Considering DVD audio is still vaporware, this doesn't mean heck of alot. having more choices is good. From the article it state:
Royalties from Microsoft's DVD licensing deals are "pretty small" compared with the impact the arrangements could have on sales of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Aldridge said.
I doubt this will mean an increase in cost of DVD players. Even though media player format is lame as other's have noted in the past and present, I don't really care since I am not an audiophile. Most people don't have $2K headphones or $10K electrostatic speakers. The old argument about sound quality for average joe is useless. Heck none of my audio equipment costs more than 60 bucks tops.
If it means I can play DVD audio files on multiple devices, than it's all good to me.
I found the congressman's letter concise and powerful. The language was matter-of-fact and keeps the focus on the legal issues. Hopefully his actions will result in a balanced out come. Now if only the congressman would take up the cause of the DMCA and find an equally effective legal approach to repealing the law.
Others have said this before thousands of times. College is/should be about learning critical thinking. This doesn't mean just programming. It means having the skills to analyze anything. Don't limit yourself to just CS/EE/CE. Major in something that will really challenge you and make you grow as a person. This means it should be something that you think would be hard enough that you might fail or fall flat on your face.
You'll graduate with an appreciation for the education you got, instead of walking out with complaints like the ones posted on/. If you're just doing it for money, skip all that and get certs like everyone else said.
Look beyond the degree and do it for yourself first. This way no matter what happens after the degree, you won't doubt the value of the time and energy spent.
Win2K was an upgrade from NT4.0, since NT4 didn't support dvd or directX 7+ correctly. XP on the other hand feels like a down grade to me. Not only is the interface ugly (some will like it, I don't), but all the extra services running in the background makes it run slow with 128. There are a few nice features in XP, like network settings now allows a second set. Though I really wish it allowed more, like 5-10 since laptop often are on 3+ networks (dialup, work, home).
The home edition especially is a lame disabled version of win2K. The new web look of folders, control panels is pretty ugly and annoying. It's a good thing you can change it to classic. Overall, XP is a better OS than 95/98, but it is still not better than win2K. But I'm biased.
Here I was thinking politicians are a bunch of greedy idiots, except for a few, but reading that article proves there are still good people in politics. The argument the record companies can't have both royalties and copy protection seems like the best weapon yet against RIAA.
I'm not looking to rip off the record labels. Just to have things priced fairly and balanced. They need to make money, but they also need to respect the consumers rights. If the record company decides they want to use copy protection, then they shouldn't get to collect royalties. Once that happens, they'll realize how big of an impact fair use plays in increasing sales of music. Then again they probably already know that fact, but don't care.
if they make it cook dinner and wash my laundry
on
Xbox Sequel Rumors
·
· Score: 1, Troll
I'll buy it, though I'm only willing to pay 200.00 for it.
Re:who cares? move on and think like the commercia
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
so I can have an intelligent agent to spider the internet to find all the best pr0n for me. why else? and with a heads-up display, I can view it anytime.
I'm being sarcastic
I am building a database of ingredients and recipes for myself. So I want it to be able to spider the news groups, internet and everything else for recipes using natural language parsing, knowledgebase, semantic web, rdf and XML.
Re:who cares? move on and think like the commercia
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
good point, change that to a miniature quantum mobile platform the size of a pack of bubblegum.
Dude that is sweet. Now I wish it was open source back in 2000 (or that I knew of one) when I was working with SOAP for SMS related services. Since the early drivers for it didn't work (in beta), I just used DOM parser. I hadn't consider writing a specialized parser to handle SOAP the way you described it, credit to you for thinking of an efficient way to do it without the cost of loading the whole document. I honestly haven't kept up with all the SOAP drivers out there, so my mistake. I was researching the feasibiliy of using SOAP within a transactional message based system, so having valid message was a critical requirement as a non-valid message could potentially hang up the system.
I thought that was all a hoax. I don't think there is actually a law that prohibits it, even though some police officers do ask women in parks to breast in more private places. I know some friends complained that some Zoo's, amusement parks and park employees discourage breast feeding in public.
Here is a link about the hoax.
You make some good points, with one minor correction. I didn't say:
SOAP was developed in the context of.NET.
I said in the context of the whitepapers that are public on MSDN and.NET site. The three points you mention are good, I just personally would rather go with XML RPC, because if I don't absolutely need to validate the XML (which is most of the cases), I'd rather not. If I can get away with just using an event based parser like SAX, I will choose that first.
