I think you have a good analysis going, but that you're missing the divide between the terrorist leaders and their followers. The leaders of the particular main terrorist group, Al Qaeda, are trying to preserve their own influence, yes. Their followers are viewing it as a clash of views, though, and that's why the leaders cast it as a religious war. It's not because the West finds a religious war scarier. It's because a religious war is the only way they recruit followers.
There have been lots of terrorists throughout history who had no power and were trying to gain some. The first steps to power are to state your views and make them heard. Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh come to mind.
The basically found that the hard-code terrorists started as kids (not particularly religious) recruited when they went to University.
That's a good point. Feeling isolated does seem to lead many people into antisocial behavior. Why, specifically, would it be engineering students who feel isolated though? Or is it just that they feel isolated but that engineering was a more transferable craft to study, and therefore more people from Muslim countries were studying that in the West than other subjects?
Did you actually read it? Here are some corrections.
"For a pragmatic mindset, that was in incredibly long post to make a simple point:)"
Are you assuming I'm an engineer (or a terrorist)? I never said I was.
"There's plenty of computer scientists, doctors, physicists, geologists, chemists etc who are pragmatic individuals, who are also studying things with practical applicability in the Middle East."
What part of "I'm sure most of the Muslim people studying engineering are studying it for professional reasons, too" sounds like I would disagree with that?
"You also ignore the references to extremism in the US and China."
I said this:
"It's much more common to hear "join Islam or die", "join the Communist Party or rot in jail", or "love America or leave it" than to hear "if you'll pray with us, you might see Mohammed was right", "it's better for us all if we're all communists, please take this pamphlet and consider it", or "this is the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the place where it should be safe to dissent", even though there are peaceful and considerate Mulsims, Commmunists, and Americans. (I'm an American and I love my country, but I think we have not only a right but a duty to be heard when we have a grievance against our leaders -- that's what the country was founded on!)"
and this:
"We have wackos in the West who were good at destruction because of their education and training (for example Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Michael Swango, Josef Mengele, Richard Angelo, Charles Cullen, Kristen Gilbert, Stephan Letter, Christine Malevre, Norbert Poehlke, Beverly Allitt) many of whom have been nurses or physicians. That doesn't mean someone who's studied electronics, pyrotechnics, or medicine in the US or Europe is going to be a serial killer or mass murderer. The same is true of the Middle East."
In short, you're making claims absolutely demonstrably false about what I wrote and didn't write. If you didn't read it or didn't understand it, please try to do so before commenting further.
Engineers are well-known (by researchers, theorists, and others) as "get it done" types. They want to know as much theory as they need to make practical applications, and to make things that do something useful. As long as they're making progress, rough guidelines that take margins of error into account are as often as good as pure theory.
Terrorists are people who've decided to make people take notice of their views. They're not idealists who talk about people converting because they've come to accept what the terrorists see as truth. They want to get noticed and to get their message out to people. The media is an effective way to do that, if you can get the attention of the media. Blowing people up is a quick way to get in the news. Notice that the message spread by terrorists and the means of spreading it are often condemned by others wanting to spread a similar but more peaceful message, yet it's hard to deny who gets their message to a wider audience. It's much more common to hear "join Islam or die", "join the Communist Party or rot in jail", or "love America or leave it" than to hear "if you'll pray with us, you might see Mohammed was right", "it's better for us all if we're all communists, please take this pamphlet and consider it", or "this is the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the place where it should be safe to dissent", even though there are peaceful and considerate Mulsims, Commmunists, and Americans. (I'm an American and I love my country, but I think we have not only a right but a duty to be heard when we have a grievance against our leaders -- that's what the country was founded on!)
Much of what terrorists do requires skills most people don't have. Making a reliable suicide vest takes skill. Aiming an aircraft at a skyscraper was not something left to chance, but something the hijackers trained for in actual flight schools. Terrorist paramilitary camps exist to train people in how to fight with tactics developed over generations. Those who want to be effective terrorists appreciate that an engineering degree in chemical engineering is probably a good way to learn about explosives and poisons. Those who want to write software for their cause need to know how just as those who write software for other reasons do. They need to know how buildings are supported to bring them down more effectively, just as professional and peaceful demolitions crews do. These people take engineering degrees or go to flight school or training camp because they have made the pragmatic decision that it suits their ends.
So really, yeah, I can see it. Engineers do what they need to do to build buildings, bridges, computer processors, new plastics with better impact resistance, or cars with better safety ratings. Terrorists do what they need to do if their goal is killing, maiming, and getting noticed. Both are very goal-oriented, and very pragmatic. Being effective at terror often takes some engineering skills, which reinforces some of the correlations.
