The problem isn't that DRM is intrusive for users of a complete DRM system; of course it's designed to work for them. But for those of us who don't want to use Windows, because we feel Linux is superior, we are trapped. Either we use Windows or we are prevented for taking part in society. Sound extreme? Well, our culture is greatly defined by the media, and if all the media is restricted to copy-protected devices, then those of us who eschew DRM are essentially hermits.
3-4 year upgrade cycle? As if. My 19" CRT is 3 years old and I have zero plans to replace it: no monitor on the market for under $3000 can beat it for brightness and resolution. In fact, I recently bought another CRT because I didn't want to deal with LCDs: over priced, low resolutions, dead pixels, dim screens, reduced viewing angles. The only advantage of an LCD is the size/weight, and since I never move my computer, that's totally not worth the extra $5000 I'd need to spend to get the equivalent dual 1600x1200 setup I have now.
Just to clarify: The government didn't own the phone companies, but they had a state-granted monopoly. The reason for this is that a monopoly can be given a mandate to provide phone service for everyone, including unprofitable customers in hard-to-reach residential areas, and they can subsidize this cost with income from other customers. This would be impractical or impossible if there had been multiple phone companies.
In some industries "best practices" not only means someone is doing it now, but if you're not doing it you're negligent and liable to damages should any harm arise from your inferior practices. So I agree, in the computer industry we should refrain from using the term unless it truly is a "best practice". There are so many cases where there are multiple ways of accomplishing something and nobody can prove that one way is always better than an other, so in this case are there two different "best practices?" It's too grey. Call it "good practices" and nobody can complain.:)
The computer labs I used in 97-00 were solaris boxes, when I came back from a work placement in 2001 they had replaced several labs with Linux boxes. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the labs weren't Linux by now, unless they are holding out for some custom Solaris software that hasn't been ported yet.
If you think a big-end database can get by with only 4 GB of RAM you don't know what a big-end database is. Unless you're referring to "big-endian" which has nothing to do with memory size. The ammount of RAM is certainly a limiting factor if you're dealing with lots of data and lots of users at the same time. Maybe no single user or query needs more than 4 billion items, but when you've got hundreds of users and tables with hundreds of rows, space matters.
The study in question was specifically measuring the effects of DST compared to the same months without DST: they extended DST into March and April for '73, '74, and found that, compared to '75, DST saved energy, about 1%, due to decreased light and appliance usage.
Seems like a significant saving since it happens for free.
As for people complaining about the switch, and how it affects their internal clock, I sympathize, but I think the solution is to switch to DST all year.
Look, I'm not making this up. I was reading about Daylight Saving Time two weeks before the time change, and one of the facts I read about was specifically RE: the energy crisis, and how they measured oil use during '74, '75 when they had extended DST. They determined that there was a saving of oil.
As for "robbing Peter to pay Paul", you're partially right: There isn't more daylight. But again, statistics back up the argument: There are fewer car accidents during DST: Accidents in the mornings go up, but accidents in the evenings go down more. It's darker in the morning, meaning people need lights longer, but that's more than offset by the saving at night.
It's not like they've never tried this out. They HAVE tried it, and measured its effects. Google "Daylight Saving Time" if you don't believe me.
The legislator who claims DST saves energy didn't pull the figures out of his ass, they come from studies done during the oil crisis in the 70s that showed energy savings during periods of extended DST.
And there is no increase in sunlight; claiming that there is is just stupid and it's not what Congress is claiming either. The daylight is shifted into the evening when people can use it better; that's how the energy is saved. As for making DST all year long, that would work too. The problem is that mornings are darker during DST and the public isn't ready to accept darker mornings all winter. But I bet it will eventually happen if the current proposal is successful.
Except that we already HAVE DST during the summer, when we air-condition. The change will be to use DST during spring/fall, when it's colder. So I'd say air-conditioning won't play a part here.
You could always consider Java. Java has lots of support in the Open Source world. The Eclipse IDE is pretty nice. JBuilder, while not Free, has a decent GUI editor (never looked for one for Eclipse, so I don't know if it has one) that can approximate the drag-and-drop approach of VB. Java can do pretty much anything you need it to do, and it's cross-platform. Performace with a modern VM is not a problem. The only real problem Java has is that there is no good Free JVM. But I expect that will change in the future. But in the meantime, the Sun JVM is available for most interesting platforms. Java code is pretty easy to write, and maintain, it's well understood by lots of people, it's proven to work well on large workloads, and it has good open-source and proprietary support.