I can see a lot of situations where you would want to use other encoding like unicode 16, which would be an argument to use SOAP. But, so far I haven't found a compelling reason to use a specific encoding other than ascii or UTF8. That doesn't mean there aren't cases, just that I haven't come across a development situation where it was painfully obvious using some other encoding was critical. I don't believe that using SOAP can't be effective or even desireable to others, just from my experience working b2b/e2e applications or with messaging systems like SMS there isn't a compelling reason.
Given this is the current situation, I am clueless as to how to fix it. Universities use the money they make to fund programs, grants, and other stuff. I don't know how they actually use the money from licensing, but maybe some one out there that knows can post more details.
Some how the idea of using tax dollars to enrich private corporations doesn't seem right, even if it is legal. There are plenty of corporations that fund university research through grants. For example, the CA avocado growers association pays for research into things like soil science. Usually the grant pays for a grad student and a lab tech does the actual experiment for the CA avocado growers project. The grad student does more basic research or their thesis project. I'm guessing that is similar to how it works in CS, EE or Mechanical engineering.
Yes, semantic web is a push for richer content on the web, but it has grown since the original idea. A new book just came out last year about semantic web and how web services might work together. There is a new initiative within W3C dealing with RuleML and semantic web. So you might want to check out the latest development in that area. It is no longer as simple as "richer content". In fact, here is a presentation by the people leading RuleML. I don't remember the name of the book, but I suggest you look into it before creaming "Warning..":). I could blame the lack of coffee and caffiene, but hell I make mistakes. There's more stuff every day we have to learn and sometimes it all seems to bleed together.
The fact there are so many misconceptions about what.NET really means (my own included), means there has been a lack of specifics from microsoft.
I guess your right I am clueless, except that I worked with SOAP and other related XML services. When SOAP drivers first came out from IBM and apache, it was buggy and didn't work properly (ie, the driver wouldn't correctly get the header and body). It has improved since the early releases, atleast the last time I tried.
The argument that it is an industry standard isn't really valid in my mind. My point was in the context of.NET and what microsoft percieves as web services in their whitepapers, a lot of important details are left out.
As you mentioned SOAP is a distributed computing protocol and I agree with you at that level. The problem I have is it is not as complete as IIOP, or RMI. I haven't use JRMP or ORPC, so I'll take your word for it. I've read the SOAP spec atleast three times and I keep asking myself "why not just use XML RPC?"
In theory, a person could also use SOAP with any RPC framework, but for me it feels too much in the middle. I did some benchmarks on SOAP and I personally didn't find it worth while to add the weight.
I've only used IBM and apache SOAP parsers, so maybe microsoft has written an optimized SAX parser specifically for validating SOAP documents. I've written custom parser using JAXP 1.0 and Xerces 1. Even though I was wrong in my original post (oops no coffee), SOAP is still incomplete for complex distributed processes. If I had to implement a driver to charge credit cards for an E-commerce site (which is most likely the first use of SOAP), I would rather do it with XML RPC.
Just because my brain was caffiene deprived:), doesn't mean SOAP is any better for complex distributed processes, or light enough for simple web services.
My mistake, you're absolutely right SOAP doesn't require DOM. It's just because I prefer to use a DOM compliant parser to parse XML that has a structure and use DTD validation built into either a validating SAX or DOM parser.
In their case though, the parser has to validate, which does mean it has to load the entire document first before it can validate it contains the proper structure. Otherwise a bug in someone's code could accidentally have an envelope node inside a body node.
There have been several post in the last year about C#, but they were only mildly interesting (ie it only got me to read whitepapers, articles and sample code). Now that mono is progressing forward it is more interesting.
I don't remember all the differences between C# and Java, but it does make it more appealing. Unfortunately, SOAP is a bit heavy for the most simple web services (what ever it means to microsoft). The cost of using soap means the XML has to use DOM and it has to validate the required nodes. From W3C spec on SOAP, it states:
A SOAP message is an XML document that consists of a mandatory SOAP envelope, an optional SOAP Header, and a mandatory SOAP Body.
