is for Napster to no longer be Napster. And actually, I don't think the RIAA is the actual litigant in this case, just for accuracy's sake - it's the record comapines (except Bertelsmann) that comprise the RIAA.
Is it just me, or do the record companies and the courts still not understand what Napster is? Napster does not now and never has stored a single copyright-infringing work on any server. They have never transferred copyright-infringing material through their network. All they've ever done is list what people have on their hard drives available for other people to transfer.
There is no way of creating an opt-in list in this scenario that's any better than the blocking filter they're already trying to use. Napster doesn't have a database of file signatures to block/allow - because they never receive a copy of the song - and filenames are useless for filtering/allowing, as we've already seen.
All the record companies want is to continually raise the bar of compliance until Napster finally concedes "We can't comply with this!" and the court shuts them down. It wouldn't matter if Napster successfully complied with every court order that gets cooked up - the record companies will still claim non-compliance.
It's a sad but true fact of life that in the world of consumer goods, brand image is crucial to growing market share, because in fact most people do care about brand names. The way advertising drives demand, you at some point have to work at establishing brand consciousness in the public at large. Why do you think companies like OnStar, BASF, and SAP spend money advertising the way they do? They never sell directly to the end consumer, but they work at making their brands household words nonetheless.
It's about creating a perception that you're the only game in town - that's why intel spends so much on their advertising - specifically to drown out AMD. AMD's best bet for wooing away Dell and the other business-machine providers (where the real money in PC sales comes from), is to get buyers asking Dell, "Why don't you sell AMD machines?" The best way to do that is through aggressive advertising. The fact that AMD has the superior product should only make that job easier.
What AMD really needs is mindshare. When was the last time you saw an AMD commercial on TV? Compare that with the Blue Man Group ads for the Pentium 4 that intel runs just about every hour on every channel. AMD can't get OEM agreements with the big PC manufacturers - did it ever occur to them that it might be because Joe Consumer doesn't ask Gateway or Compaq about the latest Athlon machines?
OEMs are never going to worry about building AMD-based machines when there's no market demand. AMD has to make the public believe it's a serious competitor before the OEMs will believe it. I want very much to see AMD succeed and make the Athlon the top chip for x86 machines - but they have to know how to drive demand.
Read my post, and you'll see exactly what I was talking about. It was by Pope Pius XII's orders that Catholic institutions all over Italy and the rest of Europe harbored Jews by the thousands.
Is he somehow more culpable than any other leader of the time? Great Britain told Hitler, "Oh, go ahead and take Czechoslovakia - we'll just turn a blind eye." Stalin and Hitler carved up Poland between them. The U.S. sat on its thumbs until it was forced into the arena.
On April 28, 1935, four years before the War even started, Pacelli gave a speech that aroused the attention of the world press. Speaking to an audience of 250,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France, the future Pius XII stated that the Nazis "are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult." It was talks like this, in addition to private remarks and numerous notes of protest that Pacelli sent to Berlin in his capacity as Vatican Secretary of State, that earned him a reputation as an enemy of the Nazi party.
Elsewhere:
While the U.S., Great Britain, and other countries often refused to allow Jewish refugees to immigrate during the war, the Vatican was issuing tens of thousands of false documents to allow Jews to pass secretly as Christians so they could escape the Nazis. What is more, the financial aid Pius XII helped provide the Jews was very real. Lichten, Lapide, and other Jewish chroniclers record those funds as being in the millions of dollars--dollars even more valuable then than they are now.
Think Jews were unknowing or ungrateful? Think again:
The Pope's efforts did not go unrecognized by Jewish authorities, even during the War. The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog, sent the Pope a personal message of thanks on February 28, 1944, in which he said: "The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for us unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world."
You're damn right the Catholic Church stands ready to make him a Saint - and I say, the sooner, the better.
The Church did not ever approve or condone the actions of the Fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. Maybe they didn't denounce it at every opportunity, but that would have only increased the bloodshed. What should they have done, gotten up and screamed from every pulpit in every church around Europe? What would have happened? I'll tell you - every Catholic as well as every Jew would have been rounded up.
Every church, monastery, convent, and seminary in Nazi-controlled territory harbored as many Jews as they could, on the orders of the Vatican. The Franciscan monastery in Assisi, for example, sheltered some hundreds of Jews, and was named the sister city of Bethlehem by Israel in thanks afterward.
Peddle your angry-with-God crap elsewhere, but try at least appearing factual when you do so. There are very few things I find more irresponsible in this world than attempting to blame Christianity for the Holocaust. The two have as much in common as the Taliban does with statues of Buddha - just because they exist in the same place at the same time doesn't mean they are friends.