The problem is that the person you are communicating with may THINK they understand you, but if you make mistakes in what you write, their understanding may not be what you intend.
Anyway, spelling mistakes (I consider there/their/they're to be a spelling mistake, not a grammar mistake) are usually easily corrected when you read because the words rhyme and the words are not usually interchangable. But some other kinds of spelling mistakes can certainly lead to ambiguous meaning. And grammar mistakes can be worse, since you may have no way to infer where the mistake lies. Consider this sentence:
They does.
Should it be "He does" or "They do"? There's no way to infer that, and even in context there may be no way to infer that.
Because tax law is a completely different kind of problem than web-serving. Would you trust a doctor to write an operating system? How about a lawyer to clean your teeth? Maybe you'd like an accountant to fix your car?
Serving web sites is 99% a technical problem. Thus, programmers are well-suited to solving that problem by themselves. Open-source software tends to be programmers working alone (that is, without other business experts). Tax software requires tons of work from accountants and legal experts. Plus it has to be right the first time. Plus it often needs to be certified; every version might need to be certified. Plus there's liability. So I'd say only a company that has money can afford to pay the experts involved in designing, building, testing, and certifying the software. Web-serving, on the other hand... much simpler problem domain. Very straight-forward to test. Problem doesn't change much from year to year. Basically it's a whole different question.
But that's not strictly true. A child combines some features from each parent, but can receive features not found in either parent: i.e. if both parents have recessive genes for blue eyes, but also dominant genes for brown eyes, the parents will have brown eyes but the child could have blue eyes.
Anyway, children are not classes, they are instances. So the diagram is wrong in multiple ways.
I'm not sure the specialization arrow (triangle-shaped arrowhead) is a good way to indicate parent-child; a child is not a specialized instance of the parent.
Java bytecode is compiled to native code at runtime. This runtime compilation can actually be better than normal machine code because many optimizations at compile time are guesses, or statisically right most of the time, but the runtime optimizer can make the right choices more often since it can see how the code is being executed. It can even re-optimize things. So Java is not slower than machine code (that is, not necessarily slower) and in some ways it is faster.
The same goes for "pure interpretation" as long as the interpreter has any smarts.
the patent expired a long time ago, and there are several knock-off brands, including Megablocks (their chief competitor) and something from Hasbro I think. There are about 5 clone brands that I know of, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.
Anyway, many people are Lego purists, and refust to use clone brands. My experience with them is that the quality isn't as good. But they are about half the price sometimes.
Well, the other day I was in a computer shop and I asked the guy if they sold AMD processors, and he basically laughed at me and said you should only buy Intel. I tried to explain: AMD chips tend to be faster AND cheaper, why would anyone buy Intel? He didn't understand. I started to explain about the AMD speed rating numbers and I could tell that I lost him. It's such a simple concept: performance = number of instructions executed/cycle * cycles / second. Intel increases the second value while AMD increases the first. sigh.
But AMD found that they could get better performance by increasing the ammount of useful work done per clock cycle, rather than increasing the number of clock cycles, so in a sense they "Fell behind" in the GHz game, but they kept up in the performance game. Of course, because the public has been brainwashed for so long, they don't understand the difference, so AMD needs to advertise differently since they are not the king of the GHz game.
Java VMs may be written in C++, but the java bytecode gets optimized down to real machine code, so it's actually irrelevent what language was used for the JVM. But anything that's implemented 'native' in the VM, as opposed to in pure java, is run as regular c++.
His point isn't that he's ignoring a problem; though the argument is badly worded, what was meant was that Java's memory overhead was considered high in the early days, but it has remained mostly constant compared to the ammount of ram available to programs, and compared to the size of the java application program itself. So what used to seem like a huge overhead is not even noticable now.
And Java's JIT compilation actually out-performs natively compiled C++ in some cases. So it's not a clear-cut "Java is slower" question; for some jobs it will be, but for many, many jobs it is either A) fast enough, and the speed lost is worth the savings in security and dev. time, or B) faster than native code.