Anyone working with XML knows that validating DOM structure can be very costly for complex tree structures. For a simple document like SOAP, it's not bad until you realize it is intended for business to business processes, which could mean millions a day. The argument that SOAP is "as simple as it can/should be" ignores the fact that systems that would benefit from SOAP or other XML RPC (remote procedure calling) the most have complex distributed processes. Most of the.NET whitepapers I've read so far recycle ideas others developed. Microsoft's innovation was repackaging it as a platform.
It's too bad microsoft's whitepapers don't credit the orginal authors, since a lot of people worked to push XML forward. In some ways, it feels like SOAP and.NET is a bastardized version of Burners Lee's vision of a semantic web using XML web services and RDF. Perhaps all the press.NET has generated for XML services will help create the critical mass needed to get semantic web moving.
So what you're telling me is you're willing to put a mission critical application that could cost millions in losses if it goes down. Last time I checked, most low/medium level pc motherboards are still manufacturer on 3-5 layer process and use less stringent tolerances. Even high end motherboards don't have the same level of tolerance as Solaris server level motherboards.
Is it worth spending an extra 3-4K per machine to make sure you don't loose a couple million? I don't think math is needed to figure that one out. Plus, do you want to be the one responsible for it when it goes down? How much would a full redundant system cost to build with PC components that are equal to Solaris 1K+ servers like 4500?
I for one would never put a mission critical database or transaction application on linux PC. Not because linux isn't a good operating system, because PC components are designed to be thrown away in 1-2 years.
Argument well stated, but this just means the spammers can only use email addresses that can be traced to a physical residence and verify the state is not CA. Sure this limits the use of hotmail, yahoo and other free email services, but I don't see that as a bad thing.
If telemarketing follows similar laws about opt-out (ie, if you ask them to take your number of the list, they have to), why shouldn't email spam? The judge and DA may be flawed in their logic, but that doesn't automatically make the decision useless or unconstitutional.
Ok, using the example you gave the following comes to mind. Say you wanted to build a generalized engine that could support multiple business models and run n number of algorithms n number of times. From an OOD/OOP perspective, one might encapsulate the data with a generalized interface, and have engine that takes x object, x algorithm and execute the calculation or report back an error.
Now the real question is "should you?" Probably not if you're doing scientific calculations. You're better off optimizing the code and writing detailed documentation than generalizing the structure. Like others have said, "OO is a tool." That's all it is, nothing more, nothing less. Try to think of it as building a house or an office building.
There are reasons why office buildings have large open spaces with cubicles. This allow reconfiguration of the furniture to fit each renter's needs. For the same reasons you wouldn't try to cram 50 person company into a 4 bedroom house, you shouldn't force OOP principles on a problem that doesn't call for it.
From your post, it sounds like you're interested in OOP, so maybe the question really is "should you get a new job that gives you an opportunity to find out first hand what OOP can do for you?"
who cares? move on and think like the commercials
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
People get real. If it's just another pocket PC (real or fake), it's just more of the same. I would like to see a company really "think different" and come up with a totally new idea that really changes how people use computers. The things coming out of MIT impress me more than "yet another pocket pc."
Considering it is technically feasible to have a pocket pc that has broadband wireless and stylish heads up display today, all these devices are a bit primitive and stupid. I'll be impressed when pocket pc's have good voice recognition, a small footprint rules engine, 1 gig of memory, 50gig hard drive, heads up display and supports multiple wireless standards for secure transaction.
Corporations, how about the military?
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 1, Troll
How in the world is the government supposed to enforce laws about polution reguarding the environment when the military dumps tons of explosives, jet fuel and other PCB's into our oceans, lakes and land. Our military is doing a great job right now, but you know the corporations are the first to use the same excuse.
I'm married to an x-environmental researcher who worked on ways to clean PCB's. I practically took half her classes during grad school, since I would discuss everything she read, at lunches and dinners.
I don't know actual numbers of how much chemicals are dumped by the military, but it is not small. The current legislation from my limited understanding only requires the military set aside part of their funding for research into cleaning. No actual cleaning is required! Most of the political structure in the military continuously fund research and never implement the procedures. Corporations aren't stupid, they use the same exact trick to avoid real action. Mobile refineries in southern california have used the excuse it's too expensive to retrofit their facilities because it is cheaper to pay the fine.
A close friend is a contractor who used to clean up toxic dumps. Often we would have coffee and talk about how corrupt and messed up the EPA is. For those who know, the EPA for the most part goes after gas stations, because that's the only businesses that can't afford big shot lawyers. Until our social values place human life before convienance and price, I doubt any of this will change.