After reading everyone's overreactions (especially michael's), I went and actually read the proposal! Guess what, kids? This is a win-win.
If VeriSign spun off the NSI registrar business by May 2001, they were going to get an automatic 4-year extension on running the.com,.net, and.org registries. Under this new proposal, they won't have to spin off the registrar entirely, merely make it a subsidiary company. In exchange, they are guaranteed to give up.org after only a two-year extension, and help fund their successor in.org for a while, to the tune of $5 million. They are giving up 22 months of their extension on.net (although they still get preference for extensions there).
Last but not least, they are going to be investing $200 million in research on improving the DNS system and giving better access to the root nameservers to ccTLD and other TLD registries.
As other posts pointed out, there is no reason to expect that individuals or open-source projects would be excluded from the.org domain after it changes hands. How is any of this a bad thing?
I thought his perspective on why.NET is a colossal boondoggle is interesting. Microsoft is banking on XML as the savior of everything, but in this interview Joy says:
But Java and linking together the data types solves this component service composition model using programming language technology. XML doesn't because it's still just data. You still have to have a type system to plug the things together and essentially, dynamic linking, and you don't find that in XML just by itself... either you can compose components with behavior or you can't... and the problem is that without the ability to plug together behavior, you're basically stuck... You end up with 1,000 different XML-based thingies that don't ever really compose to do anything together. You don't have composable things because you don't have the algebra to put things together.
This is probably the simplest, most concise way of expressing this I've seen yet: some object behavior is inextricably linked to the language used to describe it. There are simply too many semantic and contextual difficulties to overcome. This is why MS couldn't really support COM/DCOM/COM+ development outside of their own compilers and can't support.NET objects in raw C++, but instead has to use a "type-safe" subset, or its own Java rip-off, C#. I also would expect that this is why the "promise" of language independence with.NET is not going to fly in the real world, unless language authors hack their babies to pieces, turning them into C# clones.
Granted, Python and some other languages can be compiled to Java bytecode, but aside from these pedagogical examples (and I would submit that trying this for anything other than simple applets or toy applications is next-to-impossible and counter-productive), any real work on the Java platform has to be done in Java. In the end we'll see that any real.NET service or application will have to be written in C#.
I'm not a language snob, honest. I just believe in the right tool for the right job.:)
I guess my point is that, like every security technology, WEP is a trade-off between speed and security. Granted, it might not be as strong as some would like, but the plain fact of the matter is that it takes processor cycles to encrypt and decrypt individual packets, and using encryption of the strength that is needed for Fort Knox-like data security over a wireless protocol isn't worthwhile for most users. Once again, the point is to further protect your own sensitive data - why depend on the network layer to do it for you?
Every security mechanism is a trade-off of security for convenience. Even 1024-bit RSA encryption is a trade-off, in terms of assuming that the cost in time and computing cycles to factor the key is not worth the data being encrypted.
Furthermore, one must keep in mind that this is only network-level encryption. There is nothing preventing further, more secure encryption at the transport or session layers. WEP provides minimal security, hopefully equivalent to the difficulty of plugging in to a wired network (hence the name). As always, it is the decision of the network admin/user to supplement this with further security measures. For example, if you're worried about your home wireless LAN being snooped upon, use SSL communication between your machines.
I obtained my first network experience on my college network, and let me tell you, I'd feel a lot better about 802.11 with WEP than I used to about ethernet in my residence hall!
Take the job offer at the new company and bring your friends' business cards with them.
But you have to keep in mind any non-recruit clauses in your contract. I, for example, would be forbidden from recruiting any of my co-workers for a year after I left my current employer. If the company is as messed up as you say, they might very well sue you for breach of contract.
If, on the other hand, your co-workers solicit you, or if you wait until the company in fact folds, you'll probably be off the hook.
The Milberg Weiss website is asking for applicants to be lead plantiffs. My question is: how the hell do you file a lawsuit, even if it is class-action, with no lead plaintiff to begin with? Can a lawyer just file a lawsuit first, and find a plaintiff later? That somehow doesn't seem right...
So, let me get this straight - the company whose founder is trying to take over the whole digital world (or so it seems from the trailers) is using Free Software to do it?!?! My God, what have we done?
I guess the prognosticators who said Red Hat would become the new Microsoft weren't that far off after all...
If you work in software as a programmer, you don't want bugs at all, because they're boring and time-consuming to fix, and frankly, they're embarassing. What any software engineer really wants is new challenges and projects, not maintenance-mode work.
