"The cadmium atom that has lost an electron becomes a negatively charged ion, which can then be controlled with an electrical field," said Daniel Stick, a doctoral student in the University of Michigan's physics department who participated in the work.
Last I checked, when an atom loses an electron it becomes a positively charged atom. Physics certainly has progressed since I was in college.
I personally believe that most projects spent on emulating something Microsoft has done is a waste of time. Historically Microsoft has had very little contribution to the computer industry that has any significant longevity or impact outside of their own interests.
With the exception of MONO, I am not aware of any projects to emulate Microsoft versions of languages (eg: Visual Basic). In contrast, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Java, C/C++ where all languages that were developed someplace other than Windows and have managed to remain rather viable to date. And they have some degree of cross platform compatability depending on the platforms and the constructs of the language used.
If you look at their other products: Office was nice but it's getting a bit out of hand. But OpenOffice covers >90% of the functionality. And it's something that is available on and compatible with more OS platforms than Office. Long term, it's ultimately a better buy.
About the only arena that Windows might have advantages is with IDE's. But I'm not a big fan of most of the IDE's out there. They tend to assume your code style and ultimately you end up debugging your code on the contributions of the IDE rather than your own contributions or the contributions of others. When you spend time trying to fix your code because of your Environment, it's time to move to a new environment. But that's just my opinion. A lot of people absolutely love their IDEs.
But I have to disagree with the conclusion that you can just write everything in Java to make it cross platform compatable. Yes, you probably can. But Java just isn't that special anymore. It's not the only language that's cross platform capable. It has never really lived up to it's proclaimed write once run anywhere mantra. It's done well, but it's never been a guarantee. More like, write once, test everywhere, hope you get lucky.
When you compare the speed of Java (start up and runtime) and the fact that it's compiled to the newer (alternative) languages like Python, Ruby (perl as an alternative) there really isn't much left for Java to do that's worth the overhead in development time and resources. My past experience with Java is that I have to keep watching out for Out of Memory errors on applications. This is the only programming language that I have experienced an Out of Memory error in the past 5 years.
I'm starting to think that languages that are not developed by companies are better than languages that are developed by companies, regardless of their intentions.
OK, so they got a water cooled radiator on the top. And maybe it's easy to install.
I don't think water cooling computers is that big of a deal anymore. It's been around long enough that it's close to becoming a mature product.
I think the important evolution that needs to happen before water cooling is of any main-line significance is noise. If it sounds like a jet engine then you've gained nothing in comparison to standard convection air cooling. The majority of computer owners don't notice their thermal properties of the computer as much as the acoustic properties. Even overheating has been well addressed by the more reputable computer manufacturers or is easily addressed by third party companies.
But there are so many of these water cooling products out there that are just too damn noisy to be of any advantage when compared to fan based cooling.
Yes, this is a picture of what you are doing with streaming data and a possible approach to handling the stream, by reprioritizing everything on the system to deal with it. But I don't necessarily agree that this is the best approach or the realistic approach.
If we have to address the video streaming capabilities of a high bandwidth internet then that's fine. I'm really not worried about the current OSes. As a benchmark I have routinely watched full screen (21-inch) video over NFS mounted hard drives across my fast ethernet home network. This has proved to be good enough bandwidth that the movies are clean and the network can still do other functions (macromedia flash gaming is one high bandwidth example). Granted this is pretty much one user, but it's a benchmark.
Now it is arguable that NFS is not the best solution to video streaming, but it's one that I have readily available.
I would have assumed the best approach would be a two part application; the first part caching the stream and buffering the data so that latency interruptions can be handled more gracefully, and the second part to read off the buffer (memory or disk) and present the video.
I don't know of any one who believes that even a terabit network can do realtime streaming of hi definition video with zero risk of latency interruptions so I just can imagine anything with that model in mind as being anything less than marketing hype.
I think it is fair to mash together the F/OSS nixes
You have forgotten that the severity and existence of certain bugs in F/OSS have a tendency to depend upon how the software in question is configured. For example: SSH had a security problem, unless you only allowed public/private key authentication. If you're distribution of choice only allowed that authentication mechanism then the security problem should not count against that distribution.
