That's a stupid question. Sorry, I'm not flaming... ALL companies have need for a PR department, regardless of "confidence". Microsoft does not have 100% market share. Microsoft would like 100% marketshare, and have everyone be perfectly content with the status-quo. This has nothing to do with how "confident" Microsoft is, and more to do with the fact that a handful of people still haven't come to understand how good and wonderful their product is.
People who answer interviews for Microsoft can weasel out of almost anything. It would be much better to use this opportunity to ask very insightful/thoughtful questions that haven't been asked before (eg. follow-up questions to MS's interview responses where they seemed to have completely weaseled out of the question).
Eh? Antitrust laws do not simply protect against monopolies/cartels, but instead protect against anything that intentionally restrains trade (as vague as that is). There are several solid pages on vertical integration/antitrust (one, two ). Isn't payola a clear case of vertical integration? If you can control the channels of production, it doesn't matter if you have lots of competitors who will sell at a lower price than you; the customer doesn't have access to their product.
Consumers need to start understanding how corporations look at commericals: consumer's annoyance for commercials is usually less than what companies can make from commercial-generated revenue. If corporations can add commercials to a product, which lowers the value of the product $X in the minds of consumers, but the commercials add $Y profit to their bottom line, and $X > $Y, then corporations will add more commercials and subtract $Y from the cost of their product. (actually, in some cases, consumers simply won't recognize the 50-cent price difference, so corporations don't even have to subtract that in those cases)
Why are databases fast? Indexes. What do all XML databases do? Store XML internally in a way that machines read much faster, but makes it a pain for humans to update. Indexes. So if you have all these computer programs passing around data, each with their own different deserialized structure, why don't we just standard that side of things too? Indexes. Computers MUST have them to work efficiently, but no human updates them by hand. Ergo, one form easy for humans (plaintext XML) and one form quick for computers (indexes), with an easy way to convert back and forth.
Having a massive game world running on a large cluster of servers doesn't help anything if your players only inhabit a fraction of them.
I think your post is spot-on, but I think the proper summary is: it's a game-mechanics issue, not a technology issue. There are several cases where it'd be not-fun to have 10,000 people in the same place (even if graphics cards were advanced enough to render that without breaking a sweat).
Marketroids also brought us Maxima and Altima, and this didn't cause any brains to implode or robots to blow up. And these names didn't cause Nissan any hesitation in deciding to release the 2007 GT-R which will be superior in most respects.
I excluded Forth because 1) Forth and Postscript are extremely similar as you note, and in terms similarity-to-Lisp, they're pretty much identical, so I just left the middle out, and 2) Forth lacks garbage collection, making it actually extremely cool for embedded applications, but IMHO, since we've had GC for a whole 46 years now, unless you're doing embedded/OS work, I'd prefer to just ignore such languages. I'm a GC-bigot, sue me.
In the begining (1954, according to my O'Reilly poster) was Cobol. People moaned and complained.
Next came Lisp (1958). They had to literally invent garbage collection simply to be able to create the language. In 2005, garbage collection is finally starting to be found in almost every non-embedded language.
1982 brought us Postscript. It's new! Exciting new syntax. Well, okay, Lisp thought of it first.
1996 brought the world XML. Exciting new syntax! Again!
For what it's worth, the camera specs are posted on the official site... There are two 1-megapixel cameras (one wide-angle and one narrow-angle) weighing 125 pounds total. In addition to the brightness problems, annother likely issue is that this is 1997 technology (or more like 1994-1996 tech if you take into account design time).
Binary formats contain pointers all over the place... pointers that say "this many bytes to the next record", or if the binary format is designed to be very fast to read, will even contain pointers that say "record 22031 is at offset XXX, record 22032 is at offset YYY". It's very quick to get to record 22032 for these formats, you just jump there and don't even have to wait eons for a physical disk to read in every single byte in between.