Actual code-monkeys don't want bugs - that's a management issue, and if it's deliberate, it's reprehensible. Most often, it's simply that release cycles are too short for top-notch quality work. You identify your showstopper defects, you fix them, and you ship.
As far as "planned breakage" in hardware, it's not quite as simple as you indicate. You design a product for a certain load, because there's a cost-benefit trade-off involved. You can determine the mean time to failure (MTTF) pretty accurately. You then warranty the product for whatever period corresponds to an acceptable failure rate. How you define acceptable is key here. If acceptable is "how many customers we can afford to drive away," then you give them as short a warranty period as possible. If acceptable is "how many we can afford to replace against our costs to keep customers happy," you make the warranty period as long as possible. The irony is, the longer a product's warranty period, the less likely it probably is to need warranty service within that period.
A computer is something that accomplishes 100's of task so natrually it would need more maintanance than products that only accomplish one... Not sure if there is any point to reading the article any further after a statement like that.
A computer, when you get down to brass tacks, still only does one task - crunch numbers and give you the results. The amount of maintenance is related to the number of components and the failure rates of those components. While the former might not be controllable, the latter is to a large degree.
I think the whole point of the article, actually, is that it is a matter of careful, methodical design. There are still brands of TVs 60 years after its invention, for example, that fail 22-25 percent of the time, according to Consumer Reports. What's appalling is that 22% is the industry average for computer failures.
If you look at some of the other categories, you will see the exact same process occurred for them as the author predicts for computers. TVs, VCRs, other personal electronics, automobiles - all were American-dominated industries until they got lazy and sloppy. Then some other nation's industry, more intent on improving both price and quality, ate their lunch. As the article points out, it will probably be Japan in hardware, and India in software. The real question is, will it take 20 years for the U.S. computer industry to recover like it did for so many others?
A while back, Echostar joined forces with ReplayTV shortly after the MS WebTV DishPlayer was released. This may just be a sign that things are going well enough for ReplayTV on a new sat recorder, and they don't need the consumer side on the table anymore.
Hard to say. It's now possible to get a DirecTV system with integrated TiVo, so it's a market everyone's getting into. Personally, I think it's just that they're getting clobbered by the overhead of hardware manufacturing. The article says they will continue their partnership with Panasonic, and I would assume Echostar as well, since they're said to be hoping to license to cable and satellite providers.
I think ReplayTV is seeing the difference between a service-based business model vs. a hardware-based business model. TiVo has never sold their own hardware - they license the design to Philips-Magnavox and Sony. TiVo then collects a monthly/yearly/lifetime fee for service, without which the box is pretty much a live TV-only device. ReplayTV has always included their service as part of the purchase price, which they've had to reduce to compete with TiVo on the shelf. TiVo's been eating their lunch.
Panasonic's OEM version of the ReplayTV has been selling much better than ReplayTV's own model (ah, the benefits of brand recognition). So it makes a lot of sense to get rid of the overhead, find one or two more manufacturers to sign to licensing deals, and maybe change the service to a TiVo-style pay-for-play service (grandfathering existing customers, of course;) ).
The Sun JDK/JRE 1.3 includes a plug-in for IE 5.0+. A page has to use different syntax to get it by default (using <EMBED> instead of <APPLET>), but it works. I went and looked at the Java 2D API demo applet from within IE a few weeks ago.
The MS JVM is required to use the Microsoft "extensions" to Java (read: ActiveX), but it will (probably) never support any of the Java2 feature set, so it's a good thing, I guess, that Sun's got an alternative out there!
I was thinking of the way the x86 handles interrupts. It's a major headache with SMP.
That's true, and something I hadn't thought of. The x86 is essntially interrupt-driven, and even the newer internal architectures don't make up for that entirely. On the other hand, context switches for RISC machines are considerable more expensive (deeper stack, more GPRs). How does that factor in on SMP, I wonder? The task scheduling must be a real headache both ways.
The thing is that the physical x86 architecture as it used to exist is no more. The instruction set is implemented almost entirely in frimware, and has been since the advent of the Pentium. The translation of complex CISC tasks back into RISC-style sets of instructions allows easier, deeper pipelining and branch prediction, which is where most of the hits from the x86 architecture come. It is essentially no different than an emulation layer done in software, which can be written to take advantage of new processor features.
They don't cite references, but they are essentially correct.
