I always had a problem with APIs doing locking and transaction control.
If your application really requires these things, you might want to get a database server that has direct support for them and write them as stored procedures. Straight SQL stored procedures can be very powerful, and can keep a lot of this messy logic where it belongs on the database server. Transactions should be short and simple as well. Having a hanging transaction is one of a DBAs worst nightmares.
I think for the most part client/server applications are loosing ground to more of a three tier application scheme. In this case the cursor or the scrollable result set should be dumped, and instead just scroll through once and dump into a two dimensional array and access them this way. Grab and go.
Hard sell for the exploit that caused slammer. Maybe other exploits/bugs.
SQL has a pretty good record for security. The exploit had also been patched before the worm.
The exploit was not put in on "purpose". I guess it could have been, but that is a pretty hard to believe.
The virus spread fast, but only because there is not a million SQL servers out there exposed. So it spread across the web fast, big deal.
Furthermore good administration ( especially for a db server), ie. a good firewall could have blocked it. There is the desktop engine that could have been hit, but most apps that use it are still in the server category.
The exploit itself is not a defect. Sure it could be used by an attacker, but in itself it didn't make the software defective. This could spawn a big argument. Is an exploit that would never actually impede a program unless someone uses it really a bug?
Code red was a buffer overrun in an ISAPI.DLL. Even though no one ever used the.DLLs in question ( I think it was.hda,.hdq files ) they could have been. You could argue that someone could have written a program that used to long a URL and crashed IIS. The slammer was using a port in a way it was never intended to be used.
I agree that companies should be held accountable, but intent and the way a company handles the defect also.
MS essentially called a recall by issueing the patch. It said, send in the part and we'll fix it, but in a more modern approach. How can you sue a company that found the exploit and offered a free fix?
I'm hoping this law was written for AOL and other ISPs verus the end-user. One, I don't have time to sue spammers, B) Other then losing some time and be annoyed I'm not loosing the kind of money that the ISPs are trying to fight it and pay for the bandwith used to transfer it.
It also makes logical sense for AOL or MSN that has huge database of the servers that sent the mail, and the number of people affected.
If such a law is drafted it should make sure that the end user ends up getting price breaks, or refund checks. Also, it should have some realism to it. 250 and email times 1000s of emails is so high that no one can really pay it. Also, things like not being able to renew your drivers license really drive the point home. This people are not doing this accidently.
This is a big argument to start using cross platform, or at least VM style languages like Perl and Java.
Java has one library, and it's standard and open. You install it once and don't have to worry about all this. Backwards compatability is getting better and better with each version.
Script languages take up less harddrives space, and can be compiled at run time.
Low level languages have their advantages, but they are dwindling down to speed.
Most of the programmers I work with are not uber geeky. In fact most are musicians, artists and people who just kind of fell into it.
Most of here think of programmers as guys or gals who build their own computer and install linux for fun. The kind that would know what the a binary tree is, but most are not like this at all. Most don't have computer science majors, and in some cases are better programers because of it.
On a side note I feel like these types of people are missing from the open source community. The reasons for that are many, but mostly because the programming tools are a little too powerful and a little less friendly. We need people who don't really care about how perl or other languages work under the hood, and just care about making programs that are easy to use, and actually do what your average user really needs.
As someone who smokes and wants to quit, these might be better then gum, etc.
It would be cheaper as well. It would be interesting to see if it could be used to calm the cravings slightly. Fooling you into think you are getting the nicotine witout really getting it.
As a smoker I'm not sure if I smoke for the nicotine, or if I just smoke to smoke. It would be interesting to see. When I drink I usually smoke a ton more then usuall, once drunk I don't know if I'd recognize the difference.
I remember reading that John C is going to cap the FPS on Doom3 to like 30 or 40 FPS per seconds. I'm hoping so, I bet he is tired of people grading video cards by how many FPS they can get Quake 3 running.
The best thing about the FX isn't the overall FPS per second. It is the pixel shaders and such. The number of instructions it can excute per shader, and the rate at which it processes these is the real evolution of this card. The more complex the shader and the faster they run the more life like graphics will look.
We have been stuck in the same basic quake engine for a while now. Unreal II and Doom 3 ( doom3 more ) will be the first real change in graphics we've had. Now the GPU's can handle movie style rendering, without a ton of little tricks.
We really do need the horse power. The FX could probably render toy story in real time, that is pretty amazing. I can't wait till I can watch a movie and pause it and change the angle. The ability to have true 3-d movie projection is becoming more realistic with this type of hardware ( of course we need the 3d projector )
$400 dollars for this is nothing. You don't seem to realize that just 10 years ago a 486 DX system could cost over $4000 grand. With 16 megs of ram and 1/2 gig of harddrive. The price is rather low considering what it takes to create such wonders, stop bitchin.
