JINI builds on the standard Java protocols, but AFAIK it doesn't require Java. Normally, just a JVM would be sufficient.
It is possible to write in another language, and compile that to Java bytecode. (I don't know of any existing compilers, but it can be done.) These programs will run in a JVM.
It should be possible to access JINI services/devices from such a program.
(It should also be possible to implement the JINI protocols outside of the JVM, but then you'd have to do more work.)
I remember how you could format the tape a couple of times, and each time you'd get a different capacity. So if you didn't like the capacity you got, you'd just try another format.
I've never seen the technology (an infinite loop of tape) again. I wonder: did that design have so much problems, or is it just because floppy disks became cheap enough?
(The good old days of the 8-bit computers... Does this mean I'm getting old?:-)
Last point... and really offtopic. I saw an ad last week for Compaq that said "24x7 Nonstop"... are they trying to tell me their computer will only run for one fucking week?? Sheesh!
IIRC, the old Digital slogan (before they were bought by Compaq) was "365x24".
If Compaq would only make the "Open" in OpenVMS mean GPL, then there could be some more great code to borrow.
I don't think that will ever happen, especially since Compaq licenced whole chunks of OpenVMS to Microsoft, and they won't like the fact that everybody can have a peek at something they paid money for.
AFAIK, OpenVMS isn't written in C, so porting features would not be that easy.
Strange: (Open)VMS is generally perceived as older than UNIX, while in fact it only dates back to 1978, while UNIX was conceived in 1970 (or even before).
The transition VMS to OpenVMS was done several years ago by Digital, in an attempt to boost the image of the OS. (All to no avail, as they were bought by Compaq a few years later.) The "Open" in the name simply meant "adhering to industry standards". Nothing to do with Open Source (the phrase wasn't coined back then), or even platform support (VMS only ran on VAXen, and later Alphas. The name change had nothing to do with the introduction of the Alpha processor AFAIK.)
There still is a relatively large user base, and an active users group (DECUS gives away free hobbyist licences for the base OpenVMS system).
Officially, Compaq still supports OpenVMS, although they seem to have the policy: "we'll support your installation until the NT box next to it is able to replace it".
I believe OpenVMS will survive for quite a while, especially since Microsoft has dropped Alpha support of Windows 2000.
ISDN has a similar feature (not very surprising - ISDN borrows some concepts from X25), and I heard that some people actually used this loophole to transfer files. (Remember, this is Europe, where you have to pay for local calls.)
Of course, it takes a long time to transfer a file this way. Each packet can hold only a few bytes.
Finally, the local phone company answered by charging a small call setup charge for ISDN to ISDN communications.
Which is funny, because the Forces that would abuse such a law exist in the same society that, when I was in the 9th grade, handed me a copy of assorted works of Henry David Thoreau and said, "Read it. There will be test later."
Not exactly. I'm pretty sure that book's copyright has expired long before it ever came into your hands.
If you check your old textbooks (provided you still have them) for more recent authors, you will notice that you never have complete texts.
This is because of another provision in copyright law, stating that you can publish excerpts of a copyrighted work for the purpose of education or parody (maybe also discussion, but I don't remember exactly).
One last point: the DMCA seems to go against that provision as well. (At least, as I understand the text - but remember: IANAL.)
Automobiles: the whole road infrastucture has changed because of cars and trucks. Even more important: our lives have become dependant on that kind of transport. Just think about the fact that most stores have a small stock of everything and they rely on the fact that it's cheaper to order on the fly.
Telecommunication and mass media: TV and radio have made the world news more accessible to the common man. People actually gained access to things that happened outside of their village. (Even if they only heard some part of the whole story, it was still more than before.)
Electronics: I suppose that most of us use some kind of electronic equipment every day, ranging from a digital watch [1] to a state of the art computer.
It may be true that it is impossible to perfectly isolate any system, it is always possible to "transform" any open system in a closed one.
How?
In thermodynamics, the universe is divided into 3 parts:
The system of the experiment,
The environment (i.e., that part of the universe that is influenced by the system
The rest.
For a closed system, the environment is empty.
It also follows that system + environment is a closed system, and this for any given system.
For day-to-day engineering applications, it suffices to include the direct surrounding of your experiment to get a reasonable approximation. The next step is to include the earth's atmosphere.
In an abstract way, one can treat the whole universe as a closed system.
There is one thing the article is very silent about: latency. Due to the way a cellular phone system works (all calls have to pass through your home server), wireless networks have high response times (or latency).
Increasing the bandwidth doesn't change a lot about this. It means you have to implement larger windows (= the number of packages you sent before you wait for an acknowledgement) in order to take advantage of the higher data rates.
A wireless network is not as reliable as cables, so most of the time, you have to resend some packages. And this resending is not efficient (you have to wait for an ACK basically after each package).
Alpha processors have reached that clock speed long before, and they were marketed as 667 MHz processors as well.
I think it would be a bad idea to run ads with the number 666 anywere in it: it takes just one religious zealot to raise a riot, and to discourage a lot of people from buying your product. Or worse, having your company burnt down.