Slashdot Mirror
Royalties from Microsoft's DVD licensing deals are "pretty small" compared with the impact the arrangements could have on sales of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Aldridge said.
I doubt this will mean an increase in cost of DVD players. Even though media player format is lame as other's have noted in the past and present, I don't really care since I am not an audiophile. Most people don't have $2K headphones or $10K electrostatic speakers. The old argument about sound quality for average joe is useless. Heck none of my audio equipment costs more than 60 bucks tops.
If it means I can play DVD audio files on multiple devices, than it's all good to me.
I'll second that. Too bad all the OEM's are selling XP and not win2K.
I found the congressman's letter concise and powerful. The language was matter-of-fact and keeps the focus on the legal issues. Hopefully his actions will result in a balanced out come. Now if only the congressman would take up the cause of the DMCA and find an equally effective legal approach to repealing the law.
You'll graduate with an appreciation for the education you got, instead of walking out with complaints like the ones posted on /. If you're just doing it for money, skip all that and get certs like everyone else said.
Look beyond the degree and do it for yourself first. This way no matter what happens after the degree, you won't doubt the value of the time and energy spent.
The home edition especially is a lame disabled version of win2K. The new web look of folders, control panels is pretty ugly and annoying. It's a good thing you can change it to classic. Overall, XP is a better OS than 95/98, but it is still not better than win2K. But I'm biased.
I'm not looking to rip off the record labels. Just to have things priced fairly and balanced. They need to make money, but they also need to respect the consumers rights. If the record company decides they want to use copy protection, then they shouldn't get to collect royalties. Once that happens, they'll realize how big of an impact fair use plays in increasing sales of music. Then again they probably already know that fact, but don't care.
I'll buy it, though I'm only willing to pay 200.00 for it.
I'm being sarcastic
I am building a database of ingredients and recipes for myself. So I want it to be able to spider the news groups, internet and everything else for recipes using natural language parsing, knowledgebase, semantic web, rdf and XML.
that's the ticket
Dude that is sweet. Now I wish it was open source back in 2000 (or that I knew of one) when I was working with SOAP for SMS related services. Since the early drivers for it didn't work (in beta), I just used DOM parser. I hadn't consider writing a specialized parser to handle SOAP the way you described it, credit to you for thinking of an efficient way to do it without the cost of loading the whole document. I honestly haven't kept up with all the SOAP drivers out there, so my mistake. I was researching the feasibiliy of using SOAP within a transactional message based system, so having valid message was a critical requirement as a non-valid message could potentially hang up the system.
I thought that was all a hoax. I don't think there is actually a law that prohibits it, even though some police officers do ask women in parks to breast in more private places. I know some friends complained that some Zoo's, amusement parks and park employees discourage breast feeding in public. Here is a link about the hoax.
using microsoft products give you fresh pine feeling, plug it in, plug it in
Oops, I forgot that's what makes the industry go round. Back to reality and put idealism back in the toilet.
I said in the context of the whitepapers that are public on MSDN and .NET site. The three points you mention are good, I just personally would rather go with XML RPC, because if I don't absolutely need to validate the XML (which is most of the cases), I'd rather not. If I can get away with just using an event based parser like SAX, I will choose that first.
I can see a lot of situations where you would want to use other encoding like unicode 16, which would be an argument to use SOAP. But, so far I haven't found a compelling reason to use a specific encoding other than ascii or UTF8. That doesn't mean there aren't cases, just that I haven't come across a development situation where it was painfully obvious using some other encoding was critical. I don't believe that using SOAP can't be effective or even desireable to others, just from my experience working b2b/e2e applications or with messaging systems like SMS there isn't a compelling reason.
Some how the idea of using tax dollars to enrich private corporations doesn't seem right, even if it is legal. There are plenty of corporations that fund university research through grants. For example, the CA avocado growers association pays for research into things like soil science. Usually the grant pays for a grad student and a lab tech does the actual experiment for the CA avocado growers project. The grad student does more basic research or their thesis project. I'm guessing that is similar to how it works in CS, EE or Mechanical engineering.
this post is redundant
The fact there are so many misconceptions about what .NET really means (my own included), means there has been a lack of specifics from microsoft.
The argument that it is an industry standard isn't really valid in my mind. My point was in the context of .NET and what microsoft percieves as web services in their whitepapers, a lot of important details are left out.