Now, compare to XML. EVEN IF every record was a single xml tag, the parser would have to look for "<", followed by "</", and would have to repeat that 22030 more times.
That may seem like an extreme example, but 1) most XML "records" are much more complex to parse, and 2) this demonstrates THE MOST MAJOR DOWNSIDE that human-writable formats have... they can't have these "jump to byte XXXX" markers in them, because humans don't want to constantly be updating these references every time they add or subtract a byte.
Machine-writable file formats realize that inserting or deleting bytes in the middle of a file is a big no-no, so they use several tricks to make sure they don't have to do that. All of these tricks annoy the heck of humans (they either require updating a lot of bytes, or require writing/reading the file in "pages" which bug humans because you can't "see" a whole section at the same time, or other tricks).
Therefore, human-writable formats should NOT be used as the most basic storage/access format. Agreeing to put an extremely minimal storage layer below XML is simply accepting that machines are more optimized to read/write a different kind of format than humans are.
But that price isn't correlated to population density, right? eg. the problem isn't America's geography. Your price is correlated to the fact that it's either served up by a random location by a non-monopoly, probably an underdog? The reason we don't see that kind of price in the majority of very urban areas is that government management of the issue really sucks here.
Under the hood, there are a LOT of different ways to run multiple OS's at the same time, and some of these differences can affect the user. There have been mentions of many different projects and products on Slashdot that do various kinds of emulation/virtualization, and the reason is becaues there's so many ways to do it.
On x86 computers, I know that VMWare has to re-write kernel executables to be able to get multiple OS's to cooperate. This has a noticable CPU overhead and is fairly complex (eg. see the lack of a good open-source alternative). I don't know how similar PowerPC's are to x86's, but Intel and AMD will also be adding specific hardware support to x86's so that virtualization is much more efficient, and the software side of things should be much simpler as well (see "Vanderpool" and "Pacifica").
Alternatively, he's a flawed human like the rest of us, but sees that it's obviously easy to fall into zealotry, and decides to intentionally fall the opposite way.
Burn the directory that contains bin/lib/site onto a CD
The problem is that there's at least one file that has to be twiddled with... lib\Config.pm contains a lot of lines that say "please-run-the-install-script". If you compare that file to lib\Config.pm on a normal perl install, they're completely different. I know I've specifically seen some things in the changelog that specifically say they were put in to make it easier for people to run without first installing, but I don't remember the precise details.
I don't have enough time to spend with google, but if you look through some of the windows-oriented perl mailing lists, people have posted the details there.
I've seen demos of streaming-video-on-demand on a ~200x300 pixel 3G phone, and I have to say it was cooler than I thought it would be. The video looked a lot better than I thought it would on a portable device, and, well, most people can't simply call up any video they want to any time, and it's pretty cool to see somone be able to do that. On the other hand, I don't know that I could stand paying the carriers so much money for each video, even if I did have one of these phones.
Despite what a lot of people are saying, I think that TV-on-cellphones CAN be ocassionally useful. Cell phones and PDA's continue to merge, and 3G networks will provide the badnwidth the be able to stream video, and devices like the Motorola A1000 are the obvious result.
An example of where TV-on-cellphones would be useful.... on September 11th, is there any doubt that if most people had TV-on-cellphones, that everyone not near a TV would have been glued to their cell phone, watching video clips?
Anyway, my main question is... why come up with a new standard? It seems like most cell phones will support TCP/IP in the future.... why not simply use any/all of the existing streaming-video standards that are available? (eg. Windows Media, Real, MPEG... most of these already have embedded implementations).
If it were simply a standards issue, then US customers should also be able to simply switch to the one or two carriers that provide GSM service here in the states, no? (T-Mobile, AT&T) From what I've heard, GSM isn't any better than CDMA here. See my sibling post, I really believe it's an issue of carrier-profit.
You're talking about two different companies. The people who engineer and manufacture cell phones can only make a profit by decreasing cost or increasing features.