Open source will help out in this arena as well. You got to think that the pros that did the work on Golem for LOTR are fans of open source, it won't be long until those kinds of shaders and techniques will be available for game programmers.
To me saying "why do we need all this power" is kind of sacreligous. Remember that increasing speed and creating a market for new hardware is what keeps most of us employeed. Never say more speed is a bad thing. And don't blame sluggish performance on the developers, as software becomes more complex you have to give up some performance for stability and expandability.
Well I can't read the article because it has been slashdoted, but I wanted to bring up a point about generated pages versus static pages.
Slashdot is db driven, but I believe that a static page is generated on an interval to deliver better performance. I'd like to see how well any site could perform if they regenerated every page each and everytime.
I develop and support and large internal application that is highly database driven, in some cases we can cahce queries, but we always have to generate the page on the fly, just by the nature of the system.
In this case the ways to improve performace is to cut back on the html outputed ( sometimes by limiting views of data ), have a cluster of servers to reduce requests per box ), and then optimize the crap out of every db request.
On a side note it would be interesting to see how mySQL and Postgres compare to Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server under real world high stress sitatuions, my gut as a DB is that they wouldn't come anywhere close.
I like Anadtech, but I just feel this is them touting themselves and really has no impact on most web developers. When you are serving mainly static content without any kind of real logic ( meaning you have to query a database, scroll though results, add numbers, determine who the user is, and generate all kinds of thing dynamically ) you don't really have any room to brag.
Plus, why the hell are they using one ultra expensive Ultra sparc machine. You could get one box doing load balancing, get a bunch of cheap 1 ghz pIII boxes and smoke you ultra sparc.
During the winter I wish I could actually harness the heat from my PC's more effectively, lower my gas bill.
I guess I could just run a hose like that on the back of my dryer from my fans to other parts of the house.
Perhaps new houses should be built with ventalation shafts where computers are likely to be just like where dryers go.
On a funny note sometimes I had to sleep at work after working till 2 or 3 in the morning. At some point in the night our heat would cut off and the office would become pretty cold. So I slept behind the server rack.
I say refute the crap out of them and get more press then the idiots making the wild claims.
Nasa needs to get more public support, the more chances to remind people how magical walking on the moon was the more likely we will be doing it again.
If you ask me the best way to refute it isn't to right a book, but to do it again. Would it really be that hard now that we have a space station to launch from.
If anyone needs to quit, the best way is to move somewhere where it is hard to get broadband.
I was hooked on Tribes, eating pringles, and smoking pot. All of them fit together. I basically came home from work and sat up till 3 a.m.
Basically when I moved I just decided to not get an internet connection. I had one at work, so I could still shop, check email, etc from there. I was very suprised how easy it was to get off.
As for gaming I just played single player. Single players is pot as Multiplayer is to crack. It is better not to quit cold turkey.
To pass the time I started working out a lot, and just hanging out at a local bar. Met people and got into shape. After a year I decided to get out of the dessert and get an internet connection. Now I barely use my computer other then for a stereo or to casually surf. Maybe it's the fact that I code for 8 hours a day, but I think it has more to do with the fact I actually have things to do and people to hang out with now.
The only problem is that I smoke more cigs now, and drink more then I probably should. Hmmm... maybe some of us are just prone to addiction. Or maybe it is just part of our consumer based society that "trains" us for it. I'm hooked on caffiene, moved to diet coke for the teeth and gut, but I'm still hooked. Have been since I was about 12. Starts off with sugar and just keeps going. Modern people tend to hooked on things.
The tradeshow industry is hurting everywhere. Not just comdex. This is a function of the economy, coupled with a lack of new products to sell.
Companies are cutting back across the board. Saving money by not presenting, or not sending you employees is a good way to do this.
I work for a company that provides travel service for exhibition companies. Key3 media ( company hosting comdex ) is not the only one hurting. After 9/11 people have just stopped wanting to travel to these things.
It may also be that people are realizing their true worth. In some sectors trade shows are very valuable. You actually sell something to someone, most tech shows are commercials you have to pay to see. I mean what does going to comdex to see the launch of the NV30 really accomplish. It is more of a marketing platform.
It may also be that, like many things in the last 5 years, the show got bloated. Many of the attendees where just hobbiests, with no real purpose other then to walk around, gauk, and collect worthless business cards. I think the fat is getting trimmed, and we are just going to have to get used to.
Programmers are in a way like construction works. We build something up, usually based on some specs. The big difference is that we don't have people looking over our shoulders. Putting up a wall usually takes more then one person, so the other person will see the problem.
