I took a look at intel's site about it and the chipset they are building is based on TDMA (time division multiple access) which uses the same algorith as GSM. The only problem is it won't work for a large number of people. TDMA and GSM have a hard capacity limit, which is considerably lower than CDMA. CDMA also has a capacity limit, so another type of technology is needed. Here is a link to an article
What that technology will be is beyond me, but a TDMA based solution isn't going to provide enough bandwidth and capacity to meet the needs of laptop users because they will expect LAN speeds and reliability.
From what I know and what others have posted about Mono, I don't see that Mono inherently is bad or evil. What I don't like about CLR as it is proposed in.NET, may create unmaintainable code. The idea of writing applications in any language and having it compile into a common class/byte code sounds desireable on the surface, but what happens when a person uses 3 different languages in one single application? How are the pieces supposed to interact seamlessly and how will it affect the organization of the architecture. How a person would build abstractions in C, C++, VB, C#, Perl and Python vary enough to create some funky code. Sure people will argue no one in their right mind would do that, but by virtue of it being possible, some one will.
Since my knowledge is limited, I don't know if in.NET CLR it allows only one language per application, but from what I have read it doesn't appear that way. Sure it's easy to build an application in 3 different languages and kludge it together, but will that application be maintainable and extensible? Sure Java has it's problems, but in the end, a single language leads to more maintainable code and better compliance to coding standards.
From a practical implementation perspective, I don't like the idea of working/fixing a distributed B2B service that is written in 5 languages and kludged together with tons of weird optimization to make it run at a decent speed. The other aspect of microsoft's.NET servers is there isn't much information about state replication and persistance framework. From what I can tell, the application center is a Microsoft Transaction server with clustering. It still doesn't have standard framework for persistance and state management.
I'm sure someone on/. knows more about the application center's architecture. The so called benefits of SOAP in my mind aren't really useful, unless they it is in used in a transactional context with persistence. Most web services today don't need all the encoding features of SOAP, nor does SOAP appear that much better than XML RPC. There might be a transaction/persistence framework that seamlessly plugs in with SOAP, but I haven't heard of one related to.NET services. I'm sure.NET and.NET services are useful, but there's still a lot of missing components to make it fully distributed and transactional like MS is marketing it.
Here is another slant on the whole security issue the writer did not take into consideration.
The mindset of the user.
Considering windows has a larger install base and a large portion of those users are average people, security to large portion of window users constitutes less of an issue. It's not that windows users don't think security is not important, but rather they don't care to know the guts of an OS. Large portion of windows users don't understand the hacker culture or realize hackers do it for the fun. By virtue of the user-base, hackers will see windows has a more attractive playing field. Therefore any security hole in windows has a higher risk potential than the *nix counter part. People who use and administer *nix systems tend to have a better understanding of security and the hacker culture. I have no proof of this, but I would guess unix users have a higher percentage of security freaks, than windows. Unix users tend to be technologists, therefore vulnerabilities are caught sooner than later and patches are applied more frequently.
The article should have taken these and other issues into consideration when calculating the relative risk of security holes. Lazy writers are a dime a dozen. Perhaps more people in the unix community should write articles and provide objective analysis of OS security issues.
Games like load runner and tetris are still fun to play. Some of the new console games are pretty tough, especially trying to play FPS without a keyboard. It's great to see all the hot new graphics, but part of me misses the simplicity of tetris or load runner in new games. Games like munch's odessy or crazy taxi are great because the game play is easy to understand. There isn't a huge learning curve just to play the game at a decent level.
IBM has done great things for Open source and java, but I also found the article to be biased. From personal experience, for the same clock speed, Java runs considerably faster on Solaris 7 or 8 than on linux or windows. The catch to the whole thing is for most web apps Java running on 1.5ghz+ will probably be faster than a Sun box running at 440mhz ultra sparc.