I do consider OpenBSD to be more secure out of the box than Linspire even though they are both a Unix based OS. That difference merits that they be listed seperately.
Otherwise all Windows distributions in effect on the internet today should be put into one group, from Windows 3.11 to Windows XP inclusive. But I don't think they do that.
I think there is a misconception here that Linux is being led by slick marketing campaigns and corporations. Sure, you can find slick marketing types who are extolling the virtues of such products as Linux 9.0 when they really mean RedHat 9.0 but are to fucking stupid to actually know anything.
But there are an aweful lot of people who use Linux, regardless of the distro, and are much more useful in getting things to work, problems solved, interesting things done, tried, and learned. The corporations have no incentive to provide that synergistic cooperation unless it can be tied back to their product line. At least that's the general rule of corporate business and economics.
But most of the interesting stuff being done today isn't on the front page of redhat or suse. Neither of them will help you understand the differences of RAID 5 versus RAID 1/0 and how to impliment it under EIDE, SATA, or SCSI or why you might care.
You touched on the cornerstone of why it's not being addressed as much as it is. Economics.
In a way you could argue that we are all addicted to Economics to the extent that nothing of significance will take place to change human behaviour unless there is an economic force acting behind it. The Pony Express was prohibitively expensive, difficult, and inefficient. It lasted about a year. But it was the most economical method of quickly delivering mail across the country until the railroad was completed.
The internet was largely a toy for academics and geeks until someone realized that money could be made. After that it was an avalanche of activity to get on the internet as both a client/user and a server/storefront. Today, the super-majority of the internet is all about making money.
Alternative Energy has been around since the 1960's but it's still something that has minimal adoption. This is the result of it's cost to start and return on investment. Why don't we all live in hyper efficient off-grid homes? Because for the same amount of money I can get a much larger house and that's exactly what most people end up doing.
If you disagree with the idea that economics is the engine for everything that human civilization does today, consider this. The EU recently put into place a law for B-2 diesel fuel to be standard. This has put a tremendous economic pressure to develop bio-diesel. The most economic source for bio-diesel today is to use Palm Trees. This has put an economic pressure to start up Palm tree plantations. Do you know what they are doing about this? They are cutting down rain forests to build palm tree plantations to make bio-diesel to help the EU fight global warming. Does it makes sense environmentally? Does it make sense economically? Economics win.
I'm not actually aware of ANYTHING that has been done contrary to this economic force which was a voluntary action of the people participating in a civilization. Dolphin free Tuna was lobbied by small groups. California's higher than Federally mandated emissions is driven by the State government, not economics. Californians tolerate the extra costs incurred for the emissions regulations, but probably not by much. Perhaps they realize there isn't much choice for them because places like Los Angeles has very intolerant geographical features with respect to pollution.
So this will continue until there is either an economic force introduced to make it worthwhile to shift or for some government to actually get enough momentum built to legislate is. Take heed: the EU did it and we are losing rainforests as the result of it.
Personally, I think it would be valuable to add a federal tax to all fossil-fuels (diesel, gasoline, kerosene) to the effect of about $3.00 per gallon to be used for the development and subsidization of alternative energies that compete in the same segment of the market. If you really want to have an effect, take $3.00 away from the gas guzzling SUV and give $3.00 to the biodiesel or electric vehicle geek and watch the industry turn around.
And no, not hydrogen fuel cells. They aren't cost/energy effective solutions. They consume more energy than they produce in the long run. Just like Ethanol.
I think you are right in the decline of CD sales being in part the result of half-assed musicians who are more manufactured bands (boy bands of the 90's) than actual talent. Music isn't an art form anymore, it's a marketing fad. No skills in it anymore. How hard can it be to play power cords? (PS: It's not)
But I disagree that the CD is a relatively durable medium. It sucks ass. It's worse than an old record. Old records were so big you didn't try to carry them in your backpack so you used tapes instead. And if you did scratch it, at least it didn't wipe out the entire song/CD in one shot. There's something to be said for the gradual degredation of analog data storage in contrast to the catastrophic degredation of digital data storage.
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
I'm guessing that is the trade-off: the more complex programs you can write, the more likely you are to see badly written programs.