(Although I can imagine there are some products where you actually want to use that particular number.)
It's been almost 6 years since I followed an introductory course in business law. Now the syllabus is burried under a whole stack of paper in my father's basement, so I can't look it up easily.
I vaguely remember one thing about patents: if you register one, you have to exploit it, or licence it to someone else to use/sell it for you. Otherwise, you lose the patent rights.
This is one of the reasons why some ideas never get to the patent office: companies consider it more beneficial to guard the know-how as a trade secret. (And of course, trade secrets don't expire, while patents do.)
First of all, a CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) is not ECC (Error Correcting Code). A CRC is some kind of checksum that allows you to check whether a chunk of data (typically a single sector for a hard disk) is correct or not.
ECC adds more functionality to this: it provides information about which bits are incorrect. (And, since there are only two possible values for a bit, replace it by the correct value.) I'm not an expert, but I can believe a decent ECC algoritm requires 20-40% extra.
How many ECC bits are used depends not only on the algoritm used, but mostly on the expected frequency of errors.
Interleave, is something completely unrelated: it refers to the bits in between the sectors that the drive uses to position and synchronize itself to the data on the surface.
The "A", "B" and "C" classification of IP addresses only refers to the package size by which they are sold. If you buy a Class A series, you have the right to use those approx. 16M addresses in any way you like. Subnetting, OTOH, depends on how you have set up the routers inside your assigned address space.
For example, my PC here (on the company's network) has an address in the 10.* network. However, the netmask is set to 255.255.224.0, meaning that I can only reach a set of about 56000 machines directly. For all the other ones, I need to specify a gateway. (And of course, to reach the real internet, I use a proxy server.)
Anyway, Very Bad Things would happen if ever another machine shows up on the company network using the same address as mine, regardless of its subnet mask.
IIRC, this is already implied by the standard GPL conditions. (I don't have a copy here, so I can't check this.)
I suppose GCC is in the same position, and it is generally accepted that GCC-compiled programs do not automatically fall under the GPL, so you might want to look if there is any special clause in the licence.
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JINI builds on the standard Java protocols, but AFAIK it doesn't require Java. Normally, just a JVM would be sufficient.
It is possible to write in another language, and compile that to Java bytecode. (I don't know of any existing compilers, but it can be done.) These programs will run in a JVM.
It should be possible to access JINI services/devices from such a program.
(It should also be possible to implement the JINI protocols outside of the JVM, but then you'd have to do more work.)
I remember how you could format the tape a couple of times, and each time you'd get a different capacity. So if you didn't like the capacity you got, you'd just try another format.
I've never seen the technology (an infinite loop of tape) again. I wonder: did that design have so much problems, or is it just because floppy disks became cheap enough?
(The good old days of the 8-bit computers... Does this mean I'm getting old? :-)
True, NT supports a POSIX personality for programs. There is one caveat: if you want a C2-certified system, you have to disable the POSIX subsystem.
I'm not sure if the GNU tools actually use this POSIX system: they also work on Win9x, and AFAIK there is no POSIX for that OS.
Last point... and really offtopic. I saw an ad last week for Compaq that said "24x7 Nonstop"... are they trying to tell me their computer will only run for one fucking week?? Sheesh!
IIRC, the old Digital slogan (before they were bought by Compaq) was "365x24".
One day of downtime every 4 years? :)
If Compaq would only make the "Open" in OpenVMS mean GPL, then there could be some more great code to borrow.
I don't think that will ever happen, especially since Compaq licenced whole chunks of OpenVMS to Microsoft, and they won't like the fact that everybody can have a peek at something they paid money for.
AFAIK, OpenVMS isn't written in C, so porting features would not be that easy.
Strange: (Open)VMS is generally perceived as older than UNIX, while in fact it only dates back to 1978, while UNIX was conceived in 1970 (or even before).
The transition VMS to OpenVMS was done several years ago by Digital, in an attempt to boost the image of the OS. (All to no avail, as they were bought by Compaq a few years later.) The "Open" in the name simply meant "adhering to industry standards". Nothing to do with Open Source (the phrase wasn't coined back then), or even platform support (VMS only ran on VAXen, and later Alphas. The name change had nothing to do with the introduction of the Alpha processor AFAIK.)
There still is a relatively large user base, and an active users group (DECUS gives away free hobbyist licences for the base OpenVMS system).
Officially, Compaq still supports OpenVMS, although they seem to have the policy: "we'll support your installation until the NT box next to it is able to replace it".
I believe OpenVMS will survive for quite a while, especially since Microsoft has dropped Alpha support of Windows 2000.
ISDN has a similar feature (not very surprising - ISDN borrows some concepts from X25), and I heard that some people actually used this loophole to transfer files. (Remember, this is Europe, where you have to pay for local calls.)
Of course, it takes a long time to transfer a file this way. Each packet can hold only a few bytes.
Finally, the local phone company answered by charging a small call setup charge for ISDN to ISDN communications.
If you start java with the -native flag, it warns that native threads are not supported in this release.
I haven't had any problems with it though.
