, marketing an inferior product heavily to drown out AMD is not evil. If the consumer is stupid enough not to do research when it comes to buying a very expensive little piece of hardware, then so be it, but Intel shouldn't be condemned for doing what every single other company on the planet would do in their place.
Sure, the underdog is always rooted for (at least in the US), but this sort of article posted to slashdot makes it sound like Intel is some sorta evil minion of satan using Microsoft-like business practices. Frankly, as far as I can tell, Intel is just trying to keep itself associated with quality & speed until the Itanium launch.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...:)
While I don't agree that pre-existing natural 'source' should be patentable... I did a little research on it...
When you file for a patent in the US for anything including genome maps, you must publicly disclose it entirely within 2 years for patent protection.
Disclosure includes printed publications and/or a publicly accessible database. The US govt is then required to hold the information back for up to 3 years (usually less).
Now unless I'm mistaken, this means that you can go to IBM's little patent server instead of paying them for the information, though this might be considered illegal if you reprint it without permission.
Now in 1992 the NIH (National Institutes of Health) tried to patent several gene fragments and the PTO sent a rejection notice back to them immediately.
In 1997, the PTO said that it would allow expressed sequence tags (ESTs) to be patented. Now, ESTs are DNA sequences made up to a few hundred base pairs in length that can be used to identify the expression of specific genes.
As far as I'm considered, DNA is nothing more than the source code of life and should fall under the same catagory as algorithms when it comes to patents.
Now, patenting the effects of the new DNA is something entirely different. Should you be able to patent the method of replacing a specific sequence of old DNA with your particular new DNA sequences in order to change something, for example to change hair color in humans?
This type of hands-off regulation really isn't good when it prohibits competition.
The very idea that cable companies are the only ones which could install and upgrade the cable infrastructure to support cable modems is silly.
If the cable industry was broken down like the telephone industry, a CLEC would be able to throw in their own hardware to support cable modems, be allocated a freq range and roll their own or at least have the cable company roll out the base infrastructure and backhaul the traffic back.
Simply put, cable companies are becoming telecommuniations companies and should be subject to the same regulation that existing ILECs are. Several cable companies are even registered LECs.
Personally, I think the cable industry has been upgrading their networks for digital cable because they are scared to death of DirectTV, not because they want to provide cable modem services. That was just icing on the cake.
Then again, I don't see how any ISP can provide a quality service to customers for what is effectively, ~$15/month. It amazes me that DSL providers and other high-speed providers don't have riots in their parking lots from the oversubscription rate they need to maintain.:)
I'm really not sure what else I can say to someone who seems determined to ignore the right of 80% of the world's population to speak the language that they choose to speak. Grow up and try leaving your own country once in a while.
I guess I've been thinking about this from a practical standpoint and not from a cultural standpoint.
English could just as easily be Spanish or French or Russian. It really doesn't matter. I chose English simply because it is used a lot in the global setting.
I see no practical reason to maintain several hundred different languages and translate all the world's knowledge constantly between them and not just standardize on one.
In the US, we have a whole lot of different cultures all living under one roof. Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, British, African, Brazilian, Egyptian, Indian, and so on. Everyone seems to accept the fact that in order to participate in a meaningful way in our society, you must learn English. The culture doesn't go away just because you learn a second language but English becomes your primary language.
Now, one might point out that you do loose a piece of yourself here and it is true. I being a white middle-class male have pretty much no specific ethnic culture to speak of and I'll be honest, I don't see it as a big loss.
One more thing, during this discussion I've tried to be sensible and practical as possible and just throw out some ideas which I'd hope people would comment on with an open mind.
Please try and refrain from making personal attacks when criticizing posts.
Japan, unless I'm mistaken, requires all students to take English in school.
China's highly educated population (Hong Kong, etc) also has a large percentage of English speakers.
The idea is not to force everyone to speak English, only to know it so that one you meet someone who speaks English or you need to use a computer, you can do so and receive a first-rate experience.