On the otherhand, companies buy Sun hardware not for pure speed, but for reliability, redundancy and proven scalability. The one thing all these benchmarks fail to address is "how important is speed over reliability and scalability?" A good programmer can take out lots of security, memory management and allocation checks to make it run really fast, but how stable will it be? Will it be solid enough to run 24/7 with 1% downtime? With the way CPU speeds are increasing, who cares about speed. Lets talk about the real issues, ease of development, maintainability of the code, built in document creation, wide selection of prebuilt libraries, consistent and solid security model and portability between platforms. My personal experience, large companies use a variety of platforms, so a windows only solution is not an option. A solution that allows multiple developers on different platforms to build their pieces and integrate is what many large projects require. Doing so with C can be done, but how many people feel C code is easy to maintain? I don't know that question, since I've never coded in C. Those I know who use C joke about how unreadable C becomes. Bottom line, each tool has it's strengths and weaknesses. It's about which problems you want to live with.
I have no problems slaughtering an animal and I don't waste meat. I grew up seeing animals being slaughtered, so the whole idea of eating a synthetic steak sounds bizzare. Vegans don't eat meat for a variety of reasons. Some even go as far as to only eat raw foods, like only veggies.
As bhudda would say, it is balance. Doing things in extreme is the problem. People really should clean a fish and slaughter an animal once in their life. The next time they think about wasting food, they'll remember a creature died for it. What I find disturbing about the meat industry is the sanitary appearance. People should be reminded creatures die for meat every time they go shopping. In other cultures, the idea of santinized meats is considered wrong and offensive.
I'm curious to see a dual athlon perform non-linear video editing. I haven't tried it, but I'm guessing it should be much better than a dual 450mhz P3. I think an important fact is that a G4 with 700-800mhz CPU is enough for doing non-linear video editing with Final Cut Pro. The same can't be said for PC's with a single processor.
I don't think these systems are geared towards a gamer. They are really ideal for doing high end graphics, like non-linear editing. Perhaps now PC's will catch up with Mac for high end graphics. Avid now has a version of win2K and XP, though I don't know anyone that uses it on windows.
Do what you love. No if, and, but, maybe, or somehow. As corny as it sounds, do what nike says "just do it." Do what you love and no matter how rich or poor you are, you'll be happy. Everything else is only a distraction.
Actually I like jackson polluck and I did study art history. I've yet to meet non-art person who says of jackson polluck paintings "wow that is an amazing piece of art." It may be over generalizing, but I doubt a survey of random people would show 1/3 of the people consider it beautiful. Interesting maybe, but then people say "interesting" when they want to be polite about a piece of art they think is junk or their totally confused. Pollock is considered an important point in American art history and Ed Harris played pollock in the movie "Pollock" which was released in 2000.
There are thousands of views on art, including death as art as in "performance art". There's a movie named frozen. Or there's Guillermo Gómez-Peña who is well known in the performance art world. I'll stop there. Lego art:)
Well assuming the FCC approves UWB, it will make bluetooth obsolete. All the issues related to 802.11b security isn't present in Time Domain's chipset from what I understand. UWB uses far lower power and time codes the data in picoseconds. Without knowledge of the timing, the data is total gibberish. Of course that's not to say UWB doesn't have security issues, just not the ones 802.11b has.
You'd be hard pressed to get any two people to completely agree on what constitutes art, but this one was creative in that he had to figure out a way to use the blocks he had to create the picture. The picture itself is fairly good for lego art. It's not a monet or dali, but then again neither of them used lego's.
Some might say art is about taking things that no one thought could be art and make it into art, like how andy warhol took soup cans and turned into pop art. Or distorting reality by creating a representation that make the viewer stop and think about the creative process. Some are questionable like Jackson Pollock, who most people would consider junk. So make of the portrait what you will. Lego and calista art? It's probably more artful than calista:)
As some one else mentioned, Time Domain is already selling/marketing their chipset. There still isn't a diffinitive answer on whether or not millions of UWB devices would cause problems for other devices. There still has be third party verification of broad deployment to really find out if it's practical. The military will most likely use it, since well they are above the laws of the FCC (well not really, but they sometimes act like it). I hope it pans out, since it would dramatically change the telco/cable world and force a drastic change.
This is a great bit of news and may go towards making admin lives easier. Rather than have hundreds of intel boxes, like some of the biggest E-comm sites running ASP, JSP, PHP, or Perl, you can now reduce the amount of rack space you have to lease. Trying to manage 20 racks of 1U or 2U rack mount servers can be a pain with NT.
Getting a z series does make some sense in cases where a company could consolidate hundreds of PC's into fewer z series mainframes.