Code reviews, ie. open source, is the answer to this delima, but in a lot of cases the teams are just too small, and the application not used by enough programmers to really make this work.
If you worry about your app being secure your going to need it inspected. Even the best "security" programmer is going to make a mistake or two. A program could be in the wild for years before a hacker realizes a design flaw and takes advantage of it. You need people looking at it with a checklist. Ensuring now buffer overruns, easy to guess password schemes, and then you just need someone who hacks for a living to try out various scenarios.
We should also stop trying to patch the problem and fix it. Things like buffer overruns are getting old. Most high level languages are immune to. It's been a while since I did C programming, but if you writing a network server, why not use some kind of Object to repersent your data, verus a straight up char[] and have check in the object. Make it harder for inexpierence programmers to make mistakes, or even expierence ones for that. If you've used Java, you know the compiler throws a lot of fatal warnings to keep these things at bay. Why can't the C++ community adopt some of these.
I've noticed that in windows a lot. It seems MS's VM needs some work. Sometimes it swaps out for no reason, even when plenty of ram is needed. Either that or the guys that are writing explorer.exe need to learn how to allocate their memory. I know in SQL Server it pre-allocates and locks it from getting swapped out. Probably one of MS worse performance problems at any rate.
I believe XP and the newest linux kernel are aware of this and have been somewhat optimized. this was a big deal when the Xeon's first started coming out. If your running and older OS, like NT 4 or an older kernal you could see a decrease. But the processor is executing both at the same time, each getting a piece of the massive pipeline.
You should read the articles on anandtech or arstechnica, THG has gotten kind of dumbed down as it's popularity has increased. Sometimes I read it first, then go on to other sites for more details. I've been writing multi-threaded apps for sometime, so this was interesting to me. It took me a while to fully understand it as well.
This is a very good idea, one that many people have failed, mainly because they where not musicians or fans, but business men and women. Sound familiar to another failing industry?
The submitters main point, was making it local. This is crucial. LA, Chicago, New York, Seattle, even Boise have pretty decent rock seens. Basically we just need to mod up the good stuff and mod down the bad. This concept is being proven by this site as with many others.
The site can make money buy selling CD's, clothers, concert, tickets, etc and sharing profits with the artists.
P2P could be the answer for spreading it. This also goes with modding up music. The best music will get downloaded the most, and get spread across the network the most.
MP3.com has tried this, but is just way to bloated, and got a lot of bad press. They should cut way back and go back to the principles they started with, replacing the music industry, not emulating it.
These keep coming up and up and up. When they first started I was still convinced that patents where needed, but after a few years to think about it, I don't think they are good for anything. The usual arguments are
A) Patents secure investment.
Bullshit, making profits secures investments. If you spend millions developing a drug, then sell the drug and make your money back. Sure someone else can just reverse engineer it, but you went to market first and you should be able to copyright the name, etc. If you patent it, realize you can't make money, then it just sits there and you make money off nothing. Sell you research, data, etc.
B) Patents encourage invention/invation.
Again BS, making money does that, plain and simple. Patents seem to be only applicable to small things these days anyways. You can't patent something like MS Word, or Winamp, that's what copyright is for. No, you patent the MP3 codec, or some stupid alogrithm that calculates grammar. Copyright servers the real purpose, not the patent.
It has been a long time since something was such a great new idea that it deserved a patent. Even new transitor technology doesn't deserve it, mainly because it is based on years and years of others time and thought. Without all the academic bodies working on these things do you think we would really be at 90 nm manufactoring processes. Intel and the like may make it a reality, but they sure as hell don't deserve all the credit. Patents take away the credit.
Anything worth patenting would require years of R&D. Someone maybe able to reverse engineer for a fraction of the cost, but more then likely would rather just pay you for the data, etc.
Even if someone bumped his head on a toilet and invented a time machine, I still don't think it should be patentable, why, because with most technology it should be very carefully handled. Coroporations care about bottom line, and rarely about the right and wrong of something.
I'd be willing to compromise and just change the laws. Pretty simple. Can't patent a naturally occuring substance, ie. a gene, and can't patent a concept, must have a working prototype in order to obtain the patent, and no prior art. Also, the law should patchable. Basically allowing congress to easly remove a concept or an idea from being patentable. If the law was already that way, it would be easy for congress to pass an amendment saying genes couldn't be patentable.
I know this is a little off-topic, but I just had an idea about how to make secure transactions. It would require some kind of smart card technology, so it may be cost hindered.
The basic idea is that a card, something you have, generates a number unique to you and the card. This number is based upon the time of day etc. This number is then transfered into the computer via some kind of terminal. The number is really not your identifier, but can verify it, almost like a hash.