The phase out would be gradual; require all students to take a year or two of English, only publish information on the bulk of the Internet in English, make most software English-only, submit scientific articles in English, submit technological breakthroughs in English.
Really, most of this stuff already happens by itself. I really don't see how people in industrial nations can live without knowing English and not be a step behind the rest of the world.
There are several languages that are superior to English, but none are as easy to switch the world over to.
After reading a bit on how the dvorak layout reduces the amount of distance your fingers have to travel, I thought it might be a good idea to try and learn it.
However, after attempting to write code with a dvorak keyboard, I switched right back over. While the placement of such keys as "{};&>.[]+=-*%!" is not exactly optimal on a qwerty keyboard, they are much easier to hit on qwerty than dvorak.
Unix commands which aren't necessarily english also seem to be easier to type on qwerty for some reason ls, ps, pwd, chgrp, ftp, etc...
Hopefully keyboards will be outdated by some decent voice recognition software or human neural interface before my hands cramp up and die from all the typing I do.
Does it really matter if any women are in the open source developer community? Does it matter if Linux was created by a man rather than a woman? Would some massive economic, social and spiritual change happen because it just happens that the author of a piece of software was female?
Maybe I have never been big on "heroes" or maybe it's just the fact that I never really looked up to anyone as a child and said I wanted to be like them because they were famous, but I think it's pretty silly to think that there is a problem in the world if a particular field is dominated by men. Now I'm not saying that it's ok to discourage people from going into a field of work because it's dominated by men, what I am against is pushing someone towards a field strictly because it is and going as far as to mount an entire campaign around it.
Men and women are not the same; physically and psychologically. While growing up, each person should be given a broad range of fields they can work in when they get older and should be free to make up their own decisions about which one they enjoy the most and what they as an individual are most suited towards.
Of course, as a man, I don't really have a good perspective on how women are treated as they grow up. Maybe there is a good amount of discouragement which men don't get when trying to enter a male dominated field. This is not to say that men aren't discouraged when entering a male dominated field either, it's just we are too self absorbed to care what other people, especially men, think.:)
Then again, I would like to find a woman who understood my work so I doubt have to dumb down my conversation. I really hate doing that.
So what exactly is a "PC". Is an Alpha workstation a personal computer? What about Alpha distributors which market their low-end systems as PCs?
Apple used to constantly put out "Macs vs PCs" advertisements, but recently they've changed their tune and they consider Macs PCs.
Apple has been putting out a lot of hype about how their system is the first "PC" to be under export law, but Alphas have been under restricted export law for years.
AMD's Athlon appears to be faster than the G4 from what little benchmarks I've been able to find, but I don't believe the Athlon is under export law, which I find a bit odd.
FOLDOC says a PC is:
A general-purpose single-user microcomputer designed to be operated by one person at a time.
So I guess being a PC depends on the OS, not the CPU. Does that mean a Windows machine setup for multiple logins is no longer a PC?
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Cisco IOS can run on a couple unices (BSD and Solaris I believe) as well as Cisco hardware. As far as I know, Cisco folks develop on Unix and then use a cross compiler to build for their router hardware when required.
Actually, what you would end up doing is sticking a PCMCIA hard drive into your camera like they do with high end digital cameras so you can just slide it directly into your PC. Unfortunatly, they aren't all that small.
The problem is that not even these hard drives can write data fast enough in raw form so you would end up with a 2 second lag time from the time you took the picture to the time it could actually be written to disk. There is also the problem with battery life when you are handling that much data.
Professional camera people want to be able to take several pictures with a very short delay between them, this means sticking a very large chunk of RAM into your camera to buffer it before it writes.
Compression is always a possibility, but the CPU might burn up the rest of your power compressing a 48 meg file in real time.
Google sells search engine services to other companies to place on their web sites such as Redhat, Yahoo, Latino.com, the Washington Post, eToys, eGroups, WebVan, etc. These search engines include a good amount of customization and Google gets a monthly fee out of it of upwards of $2,000.