Anand refrained from guessing why Geforce3 Ti did better at the higher res. Anyone know the architecture of both well enough to guess why that is so?
At the lower res the 8500 was faster, but what percentage of the gamers play below 1024 x 768? I haven't set the resolution game to below 1024 x 768 for over 2.5 years. The results were interesting, though it would have been nice if Anand posted 1 or 2 screen shots, especially one of the bug mentioned.
Although I agree with you that most bands own the actual music, that's not always the case. In some cases, the artist signed their rights away like billy joel, or signed the rights to the master away like prince. It is up to the artist and I absolutely agree with that. As other's have said, how each band makes money varies. Even if the artist signs a good contract, I'm sure the label still pushes them to ban bootlegging with soft talk and other bs. Dont' under estimate the power of persuasion of labels.
Remember when Pearl Jam tried to fight ticketmaster? Who won? I admit it's a bit paranoid and I seriously doubt it will happen, but that's not to say RIAA won't try and ticketmaster won't seriously consider the idea. Ticketmaster is legalize ticket scalping, so what's to stop them from breaking yet another law.
There are plenty of bands that totally say "dude, record if you want. we encourage it." What's to stop RIAA from forcing ticketmaster and venues to ban recording devices? They could come up with a handful of reasons or excuses to ban electronic devices. Even worse, RIAA could get all the labels to agree add a clause in their contracts governing bootlegging. If I was a greedy RIAA exec, I could add in a clause that says:
the artist will cooperate with the label to ensure the highest rate of return on investments, which include assisting and reporting of copyright violation and improper use of material that causes negative financial impact. The artist agrees that derivative works are covered in the preceeding statement.
I seriously doubt RIAA would succeed, but it doesn't mean they won't try. How many starving musicians are going to read the paragraph above and think, "this might make it so the audience can't bootleg." Lawyers are great at writing language that appears harmless, but gives the company great advantages.
Even though it's not for copyrighted material, I can't help but wonder what RIAA's reaction is going to be. Will they use the same argument "you can't ensure it is only used for non-copyrighted material?" or will they start pushing stadiums to do a body search for tape recorders. In either case, I doubt they will sit back and do nothing.
I am not sure I understand this particular statement, but here are some general thoughts.
However, it doesnt address the requirements of systems integration where the requirements are ill-defined
To paraphrase your problem, the development process is well defined and works, but when you go to deploy the application you run into difficulties because of the integration environment. In my own experience, part of the requirement at the beginning should be to build a close replica of the systems the application will live on. As other have stated it is good to have people who go back and forth between development and integration, but there are other good reasons for that practice.
From the perspective of building a replica of the final deployment environment, it is good to have some one who has extensive experience with the clients setup, so that you catch more of the gotchas earlier during development and it allows you to make your dev environment as close as possible. It's unlikely you can build a mirror of the deployment environment, but there are steps you can take to simulate those conditions. I can only guess at what that environment from my own experience. Financial institutions tend to have a mix of mainframe and high end unix servers from either Sun/IBM/HP/Compaq. For obvious reasons, your company probably can't afford to build a mainframe that mirrors the final system, but most of the other stuff you should be able to replicate fairly closely.
All those little differences in hardware, network architecture, and configuration oddities can be minimized by making your development environment similar. Sure it makes your development life more painful, but you don't have to do it all in one shot. You can do it slowly in phases and work it in so doesn't screw up the process or productivity. As far as making sure the application is what the client wanted, you may want to consider altering the development to include building flow mockups that allow the client to physically go through the steps with canned data. This way you reduce the time spent building features that won't integrate smoothly with their existing applications. Some or all of these suggestions might not help at all in your situation. Hopefully there's something you can use from other's suggestions.
There used to be a time when reporters and news people were intelligent with critical skills. It's obvious those days are gone and news have become Stone Philips. Do I really care if some news personality wears nice designer suits and has a personal stylist? Fck no. So called main stream journalism has no more credibility than the national inquirer. This is truly sad. I'm not even going to bother with the contents of that so called "news article."