Once the number is inputed the number is transferred to a firm like Verisign along with the time of day, address, and a password (stuff you know ). Just to make it harder to actually verify that the number is right and of course to identify yourself.
The hard part would be to supply the cards, and to create code that generates these numbers. If you had lots of algorithms it would be hard for a hacker to guess which one your card used, even if he was able to get some kind of info about your card behind your back.
Now Verisign or the agency responsible has to be trusted, but with proper legislation and safeguards it wouldn't be that hard. On top of that you still have to get around all the other safeguards in place. I mean you can't just use someones credit card without eventually getting caught. But in cases of stock trading and thing, proper identity may be crucial.
Just an idea, I'm sure it is full of holes. It also sounds like a better way for atm cards to work.
Load times are never reported in performance tests. Most games are running at over 30 fps on a gforce 3 or better, so who really cares about frame rates.
But...NOLF 2 takes about a minute to load on my box. Of course my machine isn't the fastest in the world, but I'm left wondering if all those textures loading onto the board are part of the slowdown.
Microsoft should start punishing their programers who are writing this code. If your writing the code responsible for accepting network connections, you should check your code for this.
Furthermore, why has microsoft not bought or written some buffer overflow detection tools and done a complete sweep of their code base. There are a ton of dlls to check, but with the right tool(s) it's nothing a team of 10-20 guys couldn't pull off in a short amount of time.
I wonder if this issue was actually known interally, and was planned on being released in SP4 or the next XP SP. I can't believe MS has not done some checking of their code tree. I would also hope that the linux kernel, SSL, and apache developers are doing the same with their code. Buffer overflows are just getting old.
Also, perhaps GCC should get a switch to detect them as well and throw warnings.
Not that Java is right in every case, but this is a good argument for using it more often in Server related products since Java doesn't suffer from buffer overflows.
I think the biggest stumbling block to the whole pay for napster thing is the inability to sell a cd.
Sure you can download the singles, but being able to charge 10 bucks for 1 or 2 good songs is pretty much crucial to the way the music industry works today.
Aside from the money issues, it would sure make organizing music a lot easier. Ogg, tar, and XML I think could be combined to make a pretty good format. One file in the tar called CDProperties.XML, and the rest oggs, mp3s, wmf, or whatever. Maybe even incorporate videos. The hardest part may be adding the functionaility to winamp and other players since they are generally designed around one file, one song.
The ability to sell a package would make it much these services much easier to market.
This law is unconstitutional. Not becasue it is blocking my 1st admentment rights or anything, but because it is trying to mandate a federally based system. States should not be able to pass laws that effect national and international entities like the internet.
Remeber back in the good ol' modem days. I remember getting 10 k a second on some transfer even with a 56.6.
If a P2P network protocol is text based, say like XML, it should compress pretty well and keep some of this extra bandwith down.
If HTTP would actually support compression natively we could save tons of bandwith in those HTML transfers. The page I'm typing this comment on is 11.1 k. zipped it is 3.5, and I think I have fast compression on. I'm sure the main slashdot page would save even more. Slashdot could litterally save megs a day.
It would simply be a matter of Apache and IIS supporting it. And maybe a new GETC command in HTTP that works the same. The browser would ask if the server supports it, and then go from there. Or try it and if it failed, try it normally. Apache or IIS would be smart enough to not try and compress JPEG, GIF, and other pre-compressed files.
Everything from FTP to SMTP could save a little here and there, which adds up quick.
Perhaps the real answer is to write it into the next version of TCP and have it hardware accelerated.
I live in a big city, Chicago. For me it does not seem that the last mile is problem for high speed internet access, but rather the last few hundred feet. Luckily I have DSL, but I know that it isn't going to get much faster for a while.
During the last few years cable companies and the like spent a lot of money laying the backbone of their networks. In the city the last part was getting old buildings wired. This to me seems like a bigger expense.
A you have to interact with the customer a lot. Schedule times, get access to the building, etc. Then somehow wire the thing.
I think an easier solution would be for these high speed providers to hook up key buildings in neighboor hoods with good wireless equipment. Then ship the modems in the mail to the customer and they are all set to go.
Eventaully we need to start fiber or at least cat 5 through these building. Or rather run piping so re-wiring in the future isn't such a problem, time for new building codes.
For rural customers, I would think a chain approach might be the best. House 1 is hooked up high speed and then relays to the next and so on and so on. Of course being on the end of the chain is no fun, but it might be faster then dialup.
Next time I plug in my vacuum cleaner it's going to start humming the Britney Spears songs being transfered over my neighbors Kazaa session. Or turning on and off to that annoying Eminem beat.