Which is funny, because the Forces that would abuse such a law exist in the same society that, when I was in the 9th grade, handed me a copy of assorted works of Henry David Thoreau and said, "Read it. There will be test later."
Not exactly. I'm pretty sure that book's copyright has expired long before it ever came into your hands.
If you check your old textbooks (provided you still have them) for more recent authors, you will notice that you never have complete texts.
This is because of another provision in copyright law, stating that you can publish excerpts of a copyrighted work for the purpose of education or parody (maybe also discussion, but I don't remember exactly).
One last point: the DMCA seems to go against that provision as well. (At least, as I understand the text - but remember: IANAL.)
True, people are still waiting for a Linux QT client
xanim supports quicktime.
In no particular order:
[1] which is a pretty cool invention, BTW :)
I took a Java programming class last year, and the teacher told us that IBM had the fastest JVM. (Both on Windows and Linux platforms.)
Since my professional future is going to be linked to Java for the next years (my firm just started up an authorized Java center), I like that.
For now, the only thing I need the Sun JVM for, is because the IBM implementation is still at Java 1.1.
It may be true that it is impossible to perfectly isolate any system, it is always possible to "transform" any open system in a closed one.
How?
In thermodynamics, the universe is divided into 3 parts:
For a closed system, the environment is empty.
It also follows that system + environment is a closed system, and this for any given system.
For day-to-day engineering applications, it suffices to include the direct surrounding of your experiment to get a reasonable approximation. The next step is to include the earth's atmosphere.
In an abstract way, one can treat the whole universe as a closed system.
There is one thing the article is very silent about: latency. Due to the way a cellular phone system works (all calls have to pass through your home server), wireless networks have high response times (or latency).
Increasing the bandwidth doesn't change a lot about this. It means you have to implement larger windows (= the number of packages you sent before you wait for an acknowledgement) in order to take advantage of the higher data rates.
A wireless network is not as reliable as cables, so most of the time, you have to resend some packages. And this resending is not efficient (you have to wait for an ACK basically after each package).
Alpha processors have reached that clock speed long before, and they were marketed as 667 MHz processors as well.
I think it would be a bad idea to run ads with the number 666 anywere in it: it takes just one religious zealot to raise a riot, and to discourage a lot of people from buying your product. Or worse, having your company burnt down.
(Although I can imagine there are some products where you actually want to use that particular number.)
It's been almost 6 years since I followed an introductory course in business law. Now the syllabus is burried under a whole stack of paper in my father's basement, so I can't look it up easily.
I vaguely remember one thing about patents: if you register one, you have to exploit it, or licence it to someone else to use/sell it for you. Otherwise, you lose the patent rights.
This is one of the reasons why some ideas never get to the patent office: companies consider it more beneficial to guard the know-how as a trade secret. (And of course, trade secrets don't expire, while patents do.)
Their is one loophole in that: they could release their code as a binary-only module. AFAIK, this would be perfectly legal.
(This doesn't mean that Compaq will actually take this option, of course.)
First of all, a CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) is not ECC (Error Correcting Code). A CRC is some kind of checksum that allows you to check whether a chunk of data (typically a single sector for a hard disk) is correct or not.
ECC adds more functionality to this: it provides information about which bits are incorrect. (And, since there are only two possible values for a bit, replace it by the correct value.) I'm not an expert, but I can believe a decent ECC algoritm requires 20-40% extra.
How many ECC bits are used depends not only on the algoritm used, but mostly on the expected frequency of errors.
Interleave, is something completely unrelated: it refers to the bits in between the sectors that the drive uses to position and synchronize itself to the data on the surface.
I thought the limit for ext2fs was 2TB. (Haven't checked, though.) But that still isn't quite 2.3TB.
Anyway, if those drives become available, they will provide a nice test case for the new fs SGI has contributed.
The "A", "B" and "C" classification of IP addresses only refers to the package size by which they are sold. If you buy a Class A series, you have the right to use those approx. 16M addresses in any way you like. Subnetting, OTOH, depends on how you have set up the routers inside your assigned address space.
For example, my PC here (on the company's network) has an address in the 10.* network. However, the netmask is set to 255.255.224.0, meaning that I can only reach a set of about 56000 machines directly. For all the other ones, I need to specify a gateway. (And of course, to reach the real internet, I use a proxy server.)
Anyway, Very Bad Things would happen if ever another machine shows up on the company network using the same address as mine, regardless of its subnet mask.
IIRC, this is already implied by the standard GPL conditions. (I don't have a copy here, so I can't check this.)
I suppose GCC is in the same position, and it is generally accepted that GCC-compiled programs do not automatically fall under the GPL, so you might want to look if there is any special clause in the licence.
What they actually do sometimes, is to submit these dummy addresses to removal services.
The most important thing to learn from this kind of experiments is that these opt-out lists are actually a source of addresses to be spammed.
There are other ways to have an address "harvested" by a spammer: just put it somewhere on a web page.
Most of the spam I get seems to originate from the USA, although it has been routed through some foreign server.
It appears to me that most non-USA sites haven't reached the conclusion it would be best for them to disallow relaying.