I want something in the Palm V style casing with a color screen. I also wish they'd get rid of that little writing space and replace it with more screen real-estate and just make writing on the entire screen the default. Maybe even a more natural writing feel like the Cross pen stuff so there's a bit more resistance when I'm writing on the screen to make it feel more like paper.
Actually I'd like it to be slightly larger, but thinner.
Either that or one of those little 'padd's from Star Trek... nice and thin with a very simple interface and a highly efficient input mechnism. I personally can do without all those fancy graphics and 3D bullshit in a tiny device, but that's just me.
It was announced at MacWorld. In fact, I'm watching CNN and I can see it.
Ok, the motherboard I can understand, but why would you swap out your case? Damn near everyone uses ATX now.
I guess the switch from AT to ATX would have required it, but unless you only upgrade your CPU once every decade or so, having to replacing your case shouldn't really be a problem.
Not to mention a lot of the cost involved with motherboards is the bios and chipset which tends to be tied to the CPUs, so you really wouldn't be saving that much money considering the cost of motherboards nowadays.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Actually, typically the difference between residential and business service is quality of service and support, not the bundled services.
For example, if you were to get T1 service and it were to go down at 2 am, you could call them up and have them run a diagnostic on your line while you on the phone and get them to come out in the middle of the night and fix it if there was line trouble.
Also, several providers have different guarantees and quality of service ratings between their business and residential packages. Some go as far as to build a completely seperate network which has a lower saturation rate for business customers than residential customers.
As far as DSL is concerned, consumers typically get ADSL while businesses get SDSL. While bandwidth might be bandwidth, the latency differences between the two types of circuits is much different. Telcos have been running HDSL in place of T1 circuits for some time now when it's cost effective to do so (SDSL is sometimes referred to as HDSL-2).
Also note that more IPs given to a customer implies that the customer will have more machines on their network acting as servers and more bandwidth usage on average. It's a cheap way of doing accounting.
Just so people have an idea of what Debian's non-free tree looks like:
netscape, xanim, mysql, acroread, unzip, java jdk, tao, nedit, xmame, povray, xv, majordomo, pine, distributed.net's deal, solid sql, archie, big brother, cIRCus, cucipop, mrouted, rat, nntpcache, tin, trn, mpg123, glimpse, gpg (idea, rsa, rsaref modules), pgp, dqs, omniorb, ucbmpeg, cyrus imapd
Most of this I could probably live without, but MySQL, Cyrus IMAPd, netscape, acroread, mpg123 (used by a lot of other peices of sw), pgp (need backdwards compatibility, and majordomo (come on, even linux-kernel uses this) don't really have decent full-featured equivilents.
The question really comes down to how many resources do maintaining these non-free packages take? I would assume the bulk of the time is put upon the packager which volunteered to handle it anyway. The space requirements is only about half a gig and there really aren't that many packages.
Antialiasing font rendering is something that has existed in at least Freetype for some time. However, antialiasing is fairly worthless without decent fonts to begin with. Microsoft and Apple both have manually hinted fonts which have been adjusted to look their best at the most common point sizes. There are very few people on this planet which can do a really good job manually hinting fonts and it's a very long process.
Fonts are one of those things which have very interest protections under the law. You can legally copy underlining font outline out of a font without violating any copyright laws, however the hinting is actually a set of assembly-like instructions embedded into the font which are covered under US law.
Until someone sits down and spends a year manually hinting things like Arial/Helvitica and open sources the hinting instructions, other OS's are doomed to deal with overly thick verticals, misaligned letters and misshaped ovals.
Of course, someone who really wants to be clever can install FreeType (with the old hinting engine which will process the manual hinting correctly) under Windows and create a program which evolves your own font's hinting until the output looks like the Microsoft font output at various sizes w/o aliasing turned on. The basic idea is you render the 'M' at size 36 from Times New Roman with FreeType then you import the outline into your own font file and continually change the hinting instructions until your 'M' and the Times New Roman 'M' are the same when compared pixel by pixel. You wouldn't be copying the hinting instructions, you'd be creating your own and automating the process of checking it against the original.
That would make an interesting PhD thesis.