This goes back to the age old question of "what is the value of research?" Having been told by a few academic people who do research, it's not about being useful. It's about exploration. From an engineers perspective (smart potholders) some of the research topics sounds absolutely ludicrous, but you never know if that stupid idea inspired a good idea. Researchers like to think big and dream, but I still don't know that warrants funding assinine research. MIT has been around a long time and I've met some graduates. Every university has the same problems with funding (though some to a lesser degree). Is MIT really all that different? It's not like MIT is the only place that is doing wild cutting edge research.
MIT is more well known because of a few famous people who taught, graduate or worked there. People shouldn't put too much stock in prestiege. All degrees are only as valuable as the effort you put into it. Likewise, an university is only as good as it's students' ability to be resourceful. I don't know that having the world at your finger tips with first class flights really fosters a scrap dog mentality. If necessity is the mother of invention, having everything at your fingers tips (as MIT is accustomed to) might inhibit creative thinking.
Well, having worked on wireless location technology, say you don't have 50K to get a high end lexus with GPS option. You're getting on the freeway and there's an accident about half way to work, but there are alternate routes. The scenarios we worked out were to alert the consumer of the accident and suggest an alternate route. How would you like to know which alternate route is least congested, since others will try to navigate around the accident. Not only that, with profiling and personalization, the system could suggest a faster route to work, which you're not aware of. Image if everyone had GPS enabled devices and the state transit service used a combination of cell data, gps data and sensors embedded in the road to provide realtime traffic data. Now you have the ability to generate optimal driving directions based on realtime data. In some states and cities, the roads already have embedded sensors to detect the rate of traffic. For example, the California transit district website will show you a map of the freeways and the average speed at that point.
Other less impressive things to do is searching for things based on your location. Say you're on vacation and you get a wicked headache. It would be nice to find the closest drug store and have your perscription sent there if you have a particular alergy. There are a lot more things you can do with location technology.
The danger product isn't all that impressive. If anything, WOZ should compliment danger's product. I don't see the danger website mention anything about GSPS or location determination. It might, but I'm too lazy to go through every page to find it.
Slashdot Mirror
What that technology will be is beyond me, but a TDMA based solution isn't going to provide enough bandwidth and capacity to meet the needs of laptop users because they will expect LAN speeds and reliability.
How to tell when you're choosing the wrong tool to solve a problem.
When to tell a project is doomed from the start and how to save it.
why .net
.NET, may create unmaintainable code. The idea of writing applications in any language and having it compile into a common class/byte code sounds desireable on the surface, but what happens when a person uses 3 different languages in one single application? How are the pieces supposed to interact seamlessly and how will it affect the organization of the architecture. How a person would build abstractions in C, C++, VB, C#, Perl and Python vary enough to create some funky code. Sure people will argue no one in their right mind would do that, but by virtue of it being possible, some one will.
defining the basic elements
application center
From what I know and what others have posted about Mono, I don't see that Mono inherently is bad or evil. What I don't like about CLR as it is proposed in
Since my knowledge is limited, I don't know if in .NET CLR it allows only one language per application, but from what I have read it doesn't appear that way. Sure it's easy to build an application in 3 different languages and kludge it together, but will that application be maintainable and extensible? Sure Java has it's problems, but in the end, a single language leads to more maintainable code and better compliance to coding standards.
From a practical implementation perspective, I don't like the idea of working/fixing a distributed B2B service that is written in 5 languages and kludged together with tons of weird optimization to make it run at a decent speed. The other aspect of microsoft's .NET servers is there isn't much information about state replication and persistance framework. From what I can tell, the application center is a Microsoft Transaction server with clustering. It still doesn't have standard framework for persistance and state management.
I'm sure someone on /. knows more about the application center's architecture. The so called benefits of SOAP in my mind aren't really useful, unless they it is in used in a transactional context with persistence. Most web services today don't need all the encoding features of SOAP, nor does SOAP appear that much better than XML RPC. There might be a transaction/persistence framework that seamlessly plugs in with SOAP, but I haven't heard of one related to .NET services. I'm sure .NET and .NET services are useful, but there's still a lot of missing components to make it fully distributed and transactional like MS is marketing it.
The mindset of the user.