The people who provide monthly cell service (the carriers) often make a profit by choosing low-bitrate codecs, as well as over-subscribing cell towers, and thus frequently dropping calls when a cell tower reaches its capacity. 95% cell tower utilization = more profit for the carrier. 95% cell tower utilization = crappy quality for the customer. Same story as cable modems.
And the chances of these kind of reforms going through are... what? From a national economic standpoint, even the US has an incentive to pump out as many patents as possible, no matter how frivolous, in order to extract money from corporations in other countries, since the US is using the WTO to push its "intellectual property" regime onto as many countries as it can.
In my humble opinion, it's pretty easy to quickly dismiss new innovations. The benefits new innovations provide are sometimes more subtle, but sometimes subtle enhancements can provide bigger improvements to users than one would initially think.
Tivo -- digital VCR? Why? My analog one works fine.
P2P file sharing -- I already get free music from my radio, and it doesn't constantly threaten me with $100,000 lawsuits
VoIP -- voice calls with the mobility of landlines and the voice quality and reliability of cell phones, great.....
Re:It's the future I guess
on
The Other VoIP
·
· Score: 1
Well, welcome to the future, man. Almost every cell phone right now has a video camera in it. Currently, places like London and Seoul have fast 3G networks for their cell phones, and within 5 or 10 years, everybody should have a local WCDMA cell tower.
It's inevitable that voice calls will universal and standard.
The way your problem is addressed is that you can choose to initiate either a voice or a video call... when answering a video call, you can choose to answer it in voice-only instead. Video calls are only set up if both sides agree to do video.
My guesses for why video calls haven't been widespread is 1) bandwidth, 2) cost (eg. people don't want to drop $100 for hardware just for this feature), and 3) standards. Well, the standards are here (buoyed by work in video streaming over the past couple years, eg. MPEG, Windows Media, Real,...), and 3G camera phones will solve #1 and #2.
You know what happens then? The same thing they do when you hamper your RSS feed in any other way, they scrape your HTML and create their own feeds. Slashdot doesn't monitor their front page as closely as they do their rss page, so you can get away with quite a bit of abuse, at least for a while. They've blacklisted my IP ocassionally when I got overzealous though.
This question has been asked many times, and has been answered better than I'm able to.
But the gist of it is that push-media and multicast are either a thankfully-dead-fad, or are a technology whose time has yet to come. Push media, in particular, was salivated over quite a bit in the late 90's (eg. see Wired's 1997 cover article on it), so it's not as if it's a new idea. Despite this, push and multicast haven't gained wide success yet. Lots of people have various reasons why, and some of them are actually quite insightful. Google more if you want, but at least be aware that if one simply repeats the thoughts of the past in this area, one isn't likely to be successful.
Slashdot Mirror
People who answer interviews for Microsoft can weasel out of almost anything. It would be much better to use this opportunity to ask very insightful/thoughtful questions that haven't been asked before (eg. follow-up questions to MS's interview responses where they seemed to have completely weaseled out of the question).
Eh? Antitrust laws do not simply protect against monopolies/cartels, but instead protect against anything that intentionally restrains trade (as vague as that is). There are several solid pages on vertical integration/antitrust (one, two ). Isn't payola a clear case of vertical integration? If you can control the channels of production, it doesn't matter if you have lots of competitors who will sell at a lower price than you; the customer doesn't have access to their product.
Consumers need to start understanding how corporations look at commericals: consumer's annoyance for commercials is usually less than what companies can make from commercial-generated revenue. If corporations can add commercials to a product, which lowers the value of the product $X in the minds of consumers, but the commercials add $Y profit to their bottom line, and $X > $Y, then corporations will add more commercials and subtract $Y from the cost of their product. (actually, in some cases, consumers simply won't recognize the 50-cent price difference, so corporations don't even have to subtract that in those cases)
Why are databases fast? Indexes. What do all XML databases do? Store XML internally in a way that machines read much faster, but makes it a pain for humans to update. Indexes. So if you have all these computer programs passing around data, each with their own different deserialized structure, why don't we just standard that side of things too? Indexes. Computers MUST have them to work efficiently, but no human updates them by hand. Ergo, one form easy for humans (plaintext XML) and one form quick for computers (indexes), with an easy way to convert back and forth.