You obviously haven't spent too much time with Cisco equipment. Cisco employs the same tactics that Microsoft does... if they can't beat a company, they buy the company. They charge an extrodinary premium (profit margins are in the 60% range last I checked) for their products.
It's my opinion that Cisco has purposely not enabled things like IP Multicast by default simply because it's not in their best interest to do so. They want people to use more bandwidth so they can sell bigger routers and switches. Frankly, if Cisco supported IPv6 by default on all their routers today, we'd be living in a much different world... but they won't, not until they are forced to.
Their support is spotty, they like making proprietary protocols which are completely duplicated by industry standards only to make integration with non-Cisco equipment a pain in the ass. Their online support is shotty. Their website is painfully slow.
The fact of the matter is, most successful entities, be it a corporation or a country, have gotten there by stepping on the little folks and forcing their will upon the public. This is the same for Microsoft, the US, Cisco, etc.
The US is however in a slightly different situation as the public has control over it, but is frankly too happy with our economy to do anything about it.
Another major problem comes from the fact that what people outside the US see and what people inside the US see is completely and utterly different. Britain for instance in my eyes has been extremely supportive of all of the US's military efforts in the last 10 years. They certainly aren't bending to our will because we have a lot of money.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
First things first... if you have signed any type of work assignment contract then basically any work you do on company hours or on company equipment is legally owned by them.
Here under California state law, any work you do on your own time without company equipment is owned by you, so you can work on it on your time.
What this means is that if you release company property without obtaining permission, you can be held liable. This also means that any source which was added to GPL'ed projects can be removed as it was not submitted by the copyright holder. The GPL provides no protection if you don't have the right to license the source. It would be as if you took Microsoft source code and added it to the Linux kernel without permission. You have no more rights to that source code as you do to code you right while at work.
Also note that if you duplicate modifications to a source tree that you did at work, you are on extremely shakey ground even if you fully document what you are doing. Your only option is to get an exemption from your company for this peice of software so that you either own the copyright or they agree to license the changes under the GPL so they can be included in the official source tree.
For a lot of major video releases, the initial prices are set high so that movie rentals are boosted. The price of these releases tends to drop a month or two after the initial release.
It has nothing to do with DVDs, it has been common practice for quite some time with video cassettes as well.
I actually have a replay box. It doesn't require a subscription or any type of registration with replaytv. This means that what replay will be tracking is simply my viewing habits blind. Replay knows the telephone number I'm calling from however.
I'll tell you, I sure as well have my viewing habits tracked to pick better TV than someone else. I'm personally sick of my favorite tv shows being canceled.
As long as I'm not blasted by more ads, I'm ok with it. The 25% ad time for TV today is a bit excessive as it is.
But you can figure out for yourself roughly what the ISP needs to overcommit just to break even on bandwidth. 1.5 Mbps ADSL in Bell Atlantic territory averages about $40/month which means the ISP must overcommit 37.5:1 to break even on bandwidth.
Subtract roughly $5 per customer in tech support costs, 15% profit margin and it comes out to about 40:1 overcommit rate.
Of course that still doesn't include equipment, adminstrative costs, software development costs, management costs, etc.
It also doesn't take into account the 'free' outbound bandwidth which ADSL users can't use which you can use for web hosting and what not in attempt to recoup some money.
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Personally, I think the primary reason why Perl is used so often for CGI is because of it's text manipulating abilities. It seems a lot of the CGI out there today has to work with text, forms, HTML, etc.
Now that's not to say there aren't libraries out there for C/C++ which provide similar levels of power for text manipulation, but by default when doing things like parsing text, you will tend to be working on a much lower level than perl.
Now there is a question of optimization. You can do some things to Perl to make it run faster using mod_perl or FastCGI, but they have limitations. Mod_perl unfortunately has no concept of suexec so it's not real ISP friendly. FastCGI requires code modifications which make it a bit undesirable.
The overhead of starting a copy of perl and parsing the perl script every pass will take a real toll on your machine if you can't use mod_perl or FastCGI. You could even 'daemonize' your perl CGI to boost performance, but that adds quite a bit of complexity for simple tasks.