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I always had a problem with APIs doing locking and transaction control.
If your application really requires these things, you might want to get a database server that has direct support for them and write them as stored procedures. Straight SQL stored procedures can be very powerful, and can keep a lot of this messy logic where it belongs on the database server. Transactions should be short and simple as well.
Having a hanging transaction is one of a DBAs worst nightmares.
I think for the most part client/server applications are loosing ground to more of a three tier application scheme. In this case the cursor or the scrollable result set should be dumped, and instead just scroll through once and dump into a two dimensional array and access them this way. Grab and go.
Hard sell for the exploit that caused slammer. Maybe other exploits/bugs.
.DLL. Even though no one ever used the .DLLs in question ( I think it was .hda, .hdq files ) they could have been. You could argue that someone could have written a program that used to long a URL and crashed IIS. The slammer was using a port in a way it was never intended to be used.
SQL has a pretty good record for security. The exploit had also been patched before the worm.
The exploit was not put in on "purpose". I guess it could have been, but that is a pretty hard to believe.
The virus spread fast, but only because there is not a million SQL servers out there exposed. So it spread across the web fast, big deal.
Furthermore good administration ( especially for a db server), ie. a good firewall could have blocked it. There is the desktop engine that could have been hit, but most apps that use it are still in the server category.
The exploit itself is not a defect. Sure it could be used by an attacker, but in itself it didn't make the software defective. This could spawn a big argument. Is an exploit that would never actually impede a program unless someone uses it really a bug?
Code red was a buffer overrun in an ISAPI
I agree that companies should be held accountable, but intent and the way a company handles the defect also.
MS essentially called a recall by issueing the patch. It said, send in the part and we'll fix it, but in a more modern approach. How can you sue a company that found the exploit and offered a free fix?
I'm hoping this law was written for AOL and other ISPs verus the end-user. One, I don't have time to sue spammers, B) Other then losing some time and be annoyed I'm not loosing the kind of money that the ISPs are trying to fight it and pay for the bandwith used to transfer it.
It also makes logical sense for AOL or MSN that has huge database of the servers that sent the mail, and the number of people affected.
If such a law is drafted it should make sure that the end user ends up getting price breaks, or refund checks. Also, it should have some realism to it. 250 and email times 1000s of emails is so high that no one can really pay it. Also, things like not being able to renew your drivers license
really drive the point home. This people are not doing this accidently.
This is a big argument to start using cross platform, or at least VM style languages like Perl and Java.
Java has one library, and it's standard and open. You install it once and don't have to worry about all this. Backwards compatability is getting better and better with each version.
Script languages take up less harddrives space, and can be compiled at run time.
Low level languages have their advantages, but they are dwindling down to speed.
Most of the programmers I work with are not uber geeky. In fact most are musicians, artists and people who just kind of fell into it.
Most of here think of programmers as guys or gals who build their own computer and install linux for fun. The kind that would know what the a binary tree is, but most are not like this at all. Most don't have computer science majors, and in some cases are better programers because of it.
On a side note I feel like these types of people are missing from the open source community. The reasons for that are many, but mostly because the programming tools are a little too powerful and a little less friendly. We need people who don't really care about how perl or other languages work under the hood, and just care about making programs that are easy to use, and actually do what your average user really needs.
As someone who smokes and wants to quit, these might be better then gum, etc.
It would be cheaper as well. It would be interesting to see if it could be used to calm the cravings slightly. Fooling you into think you are getting the nicotine witout really getting it.
As a smoker I'm not sure if I smoke for the nicotine, or if I just smoke to smoke. It would be interesting to see. When I drink I usually smoke a ton more then usuall, once drunk I don't know if I'd recognize the difference.
I remember reading that John C is going to cap the FPS on Doom3 to like 30 or 40 FPS per seconds. I'm hoping so, I bet he is tired of people grading video cards by how many FPS they can get Quake 3 running.
The best thing about the FX isn't the overall FPS per second. It is the pixel shaders and such. The number of instructions it can excute per shader, and the rate at which it processes these is the real evolution of this card. The more complex the shader and the faster they run the more life like graphics will look.
We have been stuck in the same basic quake engine for a while now. Unreal II and Doom 3 ( doom3 more ) will be the first real change in graphics we've had. Now the GPU's can handle movie style rendering, without a ton of little tricks.
We really do need the horse power. The FX could probably render toy story in real time, that is pretty amazing. I can't wait till I can watch a movie and pause it and change the angle. The ability to have true 3-d movie projection is becoming more realistic with this type of hardware ( of course we need the 3d projector )
$400 dollars for this is nothing. You don't seem to realize that just 10 years ago a 486 DX system could cost over $4000 grand. With 16 megs of ram and 1/2 gig of harddrive. The price is rather low considering what it takes to create such wonders, stop bitchin.
