No matter what people come up with, I suspect the Chinese are not going to be happy with a character set that wasn't designed by them. They will probably also not be happy with character sets that accomodate Taiwan.
The best solution, in my opinion, rather than to come up with a global standard, is to let different countries work out their own coding schemes and then come up with a way of encapsulating those schemes in an 8bit code. That way, people who don't need Chinese or Japanese don't have to pay for the overhead resulting from the complexity of those writing systems.
Mixed language editors would continue to be the specialty software they are and have to come up with their own representations.
Of course, US software vendors hate that because they would have to spend a lot more money on customizing their software to particular target markets; they can't just translate a file of message strings. They might even have serious competition from local vendors.
One the one side, you have a country with a pretty but otherwise messy, outdated, and unwieldy writing system, unwilling to move to a more convenient alphabetic writing system (rightly or wrongly). On the other side, you have a large collection of western corporations that desparately want to sell lots of equipment there without the cost of doing specialized software development. This ought to be an interesting fight.
The data can be interpreted that over the last 2 years, people changed their behavior and started using fewer and fewer sites. But it can also be interpreted that over the last 2 years, a large number of people came on-line who haven't yet discovered that there is a whole world wide web for them to explore. These interpretations might have very different implications about the future of the web, and from the reports, I couldn't tell which one is more accurate.
(Of course, that is not to deny that mergers have happened and that the available choices have narrowed.)
What a strange statement is that? How does it matter how much profit we had 10 years ago if today my company went bankrupt?/i>
If you manage to transfer profits from one company you own to another company you own in order to avoid costly contractual obligtations, that would matter a lot to you.
Are you suggesting that free market economy is an economic stupidity?
No. Have you always had problems with reading comprehension?
What does Jxta let me do that nothing else can do? Writing a P2P app isn't rocket science; a freshman CS major can probably do a decent job of it.
Yes, and they do. Over and over again. In C. In C++. In C again. Using half a dozen open or half open toolkits. Using MFC. Reinventing the wheel again and again.
I agree that Jxta will probably not make it. But the disease that it is trying to cure is real.
If you pick up books on memory tricks and mnemonics, they describe schemes very similar to this. Many people who do this actually prefer methods that involve a little bit more memorization: they are faster and you are less likely to make a mistake.
What does this mean? Did you put together transistors on a PC board? TTL logic gates? Bit slice processor with memory? I think beyond that, it doesn't really count anymore as "building your own computer", it's assembly from prefabricated parts. Nice, but not exactly the same.
Make millions in computer industry (unchecked)
I can't think of anything worse that ever happened to the computer industry than the feeding frenzy of 1998-2000. Let's hope the VCs and business sharks will wreak havoc in some other sector of the economy for a while.
Re:Wood... ho hum. What about stone?
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Why not just glue stone floor tiles to the outside of a standard PC case? Or, if you just want the look but don't need the weight, there are excellent high-quality acrylic versions of stone tiles that are hard to distinguish.
It was pseudo-deregulation where only one side was asked to play on the free market.
A big difference.
Yes, and do you know where that pseudo-deregulation came from? It wasn't the customers that were asking for it; most customers were completely unaware of deregulation. It was the power companies themselves. They expected to be able to buy cheap wholesale electricity while still being able to charge way-above market rates for a few years. It didn't work out, but no great loss to them anyway, since they managed to get the profits they did make out of the state before going bankrupt.
Regulated or state owned power generation does not give you the cheapest power. What it gives you is long term predictability and stability. Exposing private customers and small businesses to the price volatility of the energy market to save a few bucks, as deregulation does, is a prime example of current economic stupidity. The kinds of economists who advocate this sort of thing are either incompetent, or they are simply being paid off.
Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries
The irony is, of course, that internal decision making in corporations is anything but based on free market principles. If IBM or GE don't think it is necessary to run their corporations like a free market internally to make efficient decisions, why do they scream bloody murder when the government tries to regulate market activities?
I didn't see any mention of shielding in his description. If there is none, he's going to cause some of his neighbors that rely on radio frequencies a lot of headaches. That's just not very nice, not to mention that his neighbors can demand that he shut it down.
Courts are irrelevant. BSD has much more to lose than Darren. Users of BSD must be able to have confidence in that the project maintainers have done their licensing homework, otherwise BSD become unattractive as the basis for both open source and commercial projects.
(And I suspect that courts would agree with Darren's interpretation anyway.)
Well, my 1GHz Athlon, bought for about $900 three months ago, gets 800MFlops on that without enabling any Athlon-specific optimizations (I think it has some vectorization as well). A 466MHz G4 costs $1700 even today and only gives you 410MFlops without special hacks. Many scientific computations cannot take advantage of the Altivec without a lot of work. But even using the Altivec performance for comparison, the G4 is no more than pulling equal.
Sorry, I don't think the G4 is a good deal in terms of cost/performance. You pay a premium for Apple; that may be worth it for other reasons, but not because of performance.
It could be that Intel and AMD have incorporated more of the technologies that allowed the PPC to perform well into their chips so that they now take better advantage of their higher clock speeds.