All of does mean that someone who's a terrorist might be lead to study engineering. It doesn't mean that people studying engineering are any more likely to become terrorists than they otherwise would be.
I'm sure most of the Muslim people studying engineering are studying it for professional reasons, too. We have wackos in the West who were good at destruction because of their education and training (for example Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Michael Swango, Josef Mengele, Richard Angelo, Charles Cullen, Kristen Gilbert, Stephan Letter, Christine Malevre, Norbert Poehlke, Beverly Allitt) many of whom have been nurses or physicians. That doesn't mean someone who's studied electronics, pyrotechnics, or medicine in the US or Europe is going to be a serial killer or mass murderer. The same is true of the Middle East.
Actually, another reason is applicability. People don't study American business law to take back to Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Indonesia, because the laws aren't the same. Engineering is largely transfe
Perl 5 and Perl 6 code can't be mixed in the same module. They can be used together in the same program.
The syntax and operator changes are for various reasons. Most of them have to do with keeping more commonly used operators shorter and making the grammar easier to parse. A few are to make the language more friendly to people used to conventions in other languages.
If you look closely at the development lists, there are reasons stated for each change, and they're usually pretty good reasons. Most (but of course not all) Perl 5 code will be trivially to translate to native Perl 6, too.
No. It is not a standards-compliant browser. A standards compliant browser would render according to the standards based on the standardized information. You could have a standards-compliant browser that also did something non-standard based on the presence of a non-standard tag. You cannot have a standards-compliant browser that fails to comply with the standard based on the absence of a non-standard tag.
That word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
"I can make up all sorts of tags and create a browser that understands them, and as long as my browser also understands the standards and renders them correctly, it's still a standards-compliant browser."
No. It is not a standards-compliant browser. A standards compliant browser would render according to the standards based on the standardized information. You could have a standards-compliant browser that also did something non-standard based on the presence of a standard tag. You cannot have a standards-compliant browser that fails to comply with the standard based on the absence of a nonstandard tag.
"Except that there are a lot of unmaintained pages out there. Microsoft wants to maintain compatibility. They don't want thousands of web developers to wake up one morning and find that half of their userbase can't use their websites because of an Internet Explorer upgrade, and they can't count on users upgrading to the new version of the browser."
Microsoft stopped supporting IE 6 as a product months ago. They might still offer major security fixes for it, but it's not seeing any upgrades. They'll stop supporting XP soon and Vista comes with IE 7. The best way to thin the herd of so-called web developers who never saw a standard is to have their pages stop working. That way, maybe their customers will assure that those so-called web developers also stop working. There sure isn't exactly a shortage of people who mistakenly think they know HTML from their asses, and real web developers would love to get the business those people get. If someone does a half-ass job and the result is a half-ass web page, they deserve to lose.
I've run OS/2 2.1 and Warp 3 on everything from my Grid 486SX laptops to my home-built Pentium II 400 box that runs Linux most of the time. I first ran it on a dx4/100 with 16 MB of RAM and I'm currently running Warp 3 on an Eduquest model 50 (which is pretyt much a PS/2. I've never had any problems other than finding native software for certain tasks.
Like run all the OS/2 software many of us have? I like Linux, too, and this post is being written from a Mandriva box with Firefox. There are applications I have for OS/2, though, that don't run anywhere else. Also, it's possible to make Linux pretty stingy about hardware resources, but running a modern Linux on a 486 with 8 megabytes of RAM, a full GUI with nice docked window manager, and a couple of applications open is kinda tough. OS/2 runs pretty snappily on that kind of setup.
Sun sells hardware, too. Open Source software that runs on SPARC platforms benefits roughly three hardware companies: Sun, Fujitsu, and Tadpole. Open Source software that runs on Power benefits IBM and Momentum at least, and probably some of the PowerPC embedded sellers. IBM also has helped with lots of stuff that runs on x86, which benefits lots of hardware companies (as has Sun).
As for people never opening their formerly closed source, that's bullshit. Carmack opens all old id software titles. IBM keeps AIX closed but has moved lots of code they wrote for it into Linux. Six Part opened up Movable Type. DJB has released his code into the public domain. Adobe opened Flex. Linden Lab open-sourced their client app. The Eudora email client is now open source. Computer Associates released Ingres as open source. Watcom C/C++ and Watcom Fortran are now open. Lots of other formerly closed-source software is now open as well. I'm not sure you can tell me the stuff by id, 3DRealms, Watcom, NeoGeo, and others were not "crown jewel" bits of software.
To be fair to Sun, nobody seems to be pointing out that the Sparc and Niagara processor cores are open as well. That's something it'd be nice to see from Power or the z systems.
One million fewer in population ten years later, and you're saying that's thousands dead? The population of the world exploded after WWII in 1946 through 1949. Here we see a million fewer over the course of a decade. Never mind the fact, too, that you're citing different sources both of which are estimates and that many Jews in 1938 in Europe probably would not have admitted to such.
I believe jessiej meant, "and only testing in standards-compliant browsers and not in IE". The whole idea of standards compliance is that once the browsers are compliant any code that does the right thing in one standards-compliant browser works the same elsewhere.
Requiring a non-standard tag to be part of a standards-compliant page isn't standards-compliant. The standards says nothing about adding tags that aren't part of the standards. How could they?
The real fix here would be for MS to either: support IE 6 in making it standards compliant or report to its customers that it is not standards compliant and that pages written for it are not either. Maybe a good work-around for people who broke their sites by writing to IE 6 would be to add a tag that says to use IE 6's render mode. IT shouldn't be the people following the standards who have to make the change.
What MS is counting on two things with this botch. One is that it's the people who didn't care if anything but IE 6 worked who won't be bothered to update anything. The other is that people who cared enough about standards and cross-browser compatibility to do extra work then will care enough about IE 8 now to do a little extra.
Parrot's one target for multiple languages, but it's also only one target of Perl 6. Goals include that Perl code will be able to be targeted to either a JIT native compiler or a traditional object code compiler as well as targeting Parrot.
If you're looking for incremental improvements, you might take a look at Perl 5. In 2001 there was 5.6.1 and now there's 5.8.10 with many improvements.
Want a few examples of improvements? The regex parser recently went from mostly recursive to mostly iterative. it also has many new features and has other efficiency gains. Unicode handling exists and continues to get better. Several things take less memory than previously. Lexically-scoped pragmas can now be implemented in pure Perl without resorting to C. A simpler and clearer way to handle static lexical variables has been introduced. Perl's default variable can now be lexically scoped. Many new language features have been introduced. Perl has a switch statement in the core now. There's a new defined-or operator. The user-defined sorting subs can now be recursive if you need them to be. Compress::Zlib, Archive::Tar, and Archive::Extract are among some exciting new core modules.
Most of what I just mentioned were changes between 5.8.8 and 5.10.0, so there's quite a bit more between 5.6.1 and the current Perl landscape. There were also a lot of changes to Perl 5 back in the 2001 to 2002 time frame, and have been all along since.
Some changes between 5.6.1 and 5.8.0 included changing to a stable algorithm for sort(), changing the default IO layer from the system stdio to the PerlIO system for more predictable cross-platform behavior, safe signal handling, the UTF8 encoding being changed from lexically scoped with the program to being associated with a file handle, and a much better threading model.
Important changes during the 5.8.x series include extra randomness in the order of hash keys, Config.pm being shrunk by about 90%, better handling of UTF-16 encoding, the elimination of some temporary lists during certain operations, and smarter malloc() handling.
Perl 5 isn't exactly sitting still, and it hasn't been. Perl 6 is, IMHO, not so much a simple upgrade of Perl as a new language in the family of Perl-like languages. Perl 6 will be to Perl 5 much what Perl 5 was to Perl 4. People will notice some syntax changes, but many people will program in it like they were using the previous version with a tweaked syntax. Others will take advantage of all the new features. Eventually most Perl programmers will find a portion of the language that suits their tasks most readily and will become most comfortable with that. Perl 5 isn't going away for a long time, so people who really can't stand the idea of a new Perl will be able to do a lot of Perl 5 work.
Yeah, there are other languages that will wax and wane. Ruby looks interesting, and a lot of people seem to like it. I have a general distaste for personally using languages with so much significant whitespace as Python, but lots of people really like it and there's really good software being written in it. I can't fault a language or its designer for my having other preferences. JavaScript is pretty handy, and it's getting better tools and implementations all the time and a new standard soonish. I've picked up HaXe recently, and it's an interesting alternative to ActionScript and JavaScript. I am considering learning D. Java's really popular. Yet many people still program in Perl, C++, C, Ada, Pascal derivatives, Basic, Fortran, and even COBOL. People said Basic was dead, but Visual Basic is still around.
Like Perl, though, what we call Basic these days doesn't much resemble Basic from 20 years ago. Visual Basic doesn't even look like older versions of itself, let alone QuickBasic or the even older and even more severely limited GWBasic or Dartmouth Basic. If Perl 6 is a few years separated and a bit different, it doesn't mean it's not Perl or that it was a waste to create it. The only way it would be a waste is if nobody used it.
Good catch.:-) I meant "reckless" of course. Although it's a common misunderstanding, I assure you I know the joke you're getting at. My fingers apparently don't like typing "reck" without the "w" though.
Maybe I'll take some practice... reck reck reck reck... There, it's starting to feel natural.
That crap is why Linux and the open-source BSDs exist. Tarantella is still around, as others have pointed out. This "SCO" is actually Caldera, the old Linux vendor.
WTF would you let one OS bankrupt your business? Surely a MicroVax, a desktop Sun box or a couple of AOL accounts would have let you send email. Or hell, you could have had a 56k leased line and hooked the SCO box up via Ethernet, which I'm pretty sure it didn't have problems with in 1993 as long as you used a good card.
The slow but steady use of all those would count towards a total data transfer plan, but many of them wouldn't cause any saturation headaches for the network provider. I'm picturing something close to what commercial line customers get -- every 5 minutes or every 15 minutes it takes your average data transfer over the previous 5 minutes or 15 minutes. You'd be allowed 720 five-minute bursts or 240 each month where your average data transfer was over 1 Mbps, after which your average would be held to 1 Mbps with a cap around 1.5 Mbps.
I don't see anyone complaining that their outbound capacity is saturated. There's a good reason for that, too. Most of our consumer lines (and in fact my office DSL) are asymmetric. We download much more than we upload, and our lines are configured that way. Many plans are something crazy like 6 to 8 Mbps down with only 256 to 512 Kbps up. That's because the line is being biased for typical end-user usage. However, the big lines that carry that traffic to the peering points for the big network providers are typically still symmetric full duplex lines. That means by planning for download capacity for all those asymmetric lines, the carriers are looking for stuff to do with outbound bandwidth.
There are several places where ISPs are apart from reality.
First, there's abuse of the term "bandwidth", which has nothing to do with the amount of data downloaded. Bandwidth is how much of a frequency range is being used on the wire to provide the service. That's it.
"Date rate" is how much data the bandwidth, encoding, compression, and such allow you to get out of the bandwidth. It's also what ISPs limit you to when they say "megabits per second" or "kilobits per second".
Total monthly data transfer available for an always-on connection at a certain data rate can be calculated as the data rate per second times the number of seconds per month. Capped usage for total monthly data transfer, which is what this article is actually about, can be thought of as the data rate times the number of seconds time the percentage of utilization. What they're wanting to limit here is that percentage of utilization of what they're selling you access to use.
One way to lower total monthly data transfer for a customer is to lower the data rate. That means things come down slower all month. Another is to limit the amount of time for which the line is fully utilized. Many business users of truly high-speed access pay for what are called "burstable lines". You get the whole DS3 or entire OC-12 or whatever type of line it is. You get billed with the understanding that you use a certain percentage of data rate or less a certain percentage of the time, and that the rest of the time you can use all of it without paying extra.
When I was in the ISP field and buying our backbone lines from bigger network providers, we typically leased lines with the first 15% or 25% of the full data rate included, with the stipulation that 5% or 10% of the time we could use all the data transfer the line had to offer without being billed extra. That meant that if we experienced abnormal peak demand, we didn't get our lines saturated. It also meant we didn't get soaked paying for peak capacity all the time. We in fact got a report each month showing the percentage, on average over each 5-minute increment, we used of the line's data rate the whole month. We could look at the chart being built (by MRTG) as the month progressed, too.
The reason total traffic is the way ISPs want to deal with end users is that it's easier to explain "you can move 20 gigabytes" than "90th percentile usage will be at no more than 30% of the data rate capacity of the circuit". Still, I think people would understand easily enough if they were told, "For 60 hours a month, you can max out your line. The rest of the time, you're going to be at 1 Mbps".
I'm not sure what "against the default restorable... install" means.
In case you're not clear on what I said, the pronoun "This" in "This boots from the ROM" was referring to Splashtop, which was the topic of discussion.
Why would I buy a chapter of your book? Why, especially, would I buy only part of a musical score or only part of a song?
Prepay before release is interesting, but it's pretty much limited to those with a track record of creating good work or with one hell of a marketing campaign, isn't it?
You're right about people giving the work away absolutely free. If I buy it for $5 and another buys it for %5, and he gives it away, you and I are both out of a market for it. That's the problem. It can take years to write a book, and $5 doesn't support you for years.
You gasp at 50 years of protection, when right now we're dealing with over 100 years and abuses by middlemen. Yet you still haven't stated why it's bad (or even unneccessary) to limit distribution. It's perfectly clear you think it's bad, but you haven't made a case for why or a workable alternative.
The Eee uses a distro based on Xandros and boots from the SSD. This boots from the ROM (and either can't be updated or must use a ROM update like most modern BIOSes), and is much more akin to LinuxBIOS than a full Linux installation.
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I think you have a good analysis going, but that you're missing the divide between the terrorist leaders and their followers. The leaders of the particular main terrorist group, Al Qaeda, are trying to preserve their own influence, yes. Their followers are viewing it as a clash of views, though, and that's why the leaders cast it as a religious war. It's not because the West finds a religious war scarier. It's because a religious war is the only way they recruit followers.
There have been lots of terrorists throughout history who had no power and were trying to gain some. The first steps to power are to state your views and make them heard. Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh come to mind.
That's a good point. Feeling isolated does seem to lead many people into antisocial behavior. Why, specifically, would it be engineering students who feel isolated though? Or is it just that they feel isolated but that engineering was a more transferable craft to study, and therefore more people from Muslim countries were studying that in the West than other subjects?
Are you assuming I'm an engineer (or a terrorist)? I never said I was.
What part of "I'm sure most of the Muslim people studying engineering are studying it for professional reasons, too" sounds like I would disagree with that?
I said this:
"It's much more common to hear "join Islam or die", "join the Communist Party or rot in jail", or "love America or leave it" than to hear "if you'll pray with us, you might see Mohammed was right", "it's better for us all if we're all communists, please take this pamphlet and consider it", or "this is the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the place where it should be safe to dissent", even though there are peaceful and considerate Mulsims, Commmunists, and Americans. (I'm an American and I love my country, but I think we have not only a right but a duty to be heard when we have a grievance against our leaders -- that's what the country was founded on!)"
and this:
"We have wackos in the West who were good at destruction because of their education and training (for example Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Michael Swango, Josef Mengele, Richard Angelo, Charles Cullen, Kristen Gilbert, Stephan Letter, Christine Malevre, Norbert Poehlke, Beverly Allitt) many of whom have been nurses or physicians. That doesn't mean someone who's studied electronics, pyrotechnics, or medicine in the US or Europe is going to be a serial killer or mass murderer. The same is true of the Middle East."
In short, you're making claims absolutely demonstrably false about what I wrote and didn't write. If you didn't read it or didn't understand it, please try to do so before commenting further.
Engineers are well-known (by researchers, theorists, and others) as "get it done" types. They want to know as much theory as they need to make practical applications, and to make things that do something useful. As long as they're making progress, rough guidelines that take margins of error into account are as often as good as pure theory.
Terrorists are people who've decided to make people take notice of their views. They're not idealists who talk about people converting because they've come to accept what the terrorists see as truth. They want to get noticed and to get their message out to people. The media is an effective way to do that, if you can get the attention of the media. Blowing people up is a quick way to get in the news. Notice that the message spread by terrorists and the means of spreading it are often condemned by others wanting to spread a similar but more peaceful message, yet it's hard to deny who gets their message to a wider audience. It's much more common to hear "join Islam or die", "join the Communist Party or rot in jail", or "love America or leave it" than to hear "if you'll pray with us, you might see Mohammed was right", "it's better for us all if we're all communists, please take this pamphlet and consider it", or "this is the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the place where it should be safe to dissent", even though there are peaceful and considerate Mulsims, Commmunists, and Americans. (I'm an American and I love my country, but I think we have not only a right but a duty to be heard when we have a grievance against our leaders -- that's what the country was founded on!)
Much of what terrorists do requires skills most people don't have. Making a reliable suicide vest takes skill. Aiming an aircraft at a skyscraper was not something left to chance, but something the hijackers trained for in actual flight schools. Terrorist paramilitary camps exist to train people in how to fight with tactics developed over generations. Those who want to be effective terrorists appreciate that an engineering degree in chemical engineering is probably a good way to learn about explosives and poisons. Those who want to write software for their cause need to know how just as those who write software for other reasons do. They need to know how buildings are supported to bring them down more effectively, just as professional and peaceful demolitions crews do. These people take engineering degrees or go to flight school or training camp because they have made the pragmatic decision that it suits their ends.
So really, yeah, I can see it. Engineers do what they need to do to build buildings, bridges, computer processors, new plastics with better impact resistance, or cars with better safety ratings. Terrorists do what they need to do if their goal is killing, maiming, and getting noticed. Both are very goal-oriented, and very pragmatic. Being effective at terror often takes some engineering skills, which reinforces some of the correlations.
All of does mean that someone who's a terrorist might be lead to study engineering. It doesn't mean that people studying engineering are any more likely to become terrorists than they otherwise would be.
I'm sure most of the Muslim people studying engineering are studying it for professional reasons, too. We have wackos in the West who were good at destruction because of their education and training (for example Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Michael Swango, Josef Mengele, Richard Angelo, Charles Cullen, Kristen Gilbert, Stephan Letter, Christine Malevre, Norbert Poehlke, Beverly Allitt) many of whom have been nurses or physicians. That doesn't mean someone who's studied electronics, pyrotechnics, or medicine in the US or Europe is going to be a serial killer or mass murderer. The same is true of the Middle East.