I disagree to a point. There will be better programmers in languages that have a higher entry barrier. Java sucks because they made it easy for dumbass people to get a certificate and start programming. Similarly, Average Windows administrators are frightenly stupid when compared to average linux/BSD (not Sun/HP/IBM) administrators because the entry barrier is so much lower than going at it in Linux/BSD environments.
I dunno. Probably the same reasons we still drive cars on roads and eat food.
Questions like this are stupid.
HTML works great for most of the content on the internet. The only time it doesn't work great is when you are trying to do something highly interactive. But interactivity requires bandwidth and lots of it. No way around it.
So all you are doing with faddy crap like AJAX is trying to reduce the level of bandwidth you must consume in order to get something dynamic accomplished on a web page. If you had a form that was the web page instead of a part of it then there really wouldn't be any more/less bandwidth to pass back and forth than what was required to get the work done. Even the most minimalistic approaches still require that much bandwidth to be passed.
The ironic part is that no one is willing to settle for just a simple form on a web page to do anything. It's gots to be more, more, more. I would venture to guess that most of those webpages have unnecessary content being delivered for reasons other than getting the job done (marketing, advertisement, sales touch points).
I was going to write a nice well detailed review but I decided to make a few simple points about this.
When cars first came onto the scene, horse owners went to great lengths to discredit and inconvenience car owners as much as they could.
One of the methods was to use the legal process. They even had a law that car owners had to dissassemble their cars in the presence of a horse.
It looks to me that the horse owners did have power conferred to them to prevent (or at least try) to keep customers from switching.
So I can only conclude that history has proven me right and you are completely suckered into believing that corporations have your best interests in mind (assuming that you are only connected to them as a consumer).
Past history shows it is important to the community at large to establish and maintain a standardized means for creating web pages. I went through this once and won't do it again.
But if someone doesn't spend a lot of time and effort trying to develop new standards to keep up with the new areas of developing technology then you will end up in a chaotic environment again as people are compelled to move into the new tech stuff (to keep up with the times, stay on top, keep up with the competition) without a standard existing.
BTW, yes I have used 6 level indentations, so that H6 tag comes in handy.
I would love it too if everyone would just figure what the heck it is they want to do and stick with it, but we don't know what we want to do with it because people are still trying to figure out what can be done. The concept that is presented as the overhyped AJAX is an example. It's not new, it's not standardized, it's not MSFT's (though they lay claim to it now), but it's a neat idea. It's also horribly broken and a very shitty thing to do for most websites because it's so broken. But people don't care.
The PHBs will hear about AJAX and demand that they have it on their websites too. Even if they have no clue when you would really use it. And this creates a land rush for using AJAX on everything ASAP despite any standards or good practices. You can't stop it, those PHBs pay a lot of money for stupid work.
AJAX would be best handled by standardizing something about it sooner than later. Too late and you have an area of chaos in the HTML user space.
Personally, I haven't made a web page in years and recently decided to start making some more for a project of mine. Here's what I found out.
All my javascript related books are all written in the middle of the browser wars and spend more content on getting around MSIE and Netscape problems than actually doing anything so they are pretty useless.
I have a few books on CSS but no one actually talks about what CSS can really actually do. It's largely a matter of hit/miss to see what CSS tags have any effect on which elements. While I like the concept, the level of documentation on CSS is beyond pathetic.
I would love it if everything would just FREEZE so I wouldn't have to buy more books and stuff, but that's silly. It's always going to change. Sometimes not for the better. I just hope someone out here remembers that a good web page is designed to be downloaded while you hold your breath (reflects how long someone will wait) and to have everything on the site reachable in 3 clicks from home (not only 3 clicks but available in 3 clicks). That's the best advice I've ever heard on web design and stick to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I checked, when an atom loses an electron it becomes a positively charged atom. Physics certainly has progressed since I was in college.
Why ruin a perfectly good piece of hardware?
Cups isn't perfect and it certainly has not been any kind of defacto standard for a decade.
You are half right.
I personally believe that most projects spent on emulating something Microsoft has done is a waste of time. Historically Microsoft has had very little contribution to the computer industry that has any significant longevity or impact outside of their own interests.