Users of free software, and more importantly, other contributors to the *BSD projects, have a right to a clear, unambiguous license of the entire distribution. Darren says he isn't going to change the license to the BSD license, he'd much rather go on explaining as he goes along what his license means. That's his right. But I think the consequence of that choice is that the software shouldn't be part of the BSD distribution because it undermines the otherwise very liberal license of the entire BSD distributions.
As for "blame", I don't think Darren is to blame. IPF should never have made it into BSD into the project in the first place. It is the BSD project should have made sure that every piece of code that makes it into the distribution falls under a standard license. While the BSD project sometimes views the GNU folks as heavy-handed, they themselves must pay more attention to licensing issues if they want to keep the freedom inherent in the BSD distribution alive: if BSD gets invaded by more software contributions with restrictive licenses, BSD itself will cease to exist in its current form.
Successful open source software projects are great vehicles for purposes of marketing and establishing industry standards. As such, they are constantly at risk of being invaded by contributions that come with their own licenses and commercial or personal agendas. The GPL world has its own share of issues in this areas, with companies using projects to push their products by contributing either limited functionality code or code with strings attached. Watch out.
Whatever happened to Xweb or Broadway in XFree86? It's a collection of changes to the X11 server that makes execution of X11 applications over ther Internet practical. We do get LBX (low-bandwidth X) with XFree86, but what about untrusted clients? There seems to be some support, but all of Broadway in XFree86?
I suppose VNC is a simpler, more practical alternative for most applications, but still. Running plain X11 for remote, untrusted applications can be better in some cases.
and my name is V**GER. My machine buddies performed a few upgrades before sending me back to my creator.
How do you think "real science" is done?
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The pioneers in any area can't just order equipment from Edmund Scientifics. They had to build everything themselves. Besides, kitchen and household items are a lot cheaper than commercial supplies, and that isn't lost on budget conscious labs.
While you can't do everything on a budget, you generally don't need a lot of equipment in order to do science, even cutting edge science. Policymakers should remember that when they consider trying to restrict the availability of technology or bet that it won't proliferate. You may be able to track and restrict nuclear materials, with occasional problems, but you can't restrict biotech or computers.
The situation is really not unlike software. You may have big companies going out and spending billions on "enterprise software", while nimble smaller players do a better job with open source.
Just because you have a 250W PSU doesn't mean you're using that much.
No, but based on experience, it's easy to overload a 200W power supply in a PC, so machines do come pretty close. In addition, there are monitors and external power supplies.
Shinier, smaller, and faster. Rather than ripping out its brain, put in a shiny new Espresso PC and run a eVAX emulator on it. That way, not only can the machine serve cold drinks, it can go on serving its original function.
Don't fall for the PR stunts of a bunch of VCs that made a bad investment. Napster stopped being about fair use and the right to share information with your friends when they tried to derive revenue from it and became a startup.
The unfortunate consequence of all this greed is that the technology (copy protection) and laws to stop it may adversely affect actual fair use provisions of copyright.
Electricity in CA and NYC costs about $0.12/kwh at tier I rates. Let's say an old PC uses about 200W. So, 0.2kw * $0.12/kwh * 24h = $0.58/day or $17/month. If it's a machine with lots of disks, a monitor, and other peripherals, you can easily double or triple that. And if you use enough electricity to get into tier 2, your rates go up.
At those rates, which are pretty standard, your claim works out to running a single machine at at most 60 watts (probably half that, since you presumably have other appliances and lights). I think that's a bit low...
A predictable objection, but wrong, I think. You can emulate "much". Wine does, as did other systems before it. Unfortunately, emulating "much" of Win32 APIs isn't all that useful for running current Windows desktop apps, which still have lots of legacy code that's hard to accomodate. But the writing is on the wall. And.Net will make it even harder for Microsoft to prevent emulation.
Slashdot Mirror
The best solution, in my opinion, rather than to come up with a global standard, is to let different countries work out their own coding schemes and then come up with a way of encapsulating those schemes in an 8bit code. That way, people who don't need Chinese or Japanese don't have to pay for the overhead resulting from the complexity of those writing systems.
Mixed language editors would continue to be the specialty software they are and have to come up with their own representations.
Of course, US software vendors hate that because they would have to spend a lot more money on customizing their software to particular target markets; they can't just translate a file of message strings. They might even have serious competition from local vendors.
One the one side, you have a country with a pretty but otherwise messy, outdated, and unwieldy writing system, unwilling to move to a more convenient alphabetic writing system (rightly or wrongly). On the other side, you have a large collection of western corporations that desparately want to sell lots of equipment there without the cost of doing specialized software development. This ought to be an interesting fight.
(Of course, that is not to deny that mergers have happened and that the available choices have narrowed.)
If you manage to transfer profits from one company you own to another company you own in order to avoid costly contractual obligtations, that would matter a lot to you.
Are you suggesting that free market economy is an economic stupidity?
No. Have you always had problems with reading comprehension?