As you mentioned SOAP is a distributed computing protocol and I agree with you at that level. The problem I have is it is not as complete as IIOP, or RMI. I haven't use JRMP or ORPC, so I'll take your word for it. I've read the SOAP spec atleast three times and I keep asking myself "why not just use XML RPC?"
In theory, a person could also use SOAP with any RPC framework, but for me it feels too much in the middle. I did some benchmarks on SOAP and I personally didn't find it worth while to add the weight.
Just because my brain was caffiene deprived :), doesn't mean SOAP is any better for complex distributed processes, or light enough for simple web services.
In their case though, the parser has to validate, which does mean it has to load the entire document first before it can validate it contains the proper structure. Otherwise a bug in someone's code could accidentally have an envelope node inside a body node.
I don't remember all the differences between C# and Java, but it does make it more appealing. Unfortunately, SOAP is a bit heavy for the most simple web services (what ever it means to microsoft). The cost of using soap means the XML has to use DOM and it has to validate the required nodes. From W3C spec on SOAP, it states:
Anyone working with XML knows that validating DOM structure can be very costly for complex tree structures. For a simple document like SOAP, it's not bad until you realize it is intended for business to business processes, which could mean millions a day. The argument that SOAP is "as simple as it can/should be" ignores the fact that systems that would benefit from SOAP or other XML RPC (remote procedure calling) the most have complex distributed processes. Most of the .NET whitepapers I've read so far recycle ideas others developed. Microsoft's innovation was repackaging it as a platform.
It's too bad microsoft's whitepapers don't credit the orginal authors, since a lot of people worked to push XML forward. In some ways, it feels like SOAP and .NET is a bastardized version of Burners Lee's vision of a semantic web using XML web services and RDF. Perhaps all the press .NET has generated for XML services will help create the critical mass needed to get semantic web moving.
Is it worth spending an extra 3-4K per machine to make sure you don't loose a couple million? I don't think math is needed to figure that one out. Plus, do you want to be the one responsible for it when it goes down? How much would a full redundant system cost to build with PC components that are equal to Solaris 1K+ servers like 4500?
I for one would never put a mission critical database or transaction application on linux PC. Not because linux isn't a good operating system, because PC components are designed to be thrown away in 1-2 years.
If telemarketing follows similar laws about opt-out (ie, if you ask them to take your number of the list, they have to), why shouldn't email spam? The judge and DA may be flawed in their logic, but that doesn't automatically make the decision useless or unconstitutional.
Now the real question is "should you?" Probably not if you're doing scientific calculations. You're better off optimizing the code and writing detailed documentation than generalizing the structure. Like others have said, "OO is a tool." That's all it is, nothing more, nothing less. Try to think of it as building a house or an office building.
There are reasons why office buildings have large open spaces with cubicles. This allow reconfiguration of the furniture to fit each renter's needs. For the same reasons you wouldn't try to cram 50 person company into a 4 bedroom house, you shouldn't force OOP principles on a problem that doesn't call for it.
From your post, it sounds like you're interested in OOP, so maybe the question really is "should you get a new job that gives you an opportunity to find out first hand what OOP can do for you?"
Considering it is technically feasible to have a pocket pc that has broadband wireless and stylish heads up display today, all these devices are a bit primitive and stupid. I'll be impressed when pocket pc's have good voice recognition, a small footprint rules engine, 1 gig of memory, 50gig hard drive, heads up display and supports multiple wireless standards for secure transaction.
I'm married to an x-environmental researcher who worked on ways to clean PCB's. I practically took half her classes during grad school, since I would discuss everything she read, at lunches and dinners.
I don't know actual numbers of how much chemicals are dumped by the military, but it is not small. The current legislation from my limited understanding only requires the military set aside part of their funding for research into cleaning. No actual cleaning is required! Most of the political structure in the military continuously fund research and never implement the procedures. Corporations aren't stupid, they use the same exact trick to avoid real action. Mobile refineries in southern california have used the excuse it's too expensive to retrofit their facilities because it is cheaper to pay the fine.
A close friend is a contractor who used to clean up toxic dumps. Often we would have coffee and talk about how corrupt and messed up the EPA is. For those who know, the EPA for the most part goes after gas stations, because that's the only businesses that can't afford big shot lawyers. Until our social values place human life before convienance and price, I doubt any of this will change.