Of course, all of this doesn't mean that you should always use Java. But you should always try to use the right tool for the job, even if that tool is Java or.Net.
I'd argue that lip-reading or sign-language is "approximating regular people" as well. It's a question of how much better life is for the affected person. If having a cochlear implant lets me hear speech, and noises like alarms, and traffic, and maybe music, I'd rather have that and be unable to communicate with deaf people through "normal" means. Sign language is nice in that it is easy to teach to anyone, but it's not as efficient as spoken language, and it has drawbacks, such as requiring a line of sight to the speaker.
As for legally blind children who are not learning braille, I think they should be taught both braille and magnified reading. But given a choice between reading braille or something magnified, some might choose magnification if they find it easier.
Well, as for teaching people to cope with their disability, I think that's great, but I'd have to say, especially for vision-impaired people, that being able to restore vision function is far more important than coming up with better ways for blind people to interact with the real world. Having 5 senses instead of 4 is a huge advantage, but having vision is a huge advantage, since light carries so much information. I'm sure that the arugment will eventually be "how can we augment humans' 5 senses?" instead of "how can we augment disabled humans' 4 senses?"
I guess I'm not geeky enough... I didn't know that stuff, and in fact I've never even seen a Star Trek movie from start to finish.:)
But there is a guy, today, who has a visual implant and can see shadows. It's powered by a huge brick of a computer he lugs around, but the basic technology is in place, and it will only get better from there. even being able to see black-and-white would be good enough for most blind-people... it's way better than seeing nothing.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to skip forwards and backwards, I'm saying that if those are the only options then managing a collection of hundreds or thousands of songs will be more or less impossible.
As for whether or not you need to search, that's really up to the individual, I guess. Sometimes I make winamp randomize the playlist, and sometimes I sort by artist/album so that I can listen to a whole album. But sometimes I feel like hearing a particular song, and it's nice to be able to jump to it. Other people have different tastes, and want to sort by genre, or by release year, or by some ranking. All of these things are possible now that we're not using tapes or CDs, so why not make them possible with the mp3 player? But I agree that there needs to be at least some level of eyes-free operation, for when you want to skip a single song, or a couple songs.
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The problem isn't that DRM is intrusive for users of a complete DRM system; of course it's designed to work for them. But for those of us who don't want to use Windows, because we feel Linux is superior, we are trapped. Either we use Windows or we are prevented for taking part in society. Sound extreme? Well, our culture is greatly defined by the media, and if all the media is restricted to copy-protected devices, then those of us who eschew DRM are essentially hermits.
3-4 year upgrade cycle? As if. My 19" CRT is 3 years old and I have zero plans to replace it: no monitor on the market for under $3000 can beat it for brightness and resolution. In fact, I recently bought another CRT because I didn't want to deal with LCDs: over priced, low resolutions, dead pixels, dim screens, reduced viewing angles. The only advantage of an LCD is the size/weight, and since I never move my computer, that's totally not worth the extra $5000 I'd need to spend to get the equivalent dual 1600x1200 setup I have now.
Just to clarify: The government didn't own the phone companies, but they had a state-granted monopoly. The reason for this is that a monopoly can be given a mandate to provide phone service for everyone, including unprofitable customers in hard-to-reach residential areas, and they can subsidize this cost with income from other customers. This would be impractical or impossible if there had been multiple phone companies.
In some industries "best practices" not only means someone is doing it now, but if you're not doing it you're negligent and liable to damages should any harm arise from your inferior practices. So I agree, in the computer industry we should refrain from using the term unless it truly is a "best practice". There are so many cases where there are multiple ways of accomplishing something and nobody can prove that one way is always better than an other, so in this case are there two different "best practices?" It's too grey. Call it "good practices" and nobody can complain. :)
The computer labs I used in 97-00 were solaris boxes, when I came back from a work placement in 2001 they had replaced several labs with Linux boxes. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the labs weren't Linux by now, unless they are holding out for some custom Solaris software that hasn't been ported yet.
If you think a big-end database can get by with only 4 GB of RAM you don't know what a big-end database is. Unless you're referring to "big-endian" which has nothing to do with memory size. The ammount of RAM is certainly a limiting factor if you're dealing with lots of data and lots of users at the same time. Maybe no single user or query needs more than 4 billion items, but when you've got hundreds of users and tables with hundreds of rows, space matters.