Yes, and they do. Over and over again. In C. In C++. In C again. Using half a dozen open or half open toolkits. Using MFC. Reinventing the wheel again and again.
I agree that Jxta will probably not make it. But the disease that it is trying to cure is real.
If you pick up books on memory tricks and mnemonics, they describe schemes very similar to this. Many people who do this actually prefer methods that involve a little bit more memorization: they are faster and you are less likely to make a mistake.
What does this mean? Did you put together transistors on a PC board? TTL logic gates? Bit slice processor with memory? I think beyond that, it doesn't really count anymore as "building your own computer", it's assembly from prefabricated parts. Nice, but not exactly the same.
Make millions in computer industry (unchecked)
I can't think of anything worse that ever happened to the computer industry than the feeding frenzy of 1998-2000. Let's hope the VCs and business sharks will wreak havoc in some other sector of the economy for a while.
Why not just glue stone floor tiles to the outside of a standard PC case? Or, if you just want the look but don't need the weight, there are excellent high-quality acrylic versions of stone tiles that are hard to distinguish.
Yes, and do you know where that pseudo-deregulation came from? It wasn't the customers that were asking for it; most customers were completely unaware of deregulation. It was the power companies themselves. They expected to be able to buy cheap wholesale electricity while still being able to charge way-above market rates for a few years. It didn't work out, but no great loss to them anyway, since they managed to get the profits they did make out of the state before going bankrupt.
Regulated or state owned power generation does not give you the cheapest power. What it gives you is long term predictability and stability. Exposing private customers and small businesses to the price volatility of the energy market to save a few bucks, as deregulation does, is a prime example of current economic stupidity. The kinds of economists who advocate this sort of thing are either incompetent, or they are simply being paid off.
The irony is, of course, that internal decision making in corporations is anything but based on free market principles. If IBM or GE don't think it is necessary to run their corporations like a free market internally to make efficient decisions, why do they scream bloody murder when the government tries to regulate market activities?
As far as I can tell, Slashdot seems to represent pretty well the thinking of educated people in the US.
IPS is a leftist think tank in Washington.
Yes, one of the few. Most think tanks are right wing and merely parrot the opinions of their corporate sponsors.
I didn't see any mention of shielding in his description. If there is none, he's going to cause some of his neighbors that rely on radio frequencies a lot of headaches. That's just not very nice, not to mention that his neighbors can demand that he shut it down.
(And I suspect that courts would agree with Darren's interpretation anyway.)
Sorry, I don't think the G4 is a good deal in terms of cost/performance. You pay a premium for Apple; that may be worth it for other reasons, but not because of performance.
It could be that Intel and AMD have incorporated more of the technologies that allowed the PPC to perform well into their chips so that they now take better advantage of their higher clock speeds.
As for "blame", I don't think Darren is to blame. IPF should never have made it into BSD into the project in the first place. It is the BSD project should have made sure that every piece of code that makes it into the distribution falls under a standard license. While the BSD project sometimes views the GNU folks as heavy-handed, they themselves must pay more attention to licensing issues if they want to keep the freedom inherent in the BSD distribution alive: if BSD gets invaded by more software contributions with restrictive licenses, BSD itself will cease to exist in its current form.
Successful open source software projects are great vehicles for purposes of marketing and establishing industry standards. As such, they are constantly at risk of being invaded by contributions that come with their own licenses and commercial or personal agendas. The GPL world has its own share of issues in this areas, with companies using projects to push their products by contributing either limited functionality code or code with strings attached. Watch out.
I suppose VNC is a simpler, more practical alternative for most applications, but still. Running plain X11 for remote, untrusted applications can be better in some cases.
and my name is V**GER. My machine buddies performed a few upgrades before sending me back to my creator.
While you can't do everything on a budget, you generally don't need a lot of equipment in order to do science, even cutting edge science. Policymakers should remember that when they consider trying to restrict the availability of technology or bet that it won't proliferate. You may be able to track and restrict nuclear materials, with occasional problems, but you can't restrict biotech or computers.
The situation is really not unlike software. You may have big companies going out and spending billions on "enterprise software", while nimble smaller players do a better job with open source.
No, but based on experience, it's easy to overload a 200W power supply in a PC, so machines do come pretty close. In addition, there are monitors and external power supplies.
Shinier, smaller, and faster. Rather than ripping out its brain, put in a shiny new Espresso PC and run a eVAX emulator on it. That way, not only can the machine serve cold drinks, it can go on serving its original function.
The unfortunate consequence of all this greed is that the technology (copy protection) and laws to stop it may adversely affect actual fair use provisions of copyright.
It was a great BSD system for the PDP-11.
At those rates, which are pretty standard, your claim works out to running a single machine at at most 60 watts (probably half that, since you presumably have other appliances and lights). I think that's a bit low...
A predictable objection, but wrong, I think. You can emulate "much". Wine does, as did other systems before it. Unfortunately, emulating "much" of Win32 APIs isn't all that useful for running current Windows desktop apps, which still have lots of legacy code that's hard to accomodate. But the writing is on the wall. And .Net will make it even harder for Microsoft to prevent emulation.