With the exception of MONO, I am not aware of any projects to emulate Microsoft versions of languages (eg: Visual Basic). In contrast, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Java, C/C++ where all languages that were developed someplace other than Windows and have managed to remain rather viable to date. And they have some degree of cross platform compatability depending on the platforms and the constructs of the language used.
If you look at their other products: Office was nice but it's getting a bit out of hand. But OpenOffice covers >90% of the functionality. And it's something that is available on and compatible with more OS platforms than Office. Long term, it's ultimately a better buy.
About the only arena that Windows might have advantages is with IDE's. But I'm not a big fan of most of the IDE's out there. They tend to assume your code style and ultimately you end up debugging your code on the contributions of the IDE rather than your own contributions or the contributions of others. When you spend time trying to fix your code because of your Environment, it's time to move to a new environment. But that's just my opinion. A lot of people absolutely love their IDEs.
But I have to disagree with the conclusion that you can just write everything in Java to make it cross platform compatable. Yes, you probably can. But Java just isn't that special anymore. It's not the only language that's cross platform capable. It has never really lived up to it's proclaimed write once run anywhere mantra. It's done well, but it's never been a guarantee. More like, write once, test everywhere, hope you get lucky.
When you compare the speed of Java (start up and runtime) and the fact that it's compiled to the newer (alternative) languages like Python, Ruby (perl as an alternative) there really isn't much left for Java to do that's worth the overhead in development time and resources. My past experience with Java is that I have to keep watching out for Out of Memory errors on applications. This is the only programming language that I have experienced an Out of Memory error in the past 5 years.
I'm starting to think that languages that are not developed by companies are better than languages that are developed by companies, regardless of their intentions.
OK, so they got a water cooled radiator on the top. And maybe it's easy to install.
I don't think water cooling computers is that big of a deal anymore. It's been around long enough that it's close to becoming a mature product.
I think the important evolution that needs to happen before water cooling is of any main-line significance is noise. If it sounds like a jet engine then you've gained nothing in comparison to standard convection air cooling. The majority of computer owners don't notice their thermal properties of the computer as much as the acoustic properties. Even overheating has been well addressed by the more reputable computer manufacturers or is easily addressed by third party companies.
But there are so many of these water cooling products out there that are just too damn noisy to be of any advantage when compared to fan based cooling.
you are right. I don't remember the resolution but it was greater then 1024x768 that's for certain.
I'm going to guess you are not using the older 802.11B wireless networks. Mine was always jumpy.
Yes, this is a picture of what you are doing with streaming data and a possible approach to handling the stream, by reprioritizing everything on the system to deal with it. But I don't necessarily agree that this is the best approach or the realistic approach.
If we have to address the video streaming capabilities of a high bandwidth internet then that's fine. I'm really not worried about the current OSes. As a benchmark I have routinely watched full screen (21-inch) video over NFS mounted hard drives across my fast ethernet home network. This has proved to be good enough bandwidth that the movies are clean and the network can still do other functions (macromedia flash gaming is one high bandwidth example). Granted this is pretty much one user, but it's a benchmark.
Now it is arguable that NFS is not the best solution to video streaming, but it's one that I have readily available.
I would have assumed the best approach would be a two part application; the first part caching the stream and buffering the data so that latency interruptions can be handled more gracefully, and the second part to read off the buffer (memory or disk) and present the video.
I don't know of any one who believes that even a terabit network can do realtime streaming of hi definition video with zero risk of latency interruptions so I just can imagine anything with that model in mind as being anything less than marketing hype.
You have forgotten that the severity and existence of certain bugs in F/OSS have a tendency to depend upon how the software in question is configured. For example: SSH had a security problem, unless you only allowed public/private key authentication. If you're distribution of choice only allowed that authentication mechanism then the security problem should not count against that distribution.
I do consider OpenBSD to be more secure out of the box than Linspire even though they are both a Unix based OS. That difference merits that they be listed seperately.
Otherwise all Windows distributions in effect on the internet today should be put into one group, from Windows 3.11 to Windows XP inclusive. But I don't think they do that.