Open source will help out in this arena as well. You got to think that the pros that did the work on Golem for LOTR are fans of open source, it won't be long until those kinds of shaders and techniques will be available for game programmers.
To me saying "why do we need all this power" is kind of sacreligous. Remember that increasing speed and creating a market for new hardware is what keeps most of us employeed. Never say more speed is a bad thing. And don't blame sluggish performance on the developers, as software becomes more complex you have to give up some performance for stability and expandability.
Well I can't read the article because it has been slashdoted, but I wanted to bring up a point about generated pages versus static pages.
Slashdot is db driven, but I believe that a static page is generated on an interval to deliver better performance. I'd like to see how
well any site could perform if they regenerated every page each and everytime.
I develop and support and large internal application that is highly database driven, in some cases we can cahce queries, but we always have to generate the page on the fly, just by the nature of the system.
In this case the ways to improve performace is to cut back on the html outputed ( sometimes by limiting views of data ), have a cluster of servers to reduce requests per box ), and then optimize the crap out of every db request.
On a side note it would be interesting to see how mySQL and Postgres compare to Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server under real world high stress sitatuions, my gut as a DB is that they wouldn't come anywhere close.
I like Anadtech, but I just feel this is them touting themselves and really has no impact on most web developers. When you are serving mainly static content without any kind of real logic ( meaning you have to query a database, scroll though results, add numbers, determine who the user is, and generate all kinds of thing dynamically ) you don't really have any room to brag.
Plus, why the hell are they using one ultra expensive Ultra sparc machine. You could get one box doing load balancing, get a bunch of cheap 1 ghz pIII boxes and smoke you ultra sparc.
During the winter I wish I could actually harness the heat from my PC's more effectively, lower my gas bill.
I guess I could just run a hose like that on the back of my dryer from my fans to other parts of the house.
Perhaps new houses should be built with ventalation shafts where computers are likely to be just like where dryers go.
On a funny note sometimes I had to sleep at work after working till 2 or 3 in the morning. At some point in the night our heat would cut off and the office would become pretty cold. So I slept behind the server rack.
I say refute the crap out of them and get more press then the idiots making the wild claims.
Nasa needs to get more public support, the more chances to remind people how magical walking on the moon was the more likely we will be doing it again.
If you ask me the best way to refute it isn't to right a book, but to do it again. Would it really be that hard now that we have a space station to launch from.
If anyone needs to quit, the best way is to move somewhere where it is hard to get broadband.
I was hooked on Tribes, eating pringles, and smoking pot. All of them fit together. I basically came home from work and sat up till 3 a.m.
Basically when I moved I just decided to not get an internet connection. I had one at work, so I could still shop, check email, etc from there. I was very suprised how easy it was to get off.
As for gaming I just played single player. Single players is pot as Multiplayer is to crack. It is better not to quit cold turkey.
To pass the time I started working out a lot, and just hanging out at a local bar. Met people and got into shape. After a year I decided to get out of the dessert and get an internet connection. Now I barely use my computer other then for a stereo or to casually surf. Maybe it's the fact that I code for 8 hours a day, but I think it has more to do with the fact I actually have things to do and people to hang out with now.
The only problem is that I smoke more cigs now, and drink more then I probably should. Hmmm... maybe some of us are just prone to addiction. Or maybe it is just part of our consumer based society that "trains" us for it. I'm hooked on caffiene, moved to diet coke for the teeth and gut, but I'm still hooked. Have been since I was about 12. Starts off with sugar and just keeps going. Modern people tend to hooked on things.
The tradeshow industry is hurting everywhere. Not just comdex. This is a function of the economy, coupled with a lack of new products to sell.
Companies are cutting back across the board. Saving money by not presenting, or not sending you employees is a good way to do this.
I work for a company that provides travel service for exhibition companies. Key3 media ( company hosting comdex ) is not the only one hurting. After 9/11 people have just stopped wanting to travel to these things.
It may also be that people are realizing their true worth. In some sectors trade shows are very valuable. You actually sell something to someone, most tech shows are commercials you have to pay to see. I mean what does going to comdex to see the launch of the NV30 really accomplish. It is more of a marketing platform.
It may also be that, like many things in the last 5 years, the show got bloated. Many of the attendees where just hobbiests, with no real purpose other then to walk around, gauk, and collect worthless business cards. I think the fat is getting trimmed, and we are just going to have to get used to.
Programmers are in a way like construction works. We build something up, usually based on some specs. The big difference is that we don't have people looking over our shoulders. Putting up a wall usually takes more then one person, so the other person will see the problem.