In these instances, it would be wise to use C, C++ or ObjC.. or even Java w/ the new Java compiler. If you have a banner ad rotation script or some other little program which gets called a lot, writing it in one of these languages will not be much more complex than writing it in Perl.
Really, unless you are doing a lot of text processing, C, C++ and ObjC aren't all that much more complex than Perl and I would recommend using them in place of perl.
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You know, I really find it amazing how much people like to bash successful companies.
:)
First, the very idea that Intel could prevent every single one of the 150+ motherboard manufacturers from building an Athlon board is silly. A good portion of these motherboard manufacturers don't even use Intel parts (other than the CPU) on their boards making them completely independent from Intel. The high costs and lack of availability have more to do with demand and costs of building and producing the motherboards.
Second, I'd like to say that Intel is doing nothing immoral. They have a product which is no longer the fastest but they want to maintain public perception that it is. There's nothing wrong with this. They didn't pull an Apple and put out junk benchmarks that show their CPU 8x faster than the Athlon. In fact, as far as I could tell from their little search engine, their web site has no mention at all of the Athlon.
Third, marketing an inferior product heavily to drown out AMD is not evil. If the consumer is stupid enough not to do research when it comes to buying a very expensive little piece of hardware, then so be it, but Intel shouldn't be condemned for doing what every single other company on the planet would do in their place.
Sure, the underdog is always rooted for (at least in the US), but this sort of article posted to slashdot makes it sound like Intel is some sorta evil minion of satan using Microsoft-like business practices. Frankly, as far as I can tell, Intel is just trying to keep itself associated with quality & speed until the Itanium launch.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...
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The GPL AC-3 decoder is called 'ac3dec' and is available at http://ess.engr.uvic.ca/~aholtzma/ac3/. It supports Linux, Solaris, etc.
The Dolby Digital AC-3 specs are on that site as well.
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You aren't allowed to release the GPL section as part of it if the entire thing isn't GPL'ed.
If you don't abide by the GPL license, you loose all rights to the source including redistribution.
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While I don't agree that pre-existing natural 'source' should be patentable... I did a little research on it...
When you file for a patent in the US for anything including genome maps, you must publicly disclose it entirely within 2 years for patent protection.
Disclosure includes printed publications and/or a publicly accessible database. The US govt is then required to hold the information back for up to 3 years (usually less).
Now unless I'm mistaken, this means that you can go to IBM's little patent server instead of paying them for the information, though this might be considered illegal if you reprint it without permission.
Now in 1992 the NIH (National Institutes of Health) tried to patent several gene fragments and the PTO sent a rejection notice back to them immediately.
In 1997, the PTO said that it would allow expressed sequence tags (ESTs) to be patented. Now, ESTs are DNA sequences made up to a few hundred base pairs in length that can be used to identify the expression of specific genes.
As far as I'm considered, DNA is nothing more than the source code of life and should fall under the same catagory as algorithms when it comes to patents.
Now, patenting the effects of the new DNA is something entirely different. Should you be able to patent the method of replacing a specific sequence of old DNA with your particular new DNA sequences in order to change something, for example to change hair color in humans?
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This type of hands-off regulation really isn't good when it prohibits competition.
:)
The very idea that cable companies are the only ones which could install and upgrade the cable infrastructure to support cable modems is silly.
If the cable industry was broken down like the telephone industry, a CLEC would be able to throw in their own hardware to support cable modems, be allocated a freq range and roll their own or at least have the cable company roll out the base infrastructure and backhaul the traffic back.
Simply put, cable companies are becoming telecommuniations companies and should be subject to the same regulation that existing ILECs are. Several cable companies are even registered LECs.
Personally, I think the cable industry has been upgrading their networks for digital cable because they are scared to death of DirectTV, not because they want to provide cable modem services. That was just icing on the cake.
Then again, I don't see how any ISP can provide a quality service to customers for what is effectively, ~$15/month. It amazes me that DSL providers and other high-speed providers don't have riots in their parking lots from the oversubscription rate they need to maintain.