As the gap in actual core functionality between so-called RISC and so-called CISC architectures continues to narrow, there will be less of a performance lead by RISC architectures. The Pentium III / Athlon / PowerPC G4 architectures are actually remarkably similar - the main differences lie in the translation firmware that Intel and AMD use to translate old CISC instructions to RISC. Besides that, "RISC" processors have once again started adding layers of new functions that don't fit the RISC model - the PowerPC G4's Velocity Engine is a good example.
Ars Technica has some good articles on these issues, but they're not on the front page anymore.
RISC vs. CISC is an outdated argument - the good debates in the future involve NUMA and other on-the-horizon technologies. This study doesn't really take those into account (beyond a brief mention of IA-64).
I am far more likely to believe Gore's campaign promises than Bush's. At least Gore can point to things he's done that have actually improved things. Prescription drugs, you say? How about pharmaceutical price gouging hearings that Gore conducted in 1978? Education? Co-sponsored the bill creating the Department of Education. Environment? Do you really need me to run down the list?
What, on the other hand, can Bush really point to? Texas schoolchildren are performing better on Texas's own tests (not national tests, BTW). Big deal. Give school administrators an ultimatum like "Your students had better perform well on this ONE test or you'll lose funding" and of course they'll start teaching to the test (a test which, incidentally, ignores important subjects like history and geography). Can he point to any objective performance indicator?
Or how about something like "We've executed more people in Texas during my term than every other state in the U.S. in the time since the Supreme Court began allowing capital punishment again combined"? Who needs due process? Who needs competent counsel? Who needs appropriate judicial review?
Just because a majority belives in it, doesn't make it right or justified. A majority of Americans used to think "separate but equal" was just fine, and a majority was opposed to American involvement in WWII before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And let's not forget, a majority of Americans think Microsoft produces quality software!
And, oh the poor, unfortunate rich! How dare we have awful things like the inheritance tax that inhibit them from becoming a perpetual aristocracy? What are we thinking, using their tax money to keep people from dying of hunger, exposure, and disease! God forbid the government should exhibit a social conscience!
I do not believe that Al Gore is a liar, and I do believe that he is sincere about Social Security, Medicare, school aid, the environment, and many other issues. However, I do not believe that Bush is sincere about anything. Except that he wants to be President.
Did you even read the article? Or the one yesterday that contained this link? Al Gore is credited by many of the leading lights of the technical development of the Internet as the most influential and supportive legislator in its 30-or-so-year history. The "union label" song was a joke, and was received as such by his audience.
Have you done any investigation whatsoever? Or are you content to believe the lies about Al Gore because it's easier than actually thinking about issues (which would be exactly Philip Agre's point)?
I can understand economics without being a raving fan of capitalism - it is possible. There are ways to moderate the effects of capitalism on the disadvantaged without bringing the wheels of commerce to a halt. A graduated tax structure with deductions is one of them, because it stimulates private charity.
I don't know what history you read, but social assistance programs have typically had a positive effect on the economy, and they have been started in economic bad times. If you will remember Keynesian economics, government spending is necessary to offset shortfalls in private investment to generate full productivity. While government doesn't often pay up front for these programs in tax increases, neither do they tax economic booms into recession. If you'll notice, we are finally seeing the effects of inflation in this latest economic boom, and it's in the midst of a round of reckless tax cuts for the wealthiest 1-5%. Kinda makes you think, or at least it would if you were more interested in the truth of the matter than in having your Rush Limbaugh ditto-head say on things.
Can you point to even one historical instance of an economic downturn that was caused by taxes being too high? Or is it more likely that, like a good economist knows, it is from a decrease in the available labor pool, or the effects of inflation, or a series of supply-side shocks, or any number of other factors that have nothing to do with taxation alone?
How many people do you know with $100,000 in the bank that you wouldn't call rich? The protection of less wealthy consumers is a nice side benefit, but what does the FDIC do for people who don't even take enough home to have a savings account? And guess what - I never claimed anything about these agencies being for the protection of business, merely the rich.
The SEC also protects against bogus stock filings, conealing information, and yes, insider trading, things that tend to, when they are discovered, degrade the performance and value of stocks as a whole. The rich, who are the ones most heavily invested in the stock market, are once again the winners, while the poor do not have enough to invest, period.
Argue all you want about the middle class, but let's be honest - the fact that any of these programs help the middle class at all is just for political buy-in (and I'll grant you that social assistance programs are the same way). If rich Americans hadn't wanted the government to insure their deposits, or protect their stock investments, it wouldn't have happened. You can be certain that those below the poverty line have no stake in the matter whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
is for Napster to no longer be Napster. And actually, I don't think the RIAA is the actual litigant in this case, just for accuracy's sake - it's the record comapines (except Bertelsmann) that comprise the RIAA.