I think there is a misconception here that Linux is being led by slick marketing campaigns and corporations. Sure, you can find slick marketing types who are extolling the virtues of such products as Linux 9.0 when they really mean RedHat 9.0 but are to fucking stupid to actually know anything.
But there are an aweful lot of people who use Linux, regardless of the distro, and are much more useful in getting things to work, problems solved, interesting things done, tried, and learned. The corporations have no incentive to provide that synergistic cooperation unless it can be tied back to their product line. At least that's the general rule of corporate business and economics.
But most of the interesting stuff being done today isn't on the front page of redhat or suse. Neither of them will help you understand the differences of RAID 5 versus RAID 1/0 and how to impliment it under EIDE, SATA, or SCSI or why you might care.
Admitting you have a problem is the first step...
IMHO, I think many Americans are addicted to technology. It's fits in with the Keeping up the the Jones' ideology.
are both free and capable.
No he won't. He'll be arrested for being some sick bastard who wants his porn. Remember, the US is the most sexually uptight nation in the world.
You touched on the cornerstone of why it's not being addressed as much as it is. Economics.
In a way you could argue that we are all addicted to Economics to the extent that nothing of significance will take place to change human behaviour unless there is an economic force acting behind it. The Pony Express was prohibitively expensive, difficult, and inefficient. It lasted about a year. But it was the most economical method of quickly delivering mail across the country until the railroad was completed.
The internet was largely a toy for academics and geeks until someone realized that money could be made. After that it was an avalanche of activity to get on the internet as both a client/user and a server/storefront. Today, the super-majority of the internet is all about making money.
Alternative Energy has been around since the 1960's but it's still something that has minimal adoption. This is the result of it's cost to start and return on investment. Why don't we all live in hyper efficient off-grid homes? Because for the same amount of money I can get a much larger house and that's exactly what most people end up doing.
If you disagree with the idea that economics is the engine for everything that human civilization does today, consider this. The EU recently put into place a law for B-2 diesel fuel to be standard. This has put a tremendous economic pressure to develop bio-diesel. The most economic source for bio-diesel today is to use Palm Trees. This has put an economic pressure to start up Palm tree plantations. Do you know what they are doing about this? They are cutting down rain forests to build palm tree plantations to make bio-diesel to help the EU fight global warming. Does it makes sense environmentally? Does it make sense economically? Economics win.
I'm not actually aware of ANYTHING that has been done contrary to this economic force which was a voluntary action of the people participating in a civilization. Dolphin free Tuna was lobbied by small groups. California's higher than Federally mandated emissions is driven by the State government, not economics. Californians tolerate the extra costs incurred for the emissions regulations, but probably not by much. Perhaps they realize there isn't much choice for them because places like Los Angeles has very intolerant geographical features with respect to pollution.
So this will continue until there is either an economic force introduced to make it worthwhile to shift or for some government to actually get enough momentum built to legislate is. Take heed: the EU did it and we are losing rainforests as the result of it.
Personally, I think it would be valuable to add a federal tax to all fossil-fuels (diesel, gasoline, kerosene) to the effect of about $3.00 per gallon to be used for the development and subsidization of alternative energies that compete in the same segment of the market. If you really want to have an effect, take $3.00 away from the gas guzzling SUV and give $3.00 to the biodiesel or electric vehicle geek and watch the industry turn around.
And no, not hydrogen fuel cells. They aren't cost/energy effective solutions. They consume more energy than they produce in the long run. Just like Ethanol.
I think you are right in the decline of CD sales being in part the result of half-assed musicians who are more manufactured bands (boy bands of the 90's) than actual talent. Music isn't an art form anymore, it's a marketing fad. No skills in it anymore. How hard can it be to play power cords? (PS: It's not)
But I disagree that the CD is a relatively durable medium. It sucks ass. It's worse than an old record. Old records were so big you didn't try to carry them in your backpack so you used tapes instead. And if you did scratch it, at least it didn't wipe out the entire song/CD in one shot. There's something to be said for the gradual degredation of analog data storage in contrast to the catastrophic degredation of digital data storage.