- Having a massive game world running on a large cluster of servers doesn't help anything if your players only inhabit a fraction of them.
I think your post is spot-on, but I think the proper summary is: it's a game-mechanics issue, not a technology issue. There are several cases where it'd be not-fun to have 10,000 people in the same place (even if graphics cards were advanced enough to render that without breaking a sweat).Marketroids also brought us Maxima and Altima, and this didn't cause any brains to implode or robots to blow up. And these names didn't cause Nissan any hesitation in deciding to release the 2007 GT-R which will be superior in most respects.
I excluded Forth because 1) Forth and Postscript are extremely similar as you note, and in terms similarity-to-Lisp, they're pretty much identical, so I just left the middle out, and 2) Forth lacks garbage collection, making it actually extremely cool for embedded applications, but IMHO, since we've had GC for a whole 46 years now, unless you're doing embedded/OS work, I'd prefer to just ignore such languages. I'm a GC-bigot, sue me.
O'Reilly's History of Programming Languages poster, silly.
Next came Lisp (1958). They had to literally invent garbage collection simply to be able to create the language. In 2005, garbage collection is finally starting to be found in almost every non-embedded language.
1982 brought us Postscript. It's new! Exciting new syntax. Well, okay, Lisp thought of it first.
1996 brought the world XML. Exciting new syntax! Again!
For what it's worth, the camera specs are posted on the official site... There are two 1-megapixel cameras (one wide-angle and one narrow-angle) weighing 125 pounds total. In addition to the brightness problems, annother likely issue is that this is 1997 technology (or more like 1994-1996 tech if you take into account design time).
Well you're in luck! There are tags for tags and technorati/del.icio.us/flickr and Folksonomies to make them easier to learn.
Binary formats contain pointers all over the place... pointers that say "this many bytes to the next record", or if the binary format is designed to be very fast to read, will even contain pointers that say "record 22031 is at offset XXX, record 22032 is at offset YYY". It's very quick to get to record 22032 for these formats, you just jump there and don't even have to wait eons for a physical disk to read in every single byte in between.
Now, compare to XML. EVEN IF every record was a single xml tag, the parser would have to look for "<", followed by "</", and would have to repeat that 22030 more times.
That may seem like an extreme example, but 1) most XML "records" are much more complex to parse, and 2) this demonstrates THE MOST MAJOR DOWNSIDE that human-writable formats have... they can't have these "jump to byte XXXX" markers in them, because humans don't want to constantly be updating these references every time they add or subtract a byte.
Machine-writable file formats realize that inserting or deleting bytes in the middle of a file is a big no-no, so they use several tricks to make sure they don't have to do that. All of these tricks annoy the heck of humans (they either require updating a lot of bytes, or require writing/reading the file in "pages" which bug humans because you can't "see" a whole section at the same time, or other tricks).
Therefore, human-writable formats should NOT be used as the most basic storage/access format. Agreeing to put an extremely minimal storage layer below XML is simply accepting that machines are more optimized to read/write a different kind of format than humans are.
But that price isn't correlated to population density, right? eg. the problem isn't America's geography. Your price is correlated to the fact that it's either served up by a random location by a non-monopoly, probably an underdog? The reason we don't see that kind of price in the majority of very urban areas is that government management of the issue really sucks here.