Is it just me, or do the record companies and the courts still not understand what Napster is? Napster does not now and never has stored a single copyright-infringing work on any server. They have never transferred copyright-infringing material through their network. All they've ever done is list what people have on their hard drives available for other people to transfer.
There is no way of creating an opt-in list in this scenario that's any better than the blocking filter they're already trying to use. Napster doesn't have a database of file signatures to block/allow - because they never receive a copy of the song - and filenames are useless for filtering/allowing, as we've already seen.
All the record companies want is to continually raise the bar of compliance until Napster finally concedes "We can't comply with this!" and the court shuts them down. It wouldn't matter if Napster successfully complied with every court order that gets cooked up - the record companies will still claim non-compliance.
It's a sad but true fact of life that in the world of consumer goods, brand image is crucial to growing market share, because in fact most people do care about brand names. The way advertising drives demand, you at some point have to work at establishing brand consciousness in the public at large. Why do you think companies like OnStar, BASF, and SAP spend money advertising the way they do? They never sell directly to the end consumer, but they work at making their brands household words nonetheless.
It's about creating a perception that you're the only game in town - that's why intel spends so much on their advertising - specifically to drown out AMD. AMD's best bet for wooing away Dell and the other business-machine providers (where the real money in PC sales comes from), is to get buyers asking Dell, "Why don't you sell AMD machines?" The best way to do that is through aggressive advertising. The fact that AMD has the superior product should only make that job easier.
What AMD really needs is mindshare. When was the last time you saw an AMD commercial on TV? Compare that with the Blue Man Group ads for the Pentium 4 that intel runs just about every hour on every channel. AMD can't get OEM agreements with the big PC manufacturers - did it ever occur to them that it might be because Joe Consumer doesn't ask Gateway or Compaq about the latest Athlon machines?
OEMs are never going to worry about building AMD-based machines when there's no market demand. AMD has to make the public believe it's a serious competitor before the OEMs will believe it. I want very much to see AMD succeed and make the Athlon the top chip for x86 machines - but they have to know how to drive demand.
Read my post, and you'll see exactly what I was talking about. It was by Pope Pius XII's orders that Catholic institutions all over Italy and the rest of Europe harbored Jews by the thousands.
Is he somehow more culpable than any other leader of the time? Great Britain told Hitler, "Oh, go ahead and take Czechoslovakia - we'll just turn a blind eye." Stalin and Hitler carved up Poland between them. The U.S. sat on its thumbs until it was forced into the arena.
Pope Pius, on the other hand, was always an opponent of the Nazis. I quote from a terrific page at http://www.catholic.com/ROCK/pius_xii.htm:
On April 28, 1935, four years before the War even started, Pacelli gave a speech that aroused the attention of the world press. Speaking to an audience of 250,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France, the future Pius XII stated that the Nazis "are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult." It was talks like this, in addition to private remarks and numerous notes of protest that Pacelli sent to Berlin in his capacity as Vatican Secretary of State, that earned him a reputation as an enemy of the Nazi party.
Elsewhere:
While the U.S., Great Britain, and other countries often refused to allow Jewish refugees to immigrate during the war, the Vatican was issuing tens of thousands of false documents to allow Jews to pass secretly as Christians so they could escape the Nazis. What is more, the financial aid Pius XII helped provide the Jews was very real. Lichten, Lapide, and other Jewish chroniclers record those funds as being in the millions of dollars--dollars even more valuable then than they are now.
Think Jews were unknowing or ungrateful? Think again:
The Pope's efforts did not go unrecognized by Jewish authorities, even during the War. The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog, sent the Pope a personal message of thanks on February 28, 1944, in which he said: "The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for us unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world."
You're damn right the Catholic Church stands ready to make him a Saint - and I say, the sooner, the better.
The Church did not ever approve or condone the actions of the Fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. Maybe they didn't denounce it at every opportunity, but that would have only increased the bloodshed. What should they have done, gotten up and screamed from every pulpit in every church around Europe? What would have happened? I'll tell you - every Catholic as well as every Jew would have been rounded up.
Every church, monastery, convent, and seminary in Nazi-controlled territory harbored as many Jews as they could, on the orders of the Vatican. The Franciscan monastery in Assisi, for example, sheltered some hundreds of Jews, and was named the sister city of Bethlehem by Israel in thanks afterward.
Peddle your angry-with-God crap elsewhere, but try at least appearing factual when you do so. There are very few things I find more irresponsible in this world than attempting to blame Christianity for the Holocaust. The two have as much in common as the Taliban does with statues of Buddha - just because they exist in the same place at the same time doesn't mean they are friends.