I disagree to a point. There will be better programmers in languages that have a higher entry barrier. Java sucks because they made it easy for dumbass people to get a certificate and start programming. Similarly, Average Windows administrators are frightenly stupid when compared to average linux/BSD (not Sun/HP/IBM) administrators because the entry barrier is so much lower than going at it in Linux/BSD environments.
Mod Troll?
Linus is not that limited in his thinking. Some day you might be too.
Last time I looked, KDE was the preferred option under SuSE. When did this change? version 9.2?
I dunno. Probably the same reasons we still drive cars on roads and eat food.
Questions like this are stupid.
HTML works great for most of the content on the internet. The only time it doesn't work great is when you are trying to do something highly interactive. But interactivity requires bandwidth and lots of it. No way around it.
So all you are doing with faddy crap like AJAX is trying to reduce the level of bandwidth you must consume in order to get something dynamic accomplished on a web page. If you had a form that was the web page instead of a part of it then there really wouldn't be any more/less bandwidth to pass back and forth than what was required to get the work done. Even the most minimalistic approaches still require that much bandwidth to be passed.
The ironic part is that no one is willing to settle for just a simple form on a web page to do anything. It's gots to be more, more, more. I would venture to guess that most of those webpages have unnecessary content being delivered for reasons other than getting the job done (marketing, advertisement, sales touch points).
I was going to write a nice well detailed review but I decided to make a few simple points about this.
- When cars first came onto the scene, horse owners went to great lengths to discredit and inconvenience car owners as much as they could.
- One of the methods was to use the legal process. They even had a law that car owners had to dissassemble their cars in the presence of a horse.
- It looks to me that the horse owners did have power conferred to them to prevent (or at least try) to keep customers from switching.
So I can only conclude that history has proven me right and you are completely suckered into believing that corporations have your best interests in mind (assuming that you are only connected to them as a consumer).In short, you are an idiot.
Not to the religious fundamentalists.
But only half of them are the fanatic muslims we hear about so often in American Television.
I wonder who the rest of them are...
I agree in part.
Past history shows it is important to the community at large to establish and maintain a standardized means for creating web pages. I went through this once and won't do it again.
But if someone doesn't spend a lot of time and effort trying to develop new standards to keep up with the new areas of developing technology then you will end up in a chaotic environment again as people are compelled to move into the new tech stuff (to keep up with the times, stay on top, keep up with the competition) without a standard existing.
BTW, yes I have used 6 level indentations, so that H6 tag comes in handy.
I would love it too if everyone would just figure what the heck it is they want to do and stick with it, but we don't know what we want to do with it because people are still trying to figure out what can be done. The concept that is presented as the overhyped AJAX is an example. It's not new, it's not standardized, it's not MSFT's (though they lay claim to it now), but it's a neat idea. It's also horribly broken and a very shitty thing to do for most websites because it's so broken. But people don't care.
The PHBs will hear about AJAX and demand that they have it on their websites too. Even if they have no clue when you would really use it. And this creates a land rush for using AJAX on everything ASAP despite any standards or good practices. You can't stop it, those PHBs pay a lot of money for stupid work.
AJAX would be best handled by standardizing something about it sooner than later. Too late and you have an area of chaos in the HTML user space.
Personally, I haven't made a web page in years and recently decided to start making some more for a project of mine. Here's what I found out.
All my javascript related books are all written in the middle of the browser wars and spend more content on getting around MSIE and Netscape problems than actually doing anything so they are pretty useless.
I have a few books on CSS but no one actually talks about what CSS can really actually do. It's largely a matter of hit/miss to see what CSS tags have any effect on which elements. While I like the concept, the level of documentation on CSS is beyond pathetic.
I would love it if everything would just FREEZE so I wouldn't have to buy more books and stuff, but that's silly. It's always going to change. Sometimes not for the better. I just hope someone out here remembers that a good web page is designed to be downloaded while you hold your breath (reflects how long someone will wait) and to have everything on the site reachable in 3 clicks from home (not only 3 clicks but available in 3 clicks). That's the best advice I've ever heard on web design and stick to it.
Sounds to me like we need a <sarcasm> tag added to HTML 4.0
I think we need to introduce an XML tag for and
Oops! Good One!
But I think there is still a valid question in identifying who the audience is when writing code comments.