Considering windows has a larger install base and a large portion of those users are average people, security to large portion of window users constitutes less of an issue. It's not that windows users don't think security is not important, but rather they don't care to know the guts of an OS. Large portion of windows users don't understand the hacker culture or realize hackers do it for the fun. By virtue of the user-base, hackers will see windows has a more attractive playing field. Therefore any security hole in windows has a higher risk potential than the *nix counter part. People who use and administer *nix systems tend to have a better understanding of security and the hacker culture. I have no proof of this, but I would guess unix users have a higher percentage of security freaks, than windows. Unix users tend to be technologists, therefore vulnerabilities are caught sooner than later and patches are applied more frequently.
The article should have taken these and other issues into consideration when calculating the relative risk of security holes. Lazy writers are a dime a dozen. Perhaps more people in the unix community should write articles and provide objective analysis of OS security issues.
Games like load runner and tetris are still fun to play. Some of the new console games are pretty tough, especially trying to play FPS without a keyboard. It's great to see all the hot new graphics, but part of me misses the simplicity of tetris or load runner in new games. Games like munch's odessy or crazy taxi are great because the game play is easy to understand. There isn't a huge learning curve just to play the game at a decent level.
On the otherhand, companies buy Sun hardware not for pure speed, but for reliability, redundancy and proven scalability. The one thing all these benchmarks fail to address is "how important is speed over reliability and scalability?" A good programmer can take out lots of security, memory management and allocation checks to make it run really fast, but how stable will it be? Will it be solid enough to run 24/7 with 1% downtime? With the way CPU speeds are increasing, who cares about speed. Lets talk about the real issues, ease of development, maintainability of the code, built in document creation, wide selection of prebuilt libraries, consistent and solid security model and portability between platforms. My personal experience, large companies use a variety of platforms, so a windows only solution is not an option. A solution that allows multiple developers on different platforms to build their pieces and integrate is what many large projects require. Doing so with C can be done, but how many people feel C code is easy to maintain? I don't know that question, since I've never coded in C. Those I know who use C joke about how unreadable C becomes. Bottom line, each tool has it's strengths and weaknesses. It's about which problems you want to live with.
As bhudda would say, it is balance. Doing things in extreme is the problem. People really should clean a fish and slaughter an animal once in their life. The next time they think about wasting food, they'll remember a creature died for it. What I find disturbing about the meat industry is the sanitary appearance. People should be reminded creatures die for meat every time they go shopping. In other cultures, the idea of santinized meats is considered wrong and offensive.
I don't think these systems are geared towards a gamer. They are really ideal for doing high end graphics, like non-linear editing. Perhaps now PC's will catch up with Mac for high end graphics. Avid now has a version of win2K and XP, though I don't know anyone that uses it on windows.
Do what you love. No if, and, but, maybe, or somehow. As corny as it sounds, do what nike says "just do it." Do what you love and no matter how rich or poor you are, you'll be happy. Everything else is only a distraction.
Hey, crap is art too and then there's G.G. Allin.
There are thousands of views on art, including death as art as in "performance art". There's a movie named frozen. Or there's Guillermo Gómez-Peña who is well known in the performance art world. I'll stop there. Lego art :)
Well assuming the FCC approves UWB, it will make bluetooth obsolete. All the issues related to 802.11b security isn't present in Time Domain's chipset from what I understand. UWB uses far lower power and time codes the data in picoseconds. Without knowledge of the timing, the data is total gibberish. Of course that's not to say UWB doesn't have security issues, just not the ones 802.11b has.
Some might say art is about taking things that no one thought could be art and make it into art, like how andy warhol took soup cans and turned into pop art. Or distorting reality by creating a representation that make the viewer stop and think about the creative process. Some are questionable like Jackson Pollock, who most people would consider junk. So make of the portrait what you will. Lego and calista art? It's probably more artful than calista :)
As some one else mentioned, Time Domain is already selling/marketing their chipset. There still isn't a diffinitive answer on whether or not millions of UWB devices would cause problems for other devices. There still has be third party verification of broad deployment to really find out if it's practical. The military will most likely use it, since well they are above the laws of the FCC (well not really, but they sometimes act like it). I hope it pans out, since it would dramatically change the telco/cable world and force a drastic change.
Getting a z series does make some sense in cases where a company could consolidate hundreds of PC's into fewer z series mainframes.