After reading everyone's overreactions (especially michael's), I went and actually read the proposal! Guess what, kids? This is a win-win.
If VeriSign spun off the NSI registrar business by May 2001, they were going to get an automatic 4-year extension on running the .com, .net, and .org registries. Under this new proposal, they won't have to spin off the registrar entirely, merely make it a subsidiary company. In exchange, they are guaranteed to give up .org after only a two-year extension, and help fund their successor in .org for a while, to the tune of $5 million. They are giving up 22 months of their extension on .net (although they still get preference for extensions there).
Last but not least, they are going to be investing $200 million in research on improving the DNS system and giving better access to the root nameservers to ccTLD and other TLD registries.
As other posts pointed out, there is no reason to expect that individuals or open-source projects would be excluded from the .org domain after it changes hands. How is any of this a bad thing?
I thought his perspective on why .NET is a colossal boondoggle is interesting. Microsoft is banking on XML as the savior of everything, but in this interview Joy says:
But Java and linking together the data types solves this component service composition model using programming language technology. XML doesn't because it's still just data. You still have to have a type system to plug the things together and essentially, dynamic linking, and you don't find that in XML just by itself... either you can compose components with behavior or you can't... and the problem is that without the ability to plug together behavior, you're basically stuck... You end up with 1,000 different XML-based thingies that don't ever really compose to do anything together. You don't have composable things because you don't have the algebra to put things together.
This is probably the simplest, most concise way of expressing this I've seen yet: some object behavior is inextricably linked to the language used to describe it. There are simply too many semantic and contextual difficulties to overcome. This is why MS couldn't really support COM/DCOM/COM+ development outside of their own compilers and can't support .NET objects in raw C++, but instead has to use a "type-safe" subset, or its own Java rip-off, C#. I also would expect that this is why the "promise" of language independence with .NET is not going to fly in the real world, unless language authors hack their babies to pieces, turning them into C# clones.
Granted, Python and some other languages can be compiled to Java bytecode, but aside from these pedagogical examples (and I would submit that trying this for anything other than simple applets or toy applications is next-to-impossible and counter-productive), any real work on the Java platform has to be done in Java. In the end we'll see that any real .NET service or application will have to be written in C#.
I'm not a language snob, honest. I just believe in the right tool for the right job. :)
I guess my point is that, like every security technology, WEP is a trade-off between speed and security. Granted, it might not be as strong as some would like, but the plain fact of the matter is that it takes processor cycles to encrypt and decrypt individual packets, and using encryption of the strength that is needed for Fort Knox-like data security over a wireless protocol isn't worthwhile for most users. Once again, the point is to further protect your own sensitive data - why depend on the network layer to do it for you?
Every security mechanism is a trade-off of security for convenience. Even 1024-bit RSA encryption is a trade-off, in terms of assuming that the cost in time and computing cycles to factor the key is not worth the data being encrypted.
Furthermore, one must keep in mind that this is only network-level encryption. There is nothing preventing further, more secure encryption at the transport or session layers. WEP provides minimal security, hopefully equivalent to the difficulty of plugging in to a wired network (hence the name). As always, it is the decision of the network admin/user to supplement this with further security measures. For example, if you're worried about your home wireless LAN being snooped upon, use SSL communication between your machines.
I obtained my first network experience on my college network, and let me tell you, I'd feel a lot better about 802.11 with WEP than I used to about ethernet in my residence hall!
Take the job offer at the new company and bring your friends' business cards with them.
But you have to keep in mind any non-recruit clauses in your contract. I, for example, would be forbidden from recruiting any of my co-workers for a year after I left my current employer. If the company is as messed up as you say, they might very well sue you for breach of contract.
If, on the other hand, your co-workers solicit you, or if you wait until the company in fact folds, you'll probably be off the hook.
The Milberg Weiss website is asking for applicants to be lead plantiffs. My question is: how the hell do you file a lawsuit, even if it is class-action, with no lead plaintiff to begin with? Can a lawyer just file a lawsuit first, and find a plaintiff later? That somehow doesn't seem right...
So, let me get this straight - the company whose founder is trying to take over the whole digital world (or so it seems from the trailers) is using Free Software to do it?!?! My God, what have we done?
I guess the prognosticators who said Red Hat would become the new Microsoft weren't that far off after all...
If you work in software as a programmer, you don't want bugs at all, because they're boring and time-consuming to fix, and frankly, they're embarassing. What any software engineer really wants is new challenges and projects, not maintenance-mode work.