The study in question was specifically measuring the effects of DST compared to the same months without DST: they extended DST into March and April for '73, '74, and found that, compared to '75, DST saved energy, about 1%, due to decreased light and appliance usage.
Link
Seems like a significant saving since it happens for free.
As for people complaining about the switch, and how it affects their internal clock, I sympathize, but I think the solution is to switch to DST all year.
Look, I'm not making this up. I was reading about Daylight Saving Time two weeks before the time change, and one of the facts I read about was specifically RE: the energy crisis, and how they measured oil use during '74, '75 when they had extended DST. They determined that there was a saving of oil.
As for "robbing Peter to pay Paul", you're partially right: There isn't more daylight. But again, statistics back up the argument: There are fewer car accidents during DST: Accidents in the mornings go up, but accidents in the evenings go down more. It's darker in the morning, meaning people need lights longer, but that's more than offset by the saving at night.
It's not like they've never tried this out. They HAVE tried it, and measured its effects. Google "Daylight Saving Time" if you don't believe me.
The legislator who claims DST saves energy didn't pull the figures out of his ass, they come from studies done during the oil crisis in the 70s that showed energy savings during periods of extended DST.
And there is no increase in sunlight; claiming that there is is just stupid and it's not what Congress is claiming either. The daylight is shifted into the evening when people can use it better; that's how the energy is saved. As for making DST all year long, that would work too. The problem is that mornings are darker during DST and the public isn't ready to accept darker mornings all winter. But I bet it will eventually happen if the current proposal is successful.
Except that we already HAVE DST during the summer, when we air-condition. The change will be to use DST during spring/fall, when it's colder. So I'd say air-conditioning won't play a part here.
You could always consider Java. Java has lots of support in the Open Source world. The Eclipse IDE is pretty nice. JBuilder, while not Free, has a decent GUI editor (never looked for one for Eclipse, so I don't know if it has one) that can approximate the drag-and-drop approach of VB. Java can do pretty much anything you need it to do, and it's cross-platform. Performace with a modern VM is not a problem.
The only real problem Java has is that there is no good Free JVM. But I expect that will change in the future. But in the meantime, the Sun JVM is available for most interesting platforms. Java code is pretty easy to write, and maintain, it's well understood by lots of people, it's proven to work well on large workloads, and it has good open-source and proprietary support.
The problem is that the person you are communicating with may THINK they understand you, but if you make mistakes in what you write, their understanding may not be what you intend.
Anyway, spelling mistakes (I consider there/their/they're to be a spelling mistake, not a grammar mistake) are usually easily corrected when you read because the words rhyme and the words are not usually interchangable. But some other kinds of spelling mistakes can certainly lead to ambiguous meaning. And grammar mistakes can be worse, since you may have no way to infer where the mistake lies. Consider this sentence:
They does.
Should it be "He does" or "They do"? There's no way to infer that, and even in context there may be no way to infer that.
Because tax law is a completely different kind of problem than web-serving. Would you trust a doctor to write an operating system? How about a lawyer to clean your teeth? Maybe you'd like an accountant to fix your car?
Serving web sites is 99% a technical problem. Thus, programmers are well-suited to solving that problem by themselves. Open-source software tends to be programmers working alone (that is, without other business experts). Tax software requires tons of work from accountants and legal experts. Plus it has to be right the first time. Plus it often needs to be certified; every version might need to be certified. Plus there's liability. So I'd say only a company that has money can afford to pay the experts involved in designing, building, testing, and certifying the software. Web-serving, on the other hand... much simpler problem domain. Very straight-forward to test. Problem doesn't change much from year to year. Basically it's a whole different question.
But that's not strictly true. A child combines some features from each parent, but can receive features not found in either parent: i.e. if both parents have recessive genes for blue eyes, but also dominant genes for brown eyes, the parents will have brown eyes but the child could have blue eyes.
Anyway, children are not classes, they are instances. So the diagram is wrong in multiple ways.
I'm not sure the specialization arrow (triangle-shaped arrowhead) is a good way to indicate parent-child; a child is not a specialized instance of the parent.
Java bytecode is compiled to native code at runtime. This runtime compilation can actually be better than normal machine code because many optimizations at compile time are guesses, or statisically right most of the time, but the runtime optimizer can make the right choices more often since it can see how the code is being executed. It can even re-optimize things.