Code reviews, ie. open source, is the answer to this delima, but in a lot of cases the teams are just too small, and the application not used by enough programmers to really make this work.
If you worry about your app being secure your going to need it inspected. Even the best "security" programmer is going to make a mistake or two. A program could be in the wild for years before a hacker realizes a design flaw and takes advantage of it. You need people looking at it with a checklist. Ensuring now buffer overruns, easy to guess password schemes, and then you just need someone who hacks for a living to try out various scenarios.
We should also stop trying to patch the problem and fix it. Things like buffer overruns are getting old. Most high level languages are immune to. It's been a while since I did C programming, but if you writing a network server, why not use some kind of Object to repersent your data, verus a straight up char[] and have check in the object. Make it harder for inexpierence programmers to make mistakes, or even expierence ones for that. If you've used Java, you know the compiler throws a lot of fatal warnings to keep these things at bay. Why can't the C++ community adopt some of these.
I've noticed that in windows a lot. It seems MS's VM needs some work. Sometimes it swaps out for no reason, even when plenty of ram is needed. Either that or the guys that are writing explorer.exe need to learn how to allocate their memory. I know in SQL Server it pre-allocates and locks it from getting swapped out. Probably one of MS worse performance problems at any rate.
I believe XP and the newest linux kernel are aware of this and have been somewhat optimized. this was a big deal when the Xeon's first started coming out. If your running and older OS, like NT 4 or an older kernal you could see a decrease. But the processor is executing both at the same time, each getting a piece of the massive pipeline.
You should read the articles on anandtech or arstechnica, THG has gotten kind of dumbed down as it's popularity has increased. Sometimes I read it first, then go on to other sites for more details. I've been writing multi-threaded apps for sometime, so this was interesting to me. It took me a while to fully understand it as well.
This is a very good idea, one that many people have failed, mainly because they where not musicians or fans, but business men and women. Sound familiar to another failing industry?
The submitters main point, was making it local. This is crucial. LA, Chicago, New York, Seattle, even Boise have pretty decent rock seens. Basically we just need to mod up the good stuff and mod down the bad. This concept is being proven by this site as with many others.
The site can make money buy selling CD's, clothers, concert, tickets, etc and sharing profits with the artists.
P2P could be the answer for spreading it. This also goes with modding up music. The best music will get downloaded the most, and get spread across the network the most.
MP3.com has tried this, but is just way to bloated, and got a lot of bad press. They should cut way back and go back to the principles they started with, replacing the music industry, not emulating it.
These keep coming up and up and up. When they first started I was still convinced that patents where needed, but after a few years to think about it, I don't think they are good for anything. The usual arguments are
A) Patents secure investment.
Bullshit, making profits secures investments. If you spend millions developing a drug, then sell the drug and make your money back. Sure someone else can just reverse engineer it, but you went to market first and you should be able to copyright the name, etc. If you patent it, realize you can't make money, then it just sits there and you make money off nothing. Sell you research, data, etc.
B) Patents encourage invention/invation.
Again BS, making money does that, plain and simple. Patents seem to be only applicable to small things these days anyways. You can't patent something like MS Word, or Winamp, that's what copyright is for. No, you patent the MP3 codec, or some stupid alogrithm that calculates grammar.
Copyright servers the real purpose, not the patent.
It has been a long time since something was such a great new idea that it deserved a patent. Even new transitor technology doesn't deserve it, mainly because it is based on years and years of others time and thought. Without all the academic bodies working on these things do you think we would really be at 90 nm manufactoring processes. Intel and the like may make it a reality, but they sure as hell don't deserve all the credit. Patents take away the credit.
Anything worth patenting would require years of R&D. Someone maybe able to reverse engineer for a fraction of the cost, but more then likely would rather just pay you for the data, etc.
Even if someone bumped his head on a toilet and invented a time machine, I still don't think it should be patentable, why, because with most technology it should be very carefully handled. Coroporations care about bottom line, and rarely about the right and wrong of something.
I'd be willing to compromise and just change the laws. Pretty simple. Can't patent a naturally occuring substance, ie. a gene, and can't patent a concept, must have a working prototype in order to obtain the patent, and no prior art. Also, the law should patchable. Basically allowing congress to easly remove a concept or an idea from being patentable. If the law was already that way, it would be easy for congress to pass an amendment saying genes couldn't be patentable.
I know this is a little off-topic, but I just had an idea about how to make secure transactions. It would require some kind of smart card technology, so it may be cost hindered.
The basic idea is that a card, something you have, generates a number unique to you and the card. This number is based upon the time of day etc. This number is then transfered into the computer via some kind of terminal. The number is really not your identifier, but can verify it, almost like a hash.