Actual code-monkeys don't want bugs - that's a management issue, and if it's deliberate, it's reprehensible. Most often, it's simply that release cycles are too short for top-notch quality work. You identify your showstopper defects, you fix them, and you ship.
As far as "planned breakage" in hardware, it's not quite as simple as you indicate. You design a product for a certain load, because there's a cost-benefit trade-off involved. You can determine the mean time to failure (MTTF) pretty accurately. You then warranty the product for whatever period corresponds to an acceptable failure rate. How you define acceptable is key here. If acceptable is "how many customers we can afford to drive away," then you give them as short a warranty period as possible. If acceptable is "how many we can afford to replace against our costs to keep customers happy," you make the warranty period as long as possible. The irony is, the longer a product's warranty period, the less likely it probably is to need warranty service within that period.
A computer is something that accomplishes 100's of task so natrually it would need more maintanance than products that only accomplish one... Not sure if there is any point to reading the article any further after a statement like that.
A computer, when you get down to brass tacks, still only does one task - crunch numbers and give you the results. The amount of maintenance is related to the number of components and the failure rates of those components. While the former might not be controllable, the latter is to a large degree.
I think the whole point of the article, actually, is that it is a matter of careful, methodical design. There are still brands of TVs 60 years after its invention, for example, that fail 22-25 percent of the time, according to Consumer Reports. What's appalling is that 22% is the industry average for computer failures.
If you look at some of the other categories, you will see the exact same process occurred for them as the author predicts for computers. TVs, VCRs, other personal electronics, automobiles - all were American-dominated industries until they got lazy and sloppy. Then some other nation's industry, more intent on improving both price and quality, ate their lunch. As the article points out, it will probably be Japan in hardware, and India in software. The real question is, will it take 20 years for the U.S. computer industry to recover like it did for so many others?
A while back, Echostar joined forces with ReplayTV shortly after the MS WebTV DishPlayer was released. This may just be a sign that things are going well enough for ReplayTV on a new sat recorder, and they don't need the consumer side on the table anymore.
Hard to say. It's now possible to get a DirecTV system with integrated TiVo, so it's a market everyone's getting into. Personally, I think it's just that they're getting clobbered by the overhead of hardware manufacturing. The article says they will continue their partnership with Panasonic, and I would assume Echostar as well, since they're said to be hoping to license to cable and satellite providers.
I think ReplayTV is seeing the difference between a service-based business model vs. a hardware-based business model. TiVo has never sold their own hardware - they license the design to Philips-Magnavox and Sony. TiVo then collects a monthly/yearly/lifetime fee for service, without which the box is pretty much a live TV-only device. ReplayTV has always included their service as part of the purchase price, which they've had to reduce to compete with TiVo on the shelf. TiVo's been eating their lunch.
Panasonic's OEM version of the ReplayTV has been selling much better than ReplayTV's own model (ah, the benefits of brand recognition). So it makes a lot of sense to get rid of the overhead, find one or two more manufacturers to sign to licensing deals, and maybe change the service to a TiVo-style pay-for-play service (grandfathering existing customers, of course ;) ).
The Sun JDK/JRE 1.3 includes a plug-in for IE 5.0+. A page has to use different syntax to get it by default (using <EMBED> instead of <APPLET>), but it works. I went and looked at the Java 2D API demo applet from within IE a few weeks ago.
The MS JVM is required to use the Microsoft "extensions" to Java (read: ActiveX), but it will (probably) never support any of the Java2 feature set, so it's a good thing, I guess, that Sun's got an alternative out there!
I was thinking of the way the x86 handles interrupts. It's a major headache with SMP.
That's true, and something I hadn't thought of. The x86 is essntially interrupt-driven, and even the newer internal architectures don't make up for that entirely. On the other hand, context switches for RISC machines are considerable more expensive (deeper stack, more GPRs). How does that factor in on SMP, I wonder? The task scheduling must be a real headache both ways.
The thing is that the physical x86 architecture as it used to exist is no more. The instruction set is implemented almost entirely in frimware, and has been since the advent of the Pentium. The translation of complex CISC tasks back into RISC-style sets of instructions allows easier, deeper pipelining and branch prediction, which is where most of the hits from the x86 architecture come. It is essentially no different than an emulation layer done in software, which can be written to take advantage of new processor features.
They don't cite references, but they are essentially correct.
As the gap in actual core functionality between so-called RISC and so-called CISC architectures continues to narrow, there will be less of a performance lead by RISC architectures. The Pentium III / Athlon / PowerPC G4 architectures are actually remarkably similar - the main differences lie in the translation firmware that Intel and AMD use to translate old CISC instructions to RISC. Besides that, "RISC" processors have once again started adding layers of new functions that don't fit the RISC model - the PowerPC G4's Velocity Engine is a good example.