On x86 computers, I know that VMWare has to re-write kernel executables to be able to get multiple OS's to cooperate. This has a noticable CPU overhead and is fairly complex (eg. see the lack of a good open-source alternative). I don't know how similar PowerPC's are to x86's, but Intel and AMD will also be adding specific hardware support to x86's so that virtualization is much more efficient, and the software side of things should be much simpler as well (see "Vanderpool" and "Pacifica").
Alternatively, he's a flawed human like the rest of us, but sees that it's obviously easy to fall into zealotry, and decides to intentionally fall the opposite way.
- download the zip version of ActivePerl
- fix one or two files
- Burn the directory that contains bin/lib/site onto a CD
The problem is that there's at least one file that has to be twiddled with... lib\Config.pm contains a lot of lines that say "please-run-the-install-script". If you compare that file to lib\Config.pm on a normal perl install, they're completely different. I know I've specifically seen some things in the changelog that specifically say they were put in to make it easier for people to run without first installing, but I don't remember the precise details.I don't have enough time to spend with google, but if you look through some of the windows-oriented perl mailing lists, people have posted the details there.
I've seen demos of streaming-video-on-demand on a ~200x300 pixel 3G phone, and I have to say it was cooler than I thought it would be. The video looked a lot better than I thought it would on a portable device, and, well, most people can't simply call up any video they want to any time, and it's pretty cool to see somone be able to do that. On the other hand, I don't know that I could stand paying the carriers so much money for each video, even if I did have one of these phones.
An example of where TV-on-cellphones would be useful.... on September 11th, is there any doubt that if most people had TV-on-cellphones, that everyone not near a TV would have been glued to their cell phone, watching video clips?
Anyway, my main question is... why come up with a new standard? It seems like most cell phones will support TCP/IP in the future.... why not simply use any/all of the existing streaming-video standards that are available? (eg. Windows Media, Real, MPEG... most of these already have embedded implementations).
If it were simply a standards issue, then US customers should also be able to simply switch to the one or two carriers that provide GSM service here in the states, no? (T-Mobile, AT&T) From what I've heard, GSM isn't any better than CDMA here. See my sibling post, I really believe it's an issue of carrier-profit.
The people who provide monthly cell service (the carriers) often make a profit by choosing low-bitrate codecs, as well as over-subscribing cell towers, and thus frequently dropping calls when a cell tower reaches its capacity. 95% cell tower utilization = more profit for the carrier. 95% cell tower utilization = crappy quality for the customer. Same story as cable modems.
And the chances of these kind of reforms going through are... what? From a national economic standpoint, even the US has an incentive to pump out as many patents as possible, no matter how frivolous, in order to extract money from corporations in other countries, since the US is using the WTO to push its "intellectual property" regime onto as many countries as it can.
It's inevitable that voice calls will universal and standard.
The way your problem is addressed is that you can choose to initiate either a voice or a video call... when answering a video call, you can choose to answer it in voice-only instead. Video calls are only set up if both sides agree to do video.
My guesses for why video calls haven't been widespread is 1) bandwidth, 2) cost (eg. people don't want to drop $100 for hardware just for this feature), and 3) standards. Well, the standards are here (buoyed by work in video streaming over the past couple years, eg. MPEG, Windows Media, Real, ...), and 3G camera phones will solve #1 and #2.
You know what happens then? The same thing they do when you hamper your RSS feed in any other way, they scrape your HTML and create their own feeds. Slashdot doesn't monitor their front page as closely as they do their rss page, so you can get away with quite a bit of abuse, at least for a while. They've blacklisted my IP ocassionally when I got overzealous though.
But the gist of it is that push-media and multicast are either a thankfully-dead-fad, or are a technology whose time has yet to come. Push media, in particular, was salivated over quite a bit in the late 90's (eg. see Wired's 1997 cover article on it), so it's not as if it's a new idea. Despite this, push and multicast haven't gained wide success yet. Lots of people have various reasons why, and some of them are actually quite insightful. Google more if you want, but at least be aware that if one simply repeats the thoughts of the past in this area, one isn't likely to be successful.