Once the number is inputed the number is transferred to a firm like Verisign along with the time of day, address, and a password (stuff you know ). Just to make it harder to actually verify that the number is right and of course to identify yourself.
The hard part would be to supply the cards, and to create code that generates these numbers.
If you had lots of algorithms it would be hard for a hacker to guess which one your card used, even if he was able to get some kind of info about your card behind your back.
Now Verisign or the agency responsible has to be trusted, but with proper legislation and safeguards it wouldn't be that hard. On top of that you still have to get around all the other safeguards in place. I mean you can't just use someones credit card without eventually getting caught. But in cases of stock trading and thing, proper identity may be crucial.
Just an idea, I'm sure it is full of holes. It also sounds like a better way for atm cards to work.
Load times are never reported in performance tests. Most games are running at over 30 fps on a gforce 3 or better, so who really cares about frame rates.
But...NOLF 2 takes about a minute to load on my box. Of course my machine isn't the fastest in the world, but I'm left wondering if all those textures loading onto the board are part of the slowdown.
Microsoft should start punishing their programers who are writing this code. If your writing the code responsible for accepting network connections, you should check your code for this.
Furthermore, why has microsoft not bought or written some buffer overflow detection tools and done a complete sweep of their code base. There are a ton of dlls to check, but with the right tool(s) it's nothing a team of 10-20 guys couldn't pull off in a short amount of time.
I wonder if this issue was actually known interally, and was planned on being released in SP4 or the next XP SP. I can't believe MS has not done some checking of their code tree. I would also hope that the linux kernel, SSL, and apache developers are doing the same with their code. Buffer overflows are just getting old.
Also, perhaps GCC should get a switch to detect them as well and throw warnings.
Not that Java is right in every case, but this is a good argument for using it more often in Server related products since Java doesn't suffer from buffer overflows.
I think the biggest stumbling block to the whole pay for napster thing is the inability to sell a cd.
Sure you can download the singles, but being able to charge 10 bucks for 1 or 2 good songs is pretty much crucial to the way the music industry works today.
Aside from the money issues, it would sure make organizing music a lot easier. Ogg, tar, and XML I think could be combined to make a pretty good format. One file in the tar called CDProperties.XML, and the rest oggs, mp3s, wmf, or whatever. Maybe even incorporate videos. The hardest part may be adding the functionaility to winamp and other players since they are generally designed around one file, one song.
The ability to sell a package would make it much these services much easier to market.
This law is unconstitutional. Not becasue it is blocking my 1st admentment rights or anything, but because it is trying to mandate a federally based system. States should not be able to pass laws that effect national and international entities like the internet.
Remeber back in the good ol' modem days. I remember getting 10 k a second on some transfer even with a 56.6.
If a P2P network protocol is text based, say like XML, it should compress pretty well and keep some of this extra bandwith down.
If HTTP would actually support compression natively we could save tons of bandwith in those HTML transfers. The page I'm typing this comment on is 11.1 k. zipped it is 3.5, and I think I have fast compression on. I'm sure the main slashdot page would save even more. Slashdot could litterally save megs a day.
It would simply be a matter of Apache and IIS supporting it. And maybe a new GETC command in HTTP that works the same. The browser would ask if the server supports it, and then go from there. Or try it and if it failed, try it normally. Apache or IIS would be smart enough to not try and compress JPEG, GIF, and other pre-compressed files.
Everything from FTP to SMTP could save a little here and there, which adds up quick.
Perhaps the real answer is to write it into the next version of TCP and have it hardware accelerated.
I live in a big city, Chicago. For me it does not seem that the last mile is problem for high speed internet access, but rather the last few hundred feet. Luckily I have DSL, but I know that it isn't going to get much faster for a while.
During the last few years cable companies and the like spent a lot of money laying the backbone of their networks. In the city the last part was getting old buildings wired. This to me seems like a bigger expense.
A you have to interact with the customer a lot. Schedule times, get access to the building, etc. Then somehow wire the thing.
I think an easier solution would be for these high speed providers to hook up key buildings in neighboor hoods with good wireless equipment. Then ship the modems in the mail to the customer and they are all set to go.
Eventaully we need to start fiber or at least cat 5 through these building. Or rather run piping so re-wiring in the future isn't such a problem, time for new building codes.
For rural customers, I would think a chain approach might be the best. House 1 is hooked up high speed and then relays to the next and so on and so on. Of course being on the end of the chain is no fun, but it might be faster then dialup.
Next time I plug in my vacuum cleaner it's going to start humming the Britney Spears songs being transfered over my neighbors Kazaa session. Or turning on and off to that annoying Eminem beat.