At the lower res the 8500 was faster, but what percentage of the gamers play below 1024 x 768? I haven't set the resolution game to below 1024 x 768 for over 2.5 years. The results were interesting, though it would have been nice if Anand posted 1 or 2 screen shots, especially one of the bug mentioned.
Although I agree with you that most bands own the actual music, that's not always the case. In some cases, the artist signed their rights away like billy joel, or signed the rights to the master away like prince. It is up to the artist and I absolutely agree with that. As other's have said, how each band makes money varies. Even if the artist signs a good contract, I'm sure the label still pushes them to ban bootlegging with soft talk and other bs. Dont' under estimate the power of persuasion of labels.
Remember when Pearl Jam tried to fight ticketmaster? Who won? I admit it's a bit paranoid and I seriously doubt it will happen, but that's not to say RIAA won't try and ticketmaster won't seriously consider the idea. Ticketmaster is legalize ticket scalping, so what's to stop them from breaking yet another law.
the artist will cooperate with the label to ensure the highest rate of return on investments, which include assisting and reporting of copyright violation and improper use of material that causes negative financial impact. The artist agrees that derivative works are covered in the preceeding statement.
I seriously doubt RIAA would succeed, but it doesn't mean they won't try. How many starving musicians are going to read the paragraph above and think, "this might make it so the audience can't bootleg." Lawyers are great at writing language that appears harmless, but gives the company great advantages.
Even though it's not for copyrighted material, I can't help but wonder what RIAA's reaction is going to be. Will they use the same argument "you can't ensure it is only used for non-copyrighted material?" or will they start pushing stadiums to do a body search for tape recorders. In either case, I doubt they will sit back and do nothing.
However, it doesnt address the requirements of systems integration where the requirements are ill-defined
To paraphrase your problem, the development process is well defined and works, but when you go to deploy the application you run into difficulties because of the integration environment. In my own experience, part of the requirement at the beginning should be to build a close replica of the systems the application will live on. As other have stated it is good to have people who go back and forth between development and integration, but there are other good reasons for that practice.
From the perspective of building a replica of the final deployment environment, it is good to have some one who has extensive experience with the clients setup, so that you catch more of the gotchas earlier during development and it allows you to make your dev environment as close as possible. It's unlikely you can build a mirror of the deployment environment, but there are steps you can take to simulate those conditions. I can only guess at what that environment from my own experience. Financial institutions tend to have a mix of mainframe and high end unix servers from either Sun/IBM/HP/Compaq. For obvious reasons, your company probably can't afford to build a mainframe that mirrors the final system, but most of the other stuff you should be able to replicate fairly closely.
All those little differences in hardware, network architecture, and configuration oddities can be minimized by making your development environment similar. Sure it makes your development life more painful, but you don't have to do it all in one shot. You can do it slowly in phases and work it in so doesn't screw up the process or productivity. As far as making sure the application is what the client wanted, you may want to consider altering the development to include building flow mockups that allow the client to physically go through the steps with canned data. This way you reduce the time spent building features that won't integrate smoothly with their existing applications. Some or all of these suggestions might not help at all in your situation. Hopefully there's something you can use from other's suggestions.
There used to be a time when reporters and news people were intelligent with critical skills. It's obvious those days are gone and news have become Stone Philips. Do I really care if some news personality wears nice designer suits and has a personal stylist? Fck no. So called main stream journalism has no more credibility than the national inquirer. This is truly sad. I'm not even going to bother with the contents of that so called "news article."
MIT is more well known because of a few famous people who taught, graduate or worked there. People shouldn't put too much stock in prestiege. All degrees are only as valuable as the effort you put into it. Likewise, an university is only as good as it's students' ability to be resourceful. I don't know that having the world at your finger tips with first class flights really fosters a scrap dog mentality. If necessity is the mother of invention, having everything at your fingers tips (as MIT is accustomed to) might inhibit creative thinking.
Other less impressive things to do is searching for things based on your location. Say you're on vacation and you get a wicked headache. It would be nice to find the closest drug store and have your perscription sent there if you have a particular alergy. There are a lot more things you can do with location technology.
The danger product isn't all that impressive. If anything, WOZ should compliment danger's product. I don't see the danger website mention anything about GSPS or location determination. It might, but I'm too lazy to go through every page to find it.