So Java is not slower than machine code (that is, not necessarily slower) and in some ways it is faster.
The same goes for "pure interpretation" as long as the interpreter has any smarts.
the patent expired a long time ago, and there are several knock-off brands, including Megablocks (their chief competitor) and something from Hasbro I think. There are about 5 clone brands that I know of, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.
Anyway, many people are Lego purists, and refust to use clone brands. My experience with them is that the quality isn't as good. But they are about half the price sometimes.
Well, the other day I was in a computer shop and I asked the guy if they sold AMD processors, and he basically laughed at me and said you should only buy Intel. I tried to explain: AMD chips tend to be faster AND cheaper, why would anyone buy Intel? He didn't understand. I started to explain about the AMD speed rating numbers and I could tell that I lost him. It's such a simple concept: performance = number of instructions executed /cycle * cycles / second. Intel increases the second value while AMD increases the first. sigh.
But AMD found that they could get better performance by increasing the ammount of useful work done per clock cycle, rather than increasing the number of clock cycles, so in a sense they "Fell behind" in the GHz game, but they kept up in the performance game. Of course, because the public has been brainwashed for so long, they don't understand the difference, so AMD needs to advertise differently since they are not the king of the GHz game.
Java VMs may be written in C++, but the java bytecode gets optimized down to real machine code, so it's actually irrelevent what language was used for the JVM. But anything that's implemented 'native' in the VM, as opposed to in pure java, is run as regular c++.
His point isn't that he's ignoring a problem; though the argument is badly worded, what was meant was that Java's memory overhead was considered high in the early days, but it has remained mostly constant compared to the ammount of ram available to programs, and compared to the size of the java application program itself. So what used to seem like a huge overhead is not even noticable now.
.Net.
And Java's JIT compilation actually out-performs natively compiled C++ in some cases. So it's not a clear-cut "Java is slower" question; for some jobs it will be, but for many, many jobs it is either A) fast enough, and the speed lost is worth the savings in security and dev. time, or B) faster than native code.
Of course, all of this doesn't mean that you should always use Java. But you should always try to use the right tool for the job, even if that tool is Java or
I'd argue that lip-reading or sign-language is "approximating regular people" as well. It's a question of how much better life is for the affected person. If having a cochlear implant lets me hear speech, and noises like alarms, and traffic, and maybe music, I'd rather have that and be unable to communicate with deaf people through "normal" means. Sign language is nice in that it is easy to teach to anyone, but it's not as efficient as spoken language, and it has drawbacks, such as requiring a line of sight to the speaker.
As for legally blind children who are not learning braille, I think they should be taught both braille and magnified reading. But given a choice between reading braille or something magnified, some might choose magnification if they find it easier.
Well, as for teaching people to cope with their disability, I think that's great, but I'd have to say, especially for vision-impaired people, that being able to restore vision function is far more important than coming up with better ways for blind people to interact with the real world. Having 5 senses instead of 4 is a huge advantage, but having vision is a huge advantage, since light carries so much information. I'm sure that the arugment will eventually be "how can we augment humans' 5 senses?" instead of "how can we augment disabled humans' 4 senses?"
I guess I'm not geeky enough... I didn't know that stuff, and in fact I've never even seen a Star Trek movie from start to finish. :)
But there is a guy, today, who has a visual implant and can see shadows. It's powered by a huge brick of a computer he lugs around, but the basic technology is in place, and it will only get better from there. even being able to see black-and-white would be good enough for most blind-people... it's way better than seeing nothing.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to skip forwards and backwards, I'm saying that if those are the only options then managing a collection of hundreds or thousands of songs will be more or less impossible.
As for whether or not you need to search, that's really up to the individual, I guess. Sometimes I make winamp randomize the playlist, and sometimes I sort by artist/album so that I can listen to a whole album. But sometimes I feel like hearing a particular song, and it's nice to be able to jump to it. Other people have different tastes, and want to sort by genre, or by release year, or by some ranking. All of these things are possible now that we're not using tapes or CDs, so why not make them possible with the mp3 player? But I agree that there needs to be at least some level of eyes-free operation, for when you want to skip a single song, or a couple songs.