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English could just as easily be Spanish or French or Russian. It really doesn't matter. I chose English simply because it is used a lot in the global setting.
I see no practical reason to maintain several hundred different languages and translate all the world's knowledge constantly between them and not just standardize on one.
In the US, we have a whole lot of different cultures all living under one roof. Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, British, African, Brazilian, Egyptian, Indian, and so on. Everyone seems to accept the fact that in order to participate in a meaningful way in our society, you must learn English. The culture doesn't go away just because you learn a second language but English becomes your primary language.
Now, one might point out that you do loose a piece of yourself here and it is true. I being a white middle-class male have pretty much no specific ethnic culture to speak of and I'll be honest, I don't see it as a big loss.
One more thing, during this discussion I've tried to be sensible and practical as possible and just throw out some ideas which I'd hope people would comment on with an open mind.
Please try and refrain from making personal attacks when criticizing posts.
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Japan, unless I'm mistaken, requires all students to take English in school.
China's highly educated population (Hong Kong, etc) also has a large percentage of English speakers.
The idea is not to force everyone to speak English, only to know it so that one you meet someone who speaks English or you need to use a computer, you can do so and receive a first-rate experience.
The phase out would be gradual; require all students to take a year or two of English, only publish information on the bulk of the Internet in English, make most software English-only, submit scientific articles in English, submit technological breakthroughs in English.
Really, most of this stuff already happens by itself. I really don't see how people in industrial nations can live without knowing English and not be a step behind the rest of the world.
There are several languages that are superior to English, but none are as easy to switch the world over to.
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After reading a bit on how the dvorak layout reduces the amount of distance your fingers have to travel, I thought it might be a good idea to try and learn it.
However, after attempting to write code with a dvorak keyboard, I switched right back over. While the placement of such keys as "{};&>.[]+=-*%!" is not exactly optimal on a qwerty keyboard, they are much easier to hit on qwerty than dvorak.
Unix commands which aren't necessarily english also seem to be easier to type on qwerty for some reason ls, ps, pwd, chgrp, ftp, etc...
Hopefully keyboards will be outdated by some decent voice recognition software or human neural interface before my hands cramp up and die from all the typing I do.
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Just to play the devil's advocate for a bit...
:)
Does it really matter if any women are in the open source developer community? Does it matter if Linux was created by a man rather than a woman? Would some massive economic, social and spiritual change happen because it just happens that the author of a piece of software was female?
Maybe I have never been big on "heroes" or maybe it's just the fact that I never really looked up to anyone as a child and said I wanted to be like them because they were famous, but I think it's pretty silly to think that there is a problem in the world if a particular field is dominated by men. Now I'm not saying that it's ok to discourage people from going into a field of work because it's dominated by men, what I am against is pushing someone towards a field strictly because it is and going as far as to mount an entire campaign around it.
Men and women are not the same; physically and psychologically. While growing up, each person should be given a broad range of fields they can work in when they get older and should be free to make up their own decisions about which one they enjoy the most and what they as an individual are most suited towards.
Of course, as a man, I don't really have a good perspective on how women are treated as they grow up. Maybe there is a good amount of discouragement which men don't get when trying to enter a male dominated field. This is not to say that men aren't discouraged when entering a male dominated field either, it's just we are too self absorbed to care what other people, especially men, think.
Then again, I would like to find a woman who understood my work so I doubt have to dumb down my conversation. I really hate doing that.
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Apple used to constantly put out "Macs vs PCs" advertisements, but recently they've changed their tune and they consider Macs PCs.
Apple has been putting out a lot of hype about how their system is the first "PC" to be under export law, but Alphas have been under restricted export law for years.
AMD's Athlon appears to be faster than the G4 from what little benchmarks I've been able to find, but I don't believe the Athlon is under export law, which I find a bit odd.
FOLDOC says a PC is:So I guess being a PC depends on the OS, not the CPU. Does that mean a Windows machine setup for multiple logins is no longer a PC?
Who knows.
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