Actually, another reason is applicability. People don't study American business law to take back to Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Indonesia, because the laws aren't the same. Engineering is largely transfe
Perl 5 and Perl 6 code can't be mixed in the same module. They can be used together in the same program.
The syntax and operator changes are for various reasons. Most of them have to do with keeping more commonly used operators shorter and making the grammar easier to parse. A few are to make the language more friendly to people used to conventions in other languages.
If you look closely at the development lists, there are reasons stated for each change, and they're usually pretty good reasons. Most (but of course not all) Perl 5 code will be trivially to translate to native Perl 6, too.
That second response should read:
No. It is not a standards-compliant browser. A standards compliant browser would render according to the standards based on the standardized information. You could have a standards-compliant browser that also did something non-standard based on the presence of a non-standard tag. You cannot have a standards-compliant browser that fails to comply with the standard based on the absence of a non-standard tag.
"There are some semantic issues with your post."
That word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
"I can make up all sorts of tags and create a browser that understands them, and as long as my browser also understands the standards and renders them correctly, it's still a standards-compliant browser."
No. It is not a standards-compliant browser. A standards compliant browser would render according to the standards based on the standardized information. You could have a standards-compliant browser that also did something non-standard based on the presence of a standard tag. You cannot have a standards-compliant browser that fails to comply with the standard based on the absence of a nonstandard tag.
"Except that there are a lot of unmaintained pages out there. Microsoft wants to maintain compatibility. They don't want thousands of web developers to wake up one morning and find that half of their userbase can't use their websites because of an Internet Explorer upgrade, and they can't count on users upgrading to the new version of the browser."
Microsoft stopped supporting IE 6 as a product months ago. They might still offer major security fixes for it, but it's not seeing any upgrades. They'll stop supporting XP soon and Vista comes with IE 7. The best way to thin the herd of so-called web developers who never saw a standard is to have their pages stop working. That way, maybe their customers will assure that those so-called web developers also stop working. There sure isn't exactly a shortage of people who mistakenly think they know HTML from their asses, and real web developers would love to get the business those people get. If someone does a half-ass job and the result is a half-ass web page, they deserve to lose.
I've run OS/2 2.1 and Warp 3 on everything from my Grid 486SX laptops to my home-built Pentium II 400 box that runs Linux most of the time. I first ran it on a dx4/100 with 16 MB of RAM and I'm currently running Warp 3 on an Eduquest model 50 (which is pretyt much a PS/2. I've never had any problems other than finding native software for certain tasks.
Like run all the OS/2 software many of us have? I like Linux, too, and this post is being written from a Mandriva box with Firefox. There are applications I have for OS/2, though, that don't run anywhere else. Also, it's possible to make Linux pretty stingy about hardware resources, but running a modern Linux on a 486 with 8 megabytes of RAM, a full GUI with nice docked window manager, and a couple of applications open is kinda tough. OS/2 runs pretty snappily on that kind of setup.
Sun sells hardware, too. Open Source software that runs on SPARC platforms benefits roughly three hardware companies: Sun, Fujitsu, and Tadpole. Open Source software that runs on Power benefits IBM and Momentum at least, and probably some of the PowerPC embedded sellers. IBM also has helped with lots of stuff that runs on x86, which benefits lots of hardware companies (as has Sun).
As for people never opening their formerly closed source, that's bullshit. Carmack opens all old id software titles. IBM keeps AIX closed but has moved lots of code they wrote for it into Linux. Six Part opened up Movable Type. DJB has released his code into the public domain. Adobe opened Flex. Linden Lab open-sourced their client app. The Eudora email client is now open source. Computer Associates released Ingres as open source. Watcom C/C++ and Watcom Fortran are now open. Lots of other formerly closed-source software is now open as well. I'm not sure you can tell me the stuff by id, 3DRealms, Watcom, NeoGeo, and others were not "crown jewel" bits of software.
To be fair to Sun, nobody seems to be pointing out that the Sparc and Niagara processor cores are open as well. That's something it'd be nice to see from Power or the z systems.
It's an easy enough thing to infer, too, from the letter stating that IBM has legal obligations which precludes it opening the source.
One million fewer in population ten years later, and you're saying that's thousands dead? The population of the world exploded after WWII in 1946 through 1949. Here we see a million fewer over the course of a decade. Never mind the fact, too, that you're citing different sources both of which are estimates and that many Jews in 1938 in Europe probably would not have admitted to such.
I believe jessiej meant, "and only testing in standards-compliant browsers and not in IE". The whole idea of standards compliance is that once the browsers are compliant any code that does the right thing in one standards-compliant browser works the same elsewhere.
Requiring a non-standard tag to be part of a standards-compliant page isn't standards-compliant. The standards says nothing about adding tags that aren't part of the standards. How could they?
The real fix here would be for MS to either: support IE 6 in making it standards compliant or report to its customers that it is not standards compliant and that pages written for it are not either. Maybe a good work-around for people who broke their sites by writing to IE 6 would be to add a tag that says to use IE 6's render mode. IT shouldn't be the people following the standards who have to make the change.
What MS is counting on two things with this botch. One is that it's the people who didn't care if anything but IE 6 worked who won't be bothered to update anything. The other is that people who cared enough about standards and cross-browser compatibility to do extra work then will care enough about IE 8 now to do a little extra.
Parrot's one target for multiple languages, but it's also only one target of Perl 6. Goals include that Perl code will be able to be targeted to either a JIT native compiler or a traditional object code compiler as well as targeting Parrot.
Crap... that first line should read '5.10.0' where it says '5.8.10'.
s/8\.10/10.0/;
If you're looking for incremental improvements, you might take a look at Perl 5. In 2001 there was 5.6.1 and now there's 5.8.10 with many improvements.
Want a few examples of improvements? The regex parser recently went from mostly recursive to mostly iterative. it also has many new features and has other efficiency gains. Unicode handling exists and continues to get better. Several things take less memory than previously. Lexically-scoped pragmas can now be implemented in pure Perl without resorting to C. A simpler and clearer way to handle static lexical variables has been introduced. Perl's default variable can now be lexically scoped. Many new language features have been introduced. Perl has a switch statement in the core now. There's a new defined-or operator. The user-defined sorting subs can now be recursive if you need them to be. Compress::Zlib, Archive::Tar, and Archive::Extract are among some exciting new core modules.
Most of what I just mentioned were changes between 5.8.8 and 5.10.0, so there's quite a bit more between 5.6.1 and the current Perl landscape. There were also a lot of changes to Perl 5 back in the 2001 to 2002 time frame, and have been all along since.
Some changes between 5.6.1 and 5.8.0 included changing to a stable algorithm for sort(), changing the default IO layer from the system stdio to the PerlIO system for more predictable cross-platform behavior, safe signal handling, the UTF8 encoding being changed from lexically scoped with the program to being associated with a file handle, and a much better threading model.
Important changes during the 5.8.x series include extra randomness in the order of hash keys, Config.pm being shrunk by about 90%, better handling of UTF-16 encoding, the elimination of some temporary lists during certain operations, and smarter malloc() handling.
Perl 5 isn't exactly sitting still, and it hasn't been. Perl 6 is, IMHO, not so much a simple upgrade of Perl as a new language in the family of Perl-like languages. Perl 6 will be to Perl 5 much what Perl 5 was to Perl 4. People will notice some syntax changes, but many people will program in it like they were using the previous version with a tweaked syntax. Others will take advantage of all the new features. Eventually most Perl programmers will find a portion of the language that suits their tasks most readily and will become most comfortable with that. Perl 5 isn't going away for a long time, so people who really can't stand the idea of a new Perl will be able to do a lot of Perl 5 work.
Yeah, there are other languages that will wax and wane. Ruby looks interesting, and a lot of people seem to like it. I have a general distaste for personally using languages with so much significant whitespace as Python, but lots of people really like it and there's really good software being written in it. I can't fault a language or its designer for my having other preferences. JavaScript is pretty handy, and it's getting better tools and implementations all the time and a new standard soonish. I've picked up HaXe recently, and it's an interesting alternative to ActionScript and JavaScript. I am considering learning D. Java's really popular. Yet many people still program in Perl, C++, C, Ada, Pascal derivatives, Basic, Fortran, and even COBOL. People said Basic was dead, but Visual Basic is still around.
Like Perl, though, what we call Basic these days doesn't much resemble Basic from 20 years ago. Visual Basic doesn't even look like older versions of itself, let alone QuickBasic or the even older and even more severely limited GWBasic or Dartmouth Basic. If Perl 6 is a few years separated and a bit different, it doesn't mean it's not Perl or that it was a waste to create it. The only way it would be a waste is if nobody used it.
I'll take my Captain Kirk, painted white. If you can get me a nineteen-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis in a tight white t-shirt, so much the better.
Good catch. :-) I meant "reckless" of course. Although it's a common misunderstanding, I assure you I know the joke you're getting at. My fingers apparently don't like typing "reck" without the "w" though.
Maybe I'll take some practice... reck reck reck reck... There, it's starting to feel natural.
I looked it up, and it appears "a while" is around two years now. Good catch.
That crap is why Linux and the open-source BSDs exist. Tarantella is still around, as others have pointed out. This "SCO" is actually Caldera, the old Linux vendor.
WTF would you let one OS bankrupt your business? Surely a MicroVax, a desktop Sun box or a couple of AOL accounts would have let you send email. Or hell, you could have had a 56k leased line and hooked the SCO box up via Ethernet, which I'm pretty sure it didn't have problems with in 1993 as long as you used a good card.
The slow but steady use of all those would count towards a total data transfer plan, but many of them wouldn't cause any saturation headaches for the network provider. I'm picturing something close to what commercial line customers get -- every 5 minutes or every 15 minutes it takes your average data transfer over the previous 5 minutes or 15 minutes. You'd be allowed 720 five-minute bursts or 240 each month where your average data transfer was over 1 Mbps, after which your average would be held to 1 Mbps with a cap around 1.5 Mbps.
I don't see anyone complaining that their outbound capacity is saturated. There's a good reason for that, too. Most of our consumer lines (and in fact my office DSL) are asymmetric. We download much more than we upload, and our lines are configured that way. Many plans are something crazy like 6 to 8 Mbps down with only 256 to 512 Kbps up. That's because the line is being biased for typical end-user usage. However, the big lines that carry that traffic to the peering points for the big network providers are typically still symmetric full duplex lines. That means by planning for download capacity for all those asymmetric lines, the carriers are looking for stuff to do with outbound bandwidth.
There are several places where ISPs are apart from reality.
First, there's abuse of the term "bandwidth", which has nothing to do with the amount of data downloaded. Bandwidth is how much of a frequency range is being used on the wire to provide the service. That's it.
"Date rate" is how much data the bandwidth, encoding, compression, and such allow you to get out of the bandwidth. It's also what ISPs limit you to when they say "megabits per second" or "kilobits per second".
Total monthly data transfer available for an always-on connection at a certain data rate can be calculated as the data rate per second times the number of seconds per month. Capped usage for total monthly data transfer, which is what this article is actually about, can be thought of as the data rate times the number of seconds time the percentage of utilization. What they're wanting to limit here is that percentage of utilization of what they're selling you access to use.
One way to lower total monthly data transfer for a customer is to lower the data rate. That means things come down slower all month. Another is to limit the amount of time for which the line is fully utilized. Many business users of truly high-speed access pay for what are called "burstable lines". You get the whole DS3 or entire OC-12 or whatever type of line it is. You get billed with the understanding that you use a certain percentage of data rate or less a certain percentage of the time, and that the rest of the time you can use all of it without paying extra.
When I was in the ISP field and buying our backbone lines from bigger network providers, we typically leased lines with the first 15% or 25% of the full data rate included, with the stipulation that 5% or 10% of the time we could use all the data transfer the line had to offer without being billed extra. That meant that if we experienced abnormal peak demand, we didn't get our lines saturated. It also meant we didn't get soaked paying for peak capacity all the time. We in fact got a report each month showing the percentage, on average over each 5-minute increment, we used of the line's data rate the whole month. We could look at the chart being built (by MRTG) as the month progressed, too.
The reason total traffic is the way ISPs want to deal with end users is that it's easier to explain "you can move 20 gigabytes" than "90th percentile usage will be at no more than 30% of the data rate capacity of the circuit". Still, I think people would understand easily enough if they were told, "For 60 hours a month, you can max out your line. The rest of the time, you're going to be at 1 Mbps".
"the Eee pretty much boots from SSD"
... install" means.
I said that.
"against the default 'restorable' Linux install"
I'm not sure what "against the default restorable
In case you're not clear on what I said, the pronoun "This" in "This boots from the ROM" was referring to Splashtop, which was the topic of discussion.
Why would I buy a chapter of your book? Why, especially, would I buy only part of a musical score or only part of a song?
Prepay before release is interesting, but it's pretty much limited to those with a track record of creating good work or with one hell of a marketing campaign, isn't it?
You're right about people giving the work away absolutely free. If I buy it for $5 and another buys it for %5, and he gives it away, you and I are both out of a market for it. That's the problem. It can take years to write a book, and $5 doesn't support you for years.
You gasp at 50 years of protection, when right now we're dealing with over 100 years and abuses by middlemen. Yet you still haven't stated why it's bad (or even unneccessary) to limit distribution. It's perfectly clear you think it's bad, but you haven't made a case for why or a workable alternative.
The Eee uses a distro based on Xandros and boots from the SSD. This boots from the ROM (and either can't be updated or must use a ROM update like most modern BIOSes), and is much more akin to LinuxBIOS than a full Linux installation.