Ars Technica has some good articles on these issues, but they're not on the front page anymore.
RISC vs. CISC is an outdated argument - the good debates in the future involve NUMA and other on-the-horizon technologies. This study doesn't really take those into account (beyond a brief mention of IA-64).
I wish they'd explain what new development has caused them to upgrade Linux's prospects from hopeless to unstoppable.
They did - increased vendor support from the mid-range server market players like Compaq, Dell, and IBM.
I am far more likely to believe Gore's campaign promises than Bush's. At least Gore can point to things he's done that have actually improved things. Prescription drugs, you say? How about pharmaceutical price gouging hearings that Gore conducted in 1978? Education? Co-sponsored the bill creating the Department of Education. Environment? Do you really need me to run down the list?
What, on the other hand, can Bush really point to? Texas schoolchildren are performing better on Texas's own tests (not national tests, BTW). Big deal. Give school administrators an ultimatum like "Your students had better perform well on this ONE test or you'll lose funding" and of course they'll start teaching to the test (a test which, incidentally, ignores important subjects like history and geography). Can he point to any objective performance indicator?
Or how about something like "We've executed more people in Texas during my term than every other state in the U.S. in the time since the Supreme Court began allowing capital punishment again combined"? Who needs due process? Who needs competent counsel? Who needs appropriate judicial review?
Just because a majority belives in it, doesn't make it right or justified. A majority of Americans used to think "separate but equal" was just fine, and a majority was opposed to American involvement in WWII before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And let's not forget, a majority of Americans think Microsoft produces quality software!
And, oh the poor, unfortunate rich! How dare we have awful things like the inheritance tax that inhibit them from becoming a perpetual aristocracy? What are we thinking, using their tax money to keep people from dying of hunger, exposure, and disease! God forbid the government should exhibit a social conscience!
I do not believe that Al Gore is a liar, and I do believe that he is sincere about Social Security, Medicare, school aid, the environment, and many other issues. However, I do not believe that Bush is sincere about anything. Except that he wants to be President.
Did you even read the article? Or the one yesterday that contained this link? Al Gore is credited by many of the leading lights of the technical development of the Internet as the most influential and supportive legislator in its 30-or-so-year history. The "union label" song was a joke, and was received as such by his audience.
Have you done any investigation whatsoever? Or are you content to believe the lies about Al Gore because it's easier than actually thinking about issues (which would be exactly Philip Agre's point)?
I can understand economics without being a raving fan of capitalism - it is possible. There are ways to moderate the effects of capitalism on the disadvantaged without bringing the wheels of commerce to a halt. A graduated tax structure with deductions is one of them, because it stimulates private charity.
I don't know what history you read, but social assistance programs have typically had a positive effect on the economy, and they have been started in economic bad times. If you will remember Keynesian economics, government spending is necessary to offset shortfalls in private investment to generate full productivity. While government doesn't often pay up front for these programs in tax increases, neither do they tax economic booms into recession. If you'll notice, we are finally seeing the effects of inflation in this latest economic boom, and it's in the midst of a round of reckless tax cuts for the wealthiest 1-5%. Kinda makes you think, or at least it would if you were more interested in the truth of the matter than in having your Rush Limbaugh ditto-head say on things.
Can you point to even one historical instance of an economic downturn that was caused by taxes being too high? Or is it more likely that, like a good economist knows, it is from a decrease in the available labor pool, or the effects of inflation, or a series of supply-side shocks, or any number of other factors that have nothing to do with taxation alone?
How many people do you know with $100,000 in the bank that you wouldn't call rich? The protection of less wealthy consumers is a nice side benefit, but what does the FDIC do for people who don't even take enough home to have a savings account? And guess what - I never claimed anything about these agencies being for the protection of business, merely the rich.
The SEC also protects against bogus stock filings, conealing information, and yes, insider trading, things that tend to, when they are discovered, degrade the performance and value of stocks as a whole. The rich, who are the ones most heavily invested in the stock market, are once again the winners, while the poor do not have enough to invest, period.
Argue all you want about the middle class, but let's be honest - the fact that any of these programs help the middle class at all is just for political buy-in (and I'll grant you that social assistance programs are the same way). If rich Americans hadn't wanted the government to insure their deposits, or protect their stock investments, it wouldn't have happened. You can be certain that those below the poverty line have no stake